I’m reasonably certain the humbow I enjoyed last Wednesday brought on a very, very strange dream.

     For those of you who have not experienced a humbow, it is a wonderfully warm Chinese pastry, filled with steamy goodness. In my three years in Alaska, I was unable to find one, but I did, in my search, locate several Korean video emporiums and discontinued auto parts shops.

     Beyond that, I did have a dream about Alaska, which may or may not be related to the humbow.

     In the dream, Alaska was an amusement park ride, and the waiting area for the ride was Darwin’s Theory bar on G Street. I waited with a ticket in hand to take the Alaska ride, while sipping a gin and tonic from a bar up the street from Darwin’s. The bartender, who looked alarmingly like Anchorage political great Thomas Mark Higgins, kept referring to my contraband beverage as an “indicator species.” And each time he did so, Jay Hammond would leap to his feet and shout the words, “Carpet sale!” at the top of his lungs.

     Finally, it was my turn to take the ride, but before I could climb into the seat, which resembled a leather corporate jet reclining seat, I had to negotiate a little barrel of a man with well-advertised chest hair who was trying to sell me a 1979 Ford Pinto.

     “There’s a Pinto salesman in the newspaper press,” sounded a voice in my head, and immediately the ground I was walking on became the clattering ribs and gears of a printing press.

     Next, I was seated in the ride, ready for the trip, when Governor Frank Murkowski came sauntering obnoxiously down the aisle with a poodle named Lisa.

     “Watch out for Lisa!” he shouted, “Lisa’s got a softball team full of old growth forest she’d like you to buy.”

     When he said “old growth,” his left arm turned into a corn stalk, and little elves rushed out and built a bridge out of it.

     The next thing I knew, I was sitting next to a redhead with a stack of books in her lap.

     “Can you believe it?” she asked in a horrible British accent. And when she said it, five bellmen, each one more than seven feet tall, whispered, “she thinks she’s special.”

     When I tried to talk to the redhead, she turned into a clarinet, and began oozing milk from every valve. Every time I tried to talk with her for the rest of the dream, she would turn into a clarinet and ooze milk.

     The next thing I knew, everybody on the ride began to sing as one voice. They were singing “America the beautiful,” only the words went, “oh blah blah blue, I don’t see you, it’s all a pile of cheese...”

     Finally, the ride ended and we all exited through an aircraft door, and I saw myself, in the snow, arranging cardboard cutouts of women in prom dresses with straw cowboy hats. I was trying to prop them on beach cruiser bicycles.

     “That’s the summer,” said a voice.

     “That’s the good summer,” said another.

     When I woke up, I kissed Beth (Beth is real) on the cheek, and went and checked on my sleeping, seven-month-old daughter.

     It took me the better part of the day to sort out the details of the dream, and I have come the conclusion that I wouldn’t have had it in the first place if only there was a decent place to get a humbow in Anchorage.