Last night, I had a dream.

In that dream, I was a struggling novelist living in a small pensione in Paris. Based on the number of painters, prostitutes and priests I saw on the streets, I think I might have been living in the arrondissement Parisians call Montmartre.

But that isn’t important.

I stood in this exact spot in Paris some 25 years ago.

What is important is that every morning the sun woke me up with its pale yellow light and I worked on my novel for a few hours, and then took a walk outside to breathe the fresh air and get black coffee. This was one of the surreal parts of the dream, because I don’t drink coffee. Not because I’m Mormon or have stomach troubles, but because I don’t like the taste. To be honest, I figured that if I was going to be drinking hot coffee in my dream, I might also see a troupe of acrobats or an organ grinder, who are always in surreal dreams set in Paris.

But I didn’t.

Dreams are unpredictable.

There was a French bakery in my dream, however. It was called Amy’s Bakery, which, translated into French, is Aimée’s Boulangerie. Aimée means “beloved,” and it was a good name for the little bakery because everybody understood that its fussy owner, Aimée, sold the city’s finest pastries.

I wish my dream had also revealed why the French call their bakeries boulangeries, but it didn’t. Based on the handful of French movies I’ve seen, I suspect the French people are at least moderately obsessed with sex, and that in one way or another, everything—even pastries—reminds them of lingerie. There used to be a French bakery near my home in Denver called La Petite Boulangerie, which my American ear and sensibilities consistently translated as “The Little Breaded Underwears.”

I confess that I find it pleasant to equate pastries with lingerie, even tiny breaded underwears, and maybe especially tiny breaded underwears. Perhaps that means the spirit of France lives in me, at least partially. It also could be a sign that I have some kind of cognitive disorder. I don’t know, but I’m not worried enough about it to consult a psychiatrist.

Naming conventions aside, all Parisians understood that the treats at Aimée’s Bakery were so good they could only be described as astonishing, or miraculous. This was especially true of the bakery’s signature dessert, Tarte Mousse au Chocolat. I love Tarte Mousse au Chocolat, or as we call it here for simplicity’s sake, chocolate mousse pie, or sometimes, French Chiffon pie. When I’m not dreaming, I make an excellent chocolate mousse myself using fresh cream and eggs, Amaretto liqueur and a recipe perfected in the kitchen of the late, great food critic Craig Claiborne, who died when he was 79 years old, probably because he ate too much cream and eggs.

Few things in life are finer than the Tarte Mousse au Chocolat sold at Aimee's Boulangerie in Paris.

Sadly—and this was a French dream, so it had to be at least a little sad—I couldn’t afford to buy Aimée’s Tarte Mousse au Chocolat because I was a struggling novelist. Not even the thinest slice. So day-after-day for weeks, I stood forlornly at the great curved-glass case inside the bakery, staring at the Tarte Mousse au Chocolat resting seductively on its raised silver platter, my mouth watering with desire.

One day, filled with existential frustration—again, it was a French dream—I broke down and pounded my tightly clenched fists against the glass case, demanding a free slice of Tarte Mousse au Chocolat.

At first, the owner of the boulangerie humored me, and tried to assure her startled customers that the situation was under control.

“He’s just a struggling writer who lives in a small pensione up the street,” she explained, laughing as she rolled her eyes and circled an ear with her index finger.

But when my outburst continued, and escalated, she got worried and telephoned the police, or as they’re called in France, de police. You may have been expecting me to say gendarme here. But the gendarmes were actually medieval cavalrymen, and the word is often mistakenly used by ignorant Americans to mean the police, which is why the French consider us Philistines.

Being dutiful, and loyal to their regiment’s public oath to protect and serve, the policemen handcuffed me, and carried me in a wooden cart to the Bastille.

Bastille sounds like an ugly French word for “bastard” to my ear, and it was in fact a very unpleasant place in my dream, with tall stone walls surrounded by an imposing moat. A dreary site unfit even for the most unloved and unloving illegitimate son of indeterminate lineage. I was thrown without trial into a damp, cramped cell with three other men, who beat me up as soon as the guards turned their backs because I didn’t have any cigarettes.

Frenchmen love their cigarettes.

Time passed, and on one winter day I was taking a hot shower when I noticed that the prison guards had left the room, leaving me alone with the disagreeable men from my cell. They were naked and leering at me. Calling me Mon Chéri, which is probably French for “my cherry,” or something equally inappropriate when you’re showering with French men in a French prison.

Fortunately—for me at least, because you may enjoy stories about imprisoned men and would like to hear more—I woke up before the homoerotic implications of my dream could be fully realized.

And now you’re probably wondering what my dream means, just as I did when my eyes shot open.

It means nothing, I’m sure of it.

I was merely hungry, and wanted the narrowest slice of Tarte Mousse au Chocolat.  Sometimes, a tarte is just a pie, even when it’s Aimée’s Tarte Mousse au Chocolat, and you’re a struggling novelist living in a small pensione in France.