cooking for ghosts

Date: 1/29/2017

Good lord this was a long dream. I think it's actually four dreams stitched together in my conscious. I'm in a grubby earth-tone mansion made of shingled wooden walls. Imagine count Olaf's house except less dusty and more saturated. Everything is made of wood practically, colored as if the whole mansion had been out at sea for a few years. I'm in a large room with a wall facing outside I'm assuming, light is coming in from long vertical windows although I never see them directly; feels "open". The light makes me think that it's very sunny outside, subconsciously feels like morning. There are multiple round tables spaced about seven feet apart from each other, also made of dingy wood. There's a kitchen nook inside a large straight (no turns) staircase opposite the "open" wall. The kitchen has a counter stretching the length of the threshold with the main room. I can see moisture in the air like steam from cooking. There are about four to five people in the kitchen cooking various things. I'm strongly compelled to help set the food up for [somethings, vague shadowy figures] before they arrive. I think my role is a waiter; I'm traveling from the tables to the kitchen to bring plates back to the tables. I'm floating through the counter to go into and out of the kitchen. Sometimes the tables have chairs and silverware on them, sometimes they don't. When there is silverware on the tables, I sit down and eat the plate I just carried over to test the taste (no feelings of hunger nor fullness, little sensation of taste). I visualize the [people/guests] eating the same thing as I do. They look like shadowy human forms, with their edges blurred and translucent. Usually the plates pass the test. One of the plates is unsuccessful, however: there's what's supposed to be spaghetti and tomato sauce with two pieces of sliced baguette, but the baguette slices aren't equal in size. I can't sandwich this, I think, putting the two pieces of baguette on top of each other. I go back to the kitchen to see what's going wrong in the kitchen. About five feet into the inside of the staircase (the kitchen is still inside the staircase, like potter's bedroom when he's with his aunt and uncle) is a pair of black cast iron stoves with two cooks (men, ~20s) making the baguettes. The kitchen is cramped and the walls are white now. I observe how the cooks are making the baguettes to catch mistakes, sometimes seeing through them. One cook is sitting to the side of the stove, waiting and holding a white plastic bottle (cylindrical, cone nozzle) full of batter, occasionally pouring it onto the pan the other cook is using. The batter quickly forms the way you would make pancakes, except into baguette slices. The slices are all forming in different sizes. "Oh, you're [doing it incorrectly]," I say to the cooks. They let me take over cooking the slices. I'm now hyper focused on cooking the slices as cooking them is now my life purpose. Looking back after waking up, "cooking" in the dream in that moment meant "watching the slices form intensely". The pan and the stove now take up my entire range of vision and everything is extremely vivid. I can hear them forming. I can see flames coming from under the pan in blue and orange. The slices are blue and orange. There is no other source of light. The batter spreads out in three disks and loses its bubbles. The batter becomes more porous, rising up a quarter inch off the pan and forming crust. the dream jumps suddenly after this point. I'm facing the main room from the counter, and it feels like two hours have passed. All of the shadowy figures have eaten and left. I'm having a conversation with the other cooks. There are four or five of us, some on my side and others on the other side of the counter, all standing and leaning over the counter. Conversation goes on for about fifteen minutes. A shorter cook leans up a little and says "what's that?" half jokingly, looking behind and two the right of me. I turn around and it's my third grade teacher as a cook (very vivid, I remember her having dyed blonde hair and so much makeup on to try to mask wrinkles that she constantly looked like her face was sliding off when I was a kid in her class). I turn back to the cook who just spoke and said something like "hey man, don't joke about that. That's the main cook" I'm now suddenly in my room trying to draw the teacher I saw. The paper takes up my entire field of view. I draw numerous attempts but they all end up looking like abstract figures made with a calligraphy brush. I wonder why they look that way and wake up.