The Icelandic Dairy Foundry

When I'm unwell, I dream a lot. That's not to say that I don't dream when well, but that I normally sleep deeply and without retention of dream-memory on waking. I sleep very well, even when it's only for a few minutes or hours. But when I'm ill, I tend to wake up in the middle of a sleep cycle, sometimes gasping and out-of-sorts, choking on the waters of an imaginary sea. Sometimes, I just awake with the sense of having lost something very precious, in a world where neither love nor money can compensate you.

And the other night, I dreamt of Reykjavik, and the Icelandic Dairy Foundry. I am sure that, as with all dreams, this one is a pastiche of elements of the real world I know. There is a case, for example, for saying that Icelandic Dairy Foundry and 'blogging on WordPress' are the same thing in the dreamworld.

But here's the dream.

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I dreamt I owned an ice-cream shop called 'The Icelandic Dairy Foundry'. It was an alchemist's fantasy, in which I supervised and interacted with a staff of about a dozen apprentice alchemists who were on a quest for the Ice-Block Transition Varieties, some kind of ultimate ice-cream flavours.

We had just discovered a close approximation for Cobalt Rainbow-Fish Tourmaline, one of the intermediate steps to an ultimate goal, when I woke up. The last I remember was the smooth taste of blue bubble-gum mixed with fresh caramel and pure French vanilla essence, with some sort of nutty fudge ripple. Then I woke up. Argh.