Sweet Cherry Dreams

All my life I have had vivid, complex, highly detailed dreams that I remember. Some are repeats that I dream over and over. Others are classics, like going panicky into an exam that I never studied for -- that's a common dream many have.

Others are unique, with stories and characters and meanings I can't interpret. But one night last week I woke up out of an urgent dream about . .  cherries. 

It's cherry season and the markets are full of juicy red cherries. My neighbor's trees are ripening -- cherries do well in this climate. So okay, I dreamt about them.

But there in bed at 4 a.m. I knew suddenly and definitively I had to have a cherry pitter. I got up, focused on one thing only in the dark of the room, and ordered a cherry pitter from Amazon. $11.98, two day delivery.

Then I went back to bed, right back to sleep, and in the morning I remembered my dream and my compulsion to get those pits out of those cherries. A few days later the device arrived.

I made a pie which I burned because I always do. No pictures, but it would have looked like this if the crust had not blackened, if I had fluted the edges nicely, and if I had not used too much thickener, which I did. But otherwise just like this:

The joy of popping the pits out of cherries with my new device wore off after the first dozen cherries. The process was tedious, if efficient.

Tart cherries are high in natural melatonin and cherry juice is a well known sleep aid. What was going on that night in my dream? Why was it so compelling? Why did it wake me up with such insistence that I buy a cherry pitter right away in the middle of the night? 

My dreams are weird. The pie was overbaked but good.