The Caramel Factor by Faye Donaya Haymond

If dreams had elements of real life, shouldn’t real life be able to have elements taken from dreams? She thought so, and that was why she wanted to try this new sugar cookie, a recipe she dreamed up. She gathered together butter, flour, sugar, baking powder, vanilla, salt, an egg, milk, and a bag of Skittles.

When she mentioned the idea to others, they thought the Skittles would disintegrate. She thought they would caramelize, and she loved caramel. Fruity caramel sounded delectable. Though did thoughts make a sound? If they did, it was like the taste of amethysts.

As she measured out the sugar, she thought of the snow, where the train had rushed through the wilderness. They – whoever they were – came upon an old woman, with starlight in her waist-long hair, which she wore as a blanket. Because of how innumerably ancient in years the old woman was, it was a difficult birth. She helped the old woman, who brought forth a stone full of knowledge, and the old woman gave her the stone, which had a Chinese character carved on it. Unfortunately, it was a word she hadn’t learned.

Her enemy, a man with velvet feet, tried to steal the knowledge stone, and she tricked him into thinking he would gain the most power by swallowing it. He did, and the thousand voices clamored in his mind, words pouring out of his mouth, nose, and ears, until he dissolved, leaving nothing but the stone, which now blazed with a picture of a dragon.

She realized she had been staring out the window for a few minutes, so she creamed the butter in the mixer. A blue jay flittered past, with a hawk in steel pursuit. Oh, how great it was to levitate without someone chasing her! Sometimes she went into the stratosphere, and then realized that this wasn’t Earth anymore, but another planet full of canyons, with cold grandeur. In her dreams she dared to take a gap year, and spent it flying from city to city.

She entered a megabookstore, which also sold chameleons, and hovered five feet off the ground, perusing a book on Taoism. She wished she could remember the salesperson’s face. She did recall her own laughter, which made the books fly after her as she left. They then floated down and smashed televisions, and the people cheered. That was when she knew it wasn’t real.

But what does “real” mean? If a woman took her dreams seriously, and learned from them, they had as much value as real life. Would God hold His children accountable for decisions they made in a dream? Arguably it made as much difference on the dreamer as deeds did on the doer. She hoped some special considerations applied, though, because if not, she would go to divine court for beating someone to death with a soup pot.

Vanilla is largely thought of as being plain, but humans for centuries killed for flavoring. Wars were fought over salt – here she needed a teaspoon – and Columbus was looking for spices when he found the New World, never quite realizing that potatoes, corn, and tomatoes were great things as well, which was what he ended up finding. Oh, yes, and he found – or someone did – sugar as well.

Real life was the sugar cookie. Dreams and magic put the Skittles there, making a twist, doing a little dance in the face of the humdrum. She wondered if the little boy had thought so, the one from two nights ago.

It seemed, in the dream, and in her dreams everything appeared perfectly logical, that she had a cousin who suffered a strange sort of brain damage. Nobody understood why he spent most of his time silent, not comprehending what people said, until he suddenly mentioned that the Statue of Liberty was the largest gift ever given. Her apartment had mirrors on the walls, and when he was looking in the mirror, he could read her lips, and he could read books. He had to see everything backwards, and he couldn’t remember anything except documentaries. She handed him back to his parents with the injunction that they install mirrors in ever room in the house, and make a Ken Burns style film of everything they needed to convey to him, complete with old photographs, quotes, and fiddle music.

She added milk to the batter and felt satisfied in making a difference in the life of someone who didn’t exist. That must be harder than helping someone who was real, so future mentoring should be a piece of…cookie. She didn’t like cakes, because she had to share them at social occasions, some of them requiring people to wear nametags. She used cookies as anonymous presents at people’s doorsteps, along with nice photographs she photocopied from the National Geographic. She thought everyone should have access to the National Geographic.

Ever since that one dream, she didn’t dare touch a National Geographic with scissor blades. She went to the back room of a library to find old Nat Geos, which was her own abbreviation, incidentally a good name for a novel character who traveled all the time, and found herself in a Buddhist shrine. Buddha figurines lined the walls, and two urns held tiny ceramic Buddhas in a pile deep enough to baptize an eight year-old Mormon, had it been filled with water.

The National Geographics stood in a seven-foot tall wobbling pile behind sticks of burning incense. Both Siddhartha and Jesus had to save her from the pile after it fell on her. They pulled her out together, Siddhartha calmed her and put the magazines back, Jesus healed her bruises, and they shook hands all around and vanished.

As she sifted the dry ingredients for the cookies, she felt grateful that Jesus had been so accommodating, considering how in one of her dreams she sold hot dogs at his crucifixion. When she woke up she cried and prayed for what seemed like hours, apologizing, though, again, if she were held accountable for that, she would also have committed myriad crimes of violence, deceit, impersonation, and disturbing the peace.

She dropped the cookies into little mounds on the pan, remembering the ugly dreams she wished to escape from: death, pain, and lights that wouldn’t turn off, no matter what she did. Both medication and meditation helped.

These cookies would be the key to everything, she thought. If she could make delicious Skittle cookies from an idea she had in her dream, she could set about applying all the good things from her dreams, while enjoying the concrete nature of reality.

Ten minutes later, she exulted in a burst of chewy orange-flavored caramel, and thought tomorrow would be the best fundraiser yet, even if no one knew about all the wonderful things that had come with it. Now if only she could bake those and feed them to others.