Muffaletta Dreams

I’m up at 4 AM. It’s dark outside and inside except for the glow of my computer monitor. I check Astronomy Picture of the Day, I read the news. I check Skype and see a friend is online. We chat for a while; the chat wanders from home chores to Southern style breakfasts: grits with butter, grits with redeye gravy, country ham and eggs. Suddenly I’m hungry. I eat a bowl of cereal, but it doesn’t relieve my hunger. I open the fridge, remove the remaining portion of muffaletta, nuke it to room temperature, and eat it in the semi-dark room. I feel better. Shortly afterward, I am overcome by a nap attack. I lie on the sofa and pull a serape over me. I fall asleep. I dream.

In my dream, I live in an apartment and I have a visitor: Congressman John Boehner. John Boehner?? That’s probably my brain grappling with unpleasant TV news. A dog follows me from room to room, looking at me expectantly, until I realize I need to feed the dog. I begin packing for a trip and discover my shoes are falling apart. On and on it goes, weird dream stuff.

I wake up. I feel drugged. I’m too groggy to drag myself off the sofa. I can’t move. Once in a while I open my eyes for a second. I see daylight. Wow, remind me not to sleep after eating a muffaletta.

This wasn’t my first mufflaletta dream. A few nights ago I ate a muffaletta before bed and had an even more outlandish dream. I dreamed I stepped into a machine and it sent me 1000 years into the future.

I found myself with a small group of people. I didn’t know them, but they seemed to have been expecting me. They lived in a home with rooms – bedrooms, living room, bathrooms – not unlike homes today, though I didn’t understand how the appliances worked. I didn’t even understand how the bathroom fixtures worked. Everything was familiar and different at the same time.

And everything was voice-commanded. Rooms were “virtual” – they could be switched off with a spoken word, or rearranged with a word. We went onto a balcony and I was disconcerted to see it had no railing around it. At each corner of the balcony was a small metal thing, and somehow I knew a “force-field” was projected around the balcony. No one could get through it to fall off the balcony.

We went to a place that looked like a shopping mall without stores. I rode something that looked like an elevator, though I knew it was more than an elevator. (Imagine someone from even a hundred years ago trying to describe our world.) Everything was like that: superficially familiar, but deeply unfamiliar. It was one of those dreams that sticks in your mind.

If you want my recipe for the muffaletta, you can find it online but I won’t tell you where. I will not be responsible for what happens after someone eats it.