Buffalo Chicken Mocha, Anyone?

I have been having some very vivid and strange dreams lately. I attribute this to hormones, and also to the fact that I am having to get up to pee between 4-5AM pretty consistently. I must not be sleeping well in those next couple of hours before I have to get up for good, and all that waking up is helping me to maintain a memory of my dreams. They are extremely vivid and I can remember lots of details.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that a key theme in the dreams is usually something or someone that I dealt with that day. For instance, last Friday night I had a dream that I was being followed/stalked by some crazy man in a black car. I had just watched the movie “Copycat” on TV that day. (Also in that dream, I had a little girl with me. Perhaps this is a sign about the gender of our baby?) Sunday night, right before I went to bed I was thinking through some work tasks that needed to be completed the next day. That night someone I work with showed up in my dream.

So let me tell you about my dream after eating a buffalo chicken wrap for lunch on Monday.

I am in a coffee shop with a few other girls and one male “supervisor,” and I get the feeling we are on a high school or college trip. We are getting a presentation about the different flavors of some kind of popsicles or ice cream treats, and our task is to choose the best flavor, and that’s what we get to eat. We must have chosen vanilla bean, because that is what I am eating. It is actually a vanilla-colored concoction in the shape of a bean, on a stick of course. The other girls finish before me and go out to the parking lot. I decide to get some coffee before I join them.

I have the same dilemma I always have in coffee shops, because I don’t drink a lot of coffee and never know what to get. So I default to a mocha. I ask for a “tall,” as in my experience that is basically the medium size. The lady tells me it will be $8. Eight dollars! That seems a little steep, I think. But I see a list of other people who have ordered that day, and my cousin Tami was on there. Her bill was also $8. So I think it must be normal.

The lady behind the counter grabs a huge cup - we’re talking in excess of 64 oz. here. It’s so big she can’t seem to find a proper lid for it. I think this is weird and that I’ll never be able to drink it all, but I don’t say anything, I guess I’m getting my 8 bucks worth. She starts preparing my mocha by filling the bottom of my cup with cooked chicken. Then she uses one of those flavored syrup bottles and covers the chicken in buffalo sauce. She repeats these two steps until the cup is full. This is followed by spraying whipped cream around the edges of the cup. She then goes over to a sink full of water, and reaches in to pull out a slab of meat that is more the size of something beef, but is chicken. She slaps in on the counter and pokes in a syringe to squeeze out some tan chicken juice.. She uses this to make tiny dots in the whipped cream to give aesthetic appeal to my very distinctive “mocha.”

I woke up as she was handing it to me. At no point in the dream did I think this process or its outcome were strange. As I lay in bed thinking through the dream, I suddenly burst out laughing as I realized that my subconscious had just delivered me a Buffalo Chicken Mocha, minus the mocha, with whipped cream on top.

I wouldn’t recommend ordering this one up at your local Starbucks.