Blueberries, divine daughters, and a neverbird

I only remember a few brief vignettes from last night's dreams:

1. A child brings me a piece of blueberry cake and complains that something is wrong with it. I ask what exactly is wrong, and apparently it's that the blueberries are too round and plump. "That's probably because you're used to dried blueberries," I say. "These are fresh blueberries."

2. There is a discussion about whether the daughter of a goddess would be considered a goddess, too, or just a princess. I'm on the princess side of things until I remember the counterexample of Persephone -- the daughter of Demeter and very much a goddess in her own right.

3. There's a "neverbird" in my house. This is a female bird, about the size of a large parrot, and somewhat resembles a night heron or kingfisher. Her name is Alice. The neverbird perches on my right hand and, parrot-like, greets me by examining my left hand with her bill. "I think she's here because she wants to move up through the ranks," my wife says. I raise my right hand as high as I can, lifting the neverbird up near the ceiling, at which point I wake up, about an hour before my alarm.

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The day after the dreams, I had lunch at a café near my home. While I was waiting for my food, I read a few pages of Daymon Smith's Words of the Faithful, which I am rereading in preparation for tackling the sequels. This jumped out at me:

Here is the entrance to the Paths of the Dead, Daughter Divine, one said to her, "and none who enter have yet returned."

The title Daughter Divine, only used this once in the book, is directly relevant to the discussion in the second dream vignette. There's also a fairly direct link to Persephone, who is notable for regularly entering the underworld and returning to the land of the living.

After I'd finished my lunch, the owner and chef asked if I wanted to try a cake he had just baked. It was topped with fresh blueberries, very round and plump.

I also started reading Laeth's third novel, Sketches of Alice, today -- which matches the name of the neverbird in the dream but can't really be considered a sync or precognition, since I already knew the title of the novel and was already planning to read it. As far as I can tell from a word search of my electronic copy, there are no birds in the novel.

I know the Never Bird is something from Peter Pan but don't remember anything about it. I haven't read Peter Pan since I was eight or nine. The one in my dream was a lowercase "neverbird," a kind of bird, not a unique creature.

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Note added: Here's another sentence I read in Words of the Faithful today. I don't know why there is a parenthetical exclamation mark after milk, but it served to draw my attention to it.

A bell outside the door roused the three at last, and bread and milk (!) and cheese and more fruit had been left on a polished marble charger outside the door, with a note to come and visit at their leisure in the quarters of Elmo.

In the afternoon, one of my employees came to work wearing a sweatshirt with the two words "cheese milk" written on it.