And a fantasy is what some now believe was clogging the mind of a McDonald's worker from Maryland when she claimed she had purchased a winning ticket in the record-breaking Mega Millions lottery - but failed to produce the evidence.
Mirlande Wilson, 37, a single mother of seven from Haiti, offered a series of increasingly tortuous explanations. She first insisted that she had stored the ticket in a safe place, then claimed she had hidden it at the burger joint where she works and finally said the slip of paper was missing.
But her fellow McDonald's workers in a lottery syndicate fear she might be cooking up stories because she does not want to share the winnings with them.
Three individuals in Maryland, Kansas and Illinois bought tickets with the six numbers listed in the sequence drawn on March 30. Only the Kansas winner has so far come forward to claim a pre-tax $219-million share of the pot, and that person exercised the right of anonymity under state law.
"They checked the ticket over 10 times to make sure they were reading it right . they still had a hard time believing it," said Dennis Wilson, director of the Kansas Lottery.
The Maryland and Illinois winners will not have the right to keep their identities secret.
But they have six months to contact lottery officials, who have advised them to seek financial and legal guidance.
People were urged not to discard their tickets on the mere assumption that someone else had won.
After a coast-to-coast frenzy of ticket buying pushed the jackpot to its near-unimaginable tally, America was gripped last week by the is-she-or-isn't-she-a-winner saga of Wilson. And if she did buy a winning ticket, who gets what?
Her colleagues said that they had given her money to buy tickets at the 7-Eleven convenience store opposite the McDonald's where they all work.
Wilson said that she had indeed purchased some tickets on behalf of the group but she contended that she had separately bought the winning ticket with her own money.
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