I dreamed I was a Roman cook in a kitchen that never got hot

It was just after noon, the sun high and merciless, but the kitchen stayed cool—no fire, no smoke. I was chopping herbs on a stone slab that hummed faintly, like a tuning fork. The pots were full of water, not soup, and the bread was already baked, though I hadn’t lit the oven. I kept asking myself: how is this possible? And then I remembered—I wasn’t cooking for people. I was feeding the silence between meals. When I woke, my hands still smelled like thyme.