Dreaming in Chocolate

Doesn't this kind of look like clouds? And sleep?

I have started to have recurring dreams of making pie crust and stirring chocolate cake batter.

In the dreams, I am like Sisyphus, sentenced to push that boulder up the mountain indefinitely. Only I've been given the task of making cake after cake after cake.

You would think that this would be a stressful dream, and sometimes it is. Sometimes I wake up in a cold sweat, worried that I've fallen asleep with the oven on or that I will never amount to anything. But the repetitive stirring and the tasting of the dough, these are things that soothe me to sleep. Sometimes before I even drift off, I see chocolate melting in a double boiler and I get visions of making tarts and cookies and pies, and all of this helps me fall asleep much faster than counting sheep ever has. It also reassures me that I am doing something right. Even if I can't quit my day job, I am still spending time doing something I clearly love. When I studied literature, and, even now, when I read a good poem, certain lines and phrases oftentimes repeat themselves over and over in my head. Sometimes I repeat them myself to fall asleep:

"Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
Until the last syllable of recorded time..."

"Bedewed with pleasures"

"Whereat, in either hand, the hastening angel caught
Our lingering parents, and to the eastern gate,
led them direct and down the cliff as fast,
to the subjected plain, then disappeared.
They, looking back, all the eastern side beheld
Of Paradise, so late their happy home..."

You know if you can do anything in your dreams - speak another language or recite a poem, let's say - you must know that thing so well that you can do it subconsciously. I'll comfort myself with that at least. Because I'd also just like to have a long, dreamless sleep so I can wake up early and make some cinnamon buns before work.

Flour and Sugar,
Carrie Melissa

Photo via Recipe Girl