Of late, I have been having some real doozies among the annals of dreams. I am considering just dreamblogging, as what happens with my eyes shut is clearly of greater interest than that which occupies my days:

In a multilevel ramshackle building, possibly the former barn of an early twentieth-century factory-farming concern, a number of commercial concerns are ensconced, including a down-home Americana reinterpretation of a Swiss eatery, serving Swiss food with reasonable acuity and a pleasant “howdy, y’all” sensibility. In the extensive, cluttered checkout cowchute, i am pleased to note numerous items of genuine Swiss provenance such as generally-unavailable models of Victorinox knife and Suchard chocolate powder. To my disapproval and frustration, there is no irradiated milk available. In revenge, i steal a jackknife, and make my way to a higher floor, where a family, long friends of mine, has a rummage shop.

The family patriarch, ailing, has withered to a shadow of his former self, a wizened figure with enormous parchment skull atop the body of what might be taken for that of a starving infant. As i converse with one of the ancient’s offspring, I am handed the feather-light mortal vessel, whereupon I am left alone with the elderly being. Naturally, the living skeleton ceases to be living moments later,and as I hold the corpse, the feather-light flesh and bones begin to flake away in my hands as I seek a resting site for the fragile remnant.

In so doing, I find a cigar box containing items I had attempted to husband through my life from earliest childhood, including such objects as a faux piece-of-eight obtained in the early seventies while visiting Florida, the mummified remains of a crab plucked from the beach at Mazatlan, a tooth lost at age eight, and the like. The box had gone missing (in my dream) while in the care of the family whose deceased progenitor I now held.

Upset, but of an inclination to let bygones be bygones, I finally locate my acquaintance and attempt to deliver my burden to him, whereupon the dessicated corpse crumbles into fine, very thin flakes. I catch the skull as it descends. As it crumbles in my hand I am left holding only the upper portion, roughly from the eye-sockets’ midpoint up. Turning the delicate cup over, I note the floral profusion of complex, papery bone membranes we each carry in our sinuses. I hand the remnant to my acquaintance.

He thanks me with exaggerated gravity and takes a voracious, satisfied bite out of the fragment of bone. Crunching through the clean-breaking material, more delicate than eggshell, he then insists that I must join him. Together we crunch our way through the remains of his father, as tasty as potato chips or fried chicken.

Then I woke up.

More recently, Jon Stewart chauffeured me and my wife amusingly about Hoboken while deferring my repeated blandishments concerning the importance of appearing as a guest on The Daily Show. Apparently, we’re old school chums or something. I just hope he never hears about the grandpa-eating thing.