The shoes of my dreams

Do you have dreams in which you own or somehow have access to clothes that delight you and then you wake, only to discover that that dress/blouse/suit was woven of nothing but imagination? It's a little bit heartbreaking, so if you've not experienced it, don't be sorry. I have these dreams periodically and the disappointment upon waking does not lessen over the years.

Last night I dreamed that I was in New York and passed a large shoe store with a rack of shoes out on the sidewalk. I picked one up and tried it on and it it me perfectly. Perfectly. I think this may be a fairly routine experience for many people, but shoes do not ever fit me perfectly; it's a cause of considerable angst in my life, in fact.

I went into the store to ask for the mate of the miracle shoe--a modified brogue with laces and a smart little heel. A trim, elegant shoe. And that is when the lady revealed that the shoe was so comfortable and cushiony because she had put several individually-wrapped cookies inside the display model. I was sorry that had accidentally crushed the cookies, but also wondered where I could get more because they made shoes so much like slippers. She told me that they were imported from Italy and showed me a large box of them. She was having trouble finding the mate to the perfect shoe and held up numerous other, ugly options. "Questo?" she asked, "Questo?" because suddenly she was Italian American. "No. Dispiace." I said sheepishly. "Ci sono molte scarpe qui non mi piace." [No. Sorry. There are many shoes I don't like.]

Do you understand the significance of this, gentle reader? I now speak Italian in my dreams! This is terribly exciting. Sure, it should have been "piacciono" not "piace" but even in the dream I was proud of myself for remembering the word for "shoes," rendering it plural and creating proper adjective agreement. Last year at this time I could not have formed that Italian sentence waking or sleeping. My life officially shows signs of progress. This is very heartening.

On the other hand, flawless footwear and almost correct foreign sentences. Why wake up? Maybe the key to success is to stay asleep.