An Unfair Dream

“That’s not fair,” I shouted in my mind as my alarm when off this morning.

I’d been a party with a number of people that I don’t know.  My neighbor was there.  Caroline is a few years younger than my mother.  She is a very graceful: the wife of a smart-aleck/poetry-quoting attorney and the daughter of a former congressman and later an ambassador.   Wherever she is at, she brightens up the room, as you’d expect for someone with her background.  She delights in my daughter and my daughter adores her.  Anyway, back to the dream.  Caroline suggested a movie and she and another woman and I decided to bug out to see the flick.  She drove and the other woman rode shot-gun.  I was in the back of her husband's old and huge station wagon.  We were in an old city with lots of brick buildings and steep hills, someplace like Asheville, North Carolina, but in the dream, it was our town even though it didn’t look like it.  As we got closer to the theater, Caroline suggested we stop for ice cream as we had 20 minutes before the show was to begin.   The creamery was across the street from the theater and we drove up an alley, behind it.  They were closed for business, but they let us in the back way and we were in the work area where they make the ice cream.  Two employees were packing freshly churned ice cream into 3 gallon tubs.  Caroline, in her enthusiastic way, asked about the various flavors and the guy began to tell about each one and how special it was.  Then, the woman who worked behind the counter fixed me double cone, asking if butter pecan and French vanilla was okay.  She was handing me the cone as the alarm went off.  Never have I been so rudely awakened!

At first, I didn’t have any idea of where this dream came from, but then I remembered that last image of the woman’s hand holding the cone out for me to take.  I’d seen that picture yesterday, in a blog!  As for stopping with Caroline for ice cream, that’s not unusual, but it’s usually something her husband initiates.  A few times each summer, he’ll call over and ask if we want to go out for ice cream.  There are two good creameries in our area, one to our west and another to our east, both about a 25 minute drive away.  One even has their own cows!  They both make wonderful ice cream.  And of course, the news about my insulin dependency means that I can no longer pig out on ice cream.  In addition, we've not gone out as frequently the last two summers as my daughter has developed a dairy allergy.  It seems as if we're all falling apart!

Waking up from this dream, I was angry I didn’t get to enjoy the cone in my sleep.