This is an account of a dream, so those of you bored by such things can be forewarned and skim elsewhere. I dreamed that the old Victorian-style house I spent most of my childhood in was still standing (it isn’t). Since we weren’t using it, I had volunteered it to be blown up (think Mythbusters), but my mother said no, we can’t blow it up. We should sell it.

Fine, says I, but if we’re not blowing it up I know the attic is full of things I need to look at before we sell it to anyone else. So I go into the attic. In real life the attic was just an attic, unfinished, no flooring, and the only time I ever went into it was the time I accidentally set the house on fire and needed to make sure that there was no smoldering going on, but that’s another story–which I will never tell, because it’s just too embarrassing. Anyway, in the dream the attic was HUGE. Bigger than our living quarters even. Divided into large rooms. Each room held something different. In one room there was nothing but very large stainless-steel vessels, which I recognized as parts of old milking machines. Another room held nothing but quivers full of arrows. The last room I visited was, to me, the most interesting because it was full of old books. Apparently I had spent quite a bit of time there as a kid, and one book was lying on the floor, open to the page I’d been reading years ago before I’d gone off to college and never finished it. Yet even that wasn’t what caught my attention, that was yet another book. A large book. And by “large” I mean about four feet high and three across, a picture book called something like SCENES FROM TOKYO. It was published just after WWII, and show paintings (not photos) of street scenes from the early 1950’s.

I opened it and it happened to fall open on a page showing three large men dressed as either Mongols or Tibetan Sherpas standing in a Japanese ice cream shop. The proprietor is handing one of them an ice cream cone.

Caption Reads: “Visitor Being Presented With the Ice Cream Cone of Redemption”

I was relating the dream to Carol, but after the Large Book she just sighed. “You know, I was doing pretty well parsing this in symbolic terms until ‘The Ice Cream Cone of Redemption.'”

Maybe it means something. Maybe I just had a craving.