[dream] Kiss

I'm housesitting for a boss who I care not for, in a house that feels more claustrophobic than my own apartment. The only thing that makes my two week stay tolerable is the two-year-old yellow Labrador with a strange name. It is in this uncomfortable house that I began having vivid dreams again.

* * * * *

He came up to see me and kissed me. He still had me in his arms when she called. He answered, not letting go of me. Though I did not show it, I felt nothing but resentment.

After he left a tall pretty blond girl walked in. I approached her then kissed her as I would a lover. Her lips were dry, cracked, and felt rough on the tip of my tongue. She wanted more. But those lips of hers were a turn off. I walked away.

080704 - Birth

I dreamt I was pregnant. The bulging stomach was unlike that of any other pregnant women's--a subtle convex of a curve from just below my chest. My hands could trace the head and limbs of the fetus inside. The long and skinny being inside my body was moving about constantly.

Instinctively I knew the time had come. I laid down on bed and breathed in deep to prepare myself. But without any pain the baby was born. It was a girl--a very special girl. She did not cry. She was her own complete person from the moment of birth.

I was not her mother. I was only her carrier.

* * * * *

I shared this dream with my sister and asked what she thought it meant. She had often hit a bullseye with her interpretation of my dreams. This time she was a little baffled.

"There's no way it means that you want a baby of your own. Maybe it means you'll soon face a new beginning of some sort," she suggested.

I think she's right again.

[dream] Seriously, I hate that shade of green

It was a dreary subterranean corridor of an old building where I was walking. Pools of cool fluorescent lights were distributed at irregular intervals. Corridor was dim otherwise. I was wearing my black dress with pearls around my neck. With each step my stilettos made clicking sound against the concrete floor.

He walked hurriedly from behind to catch up with me. When he did, he grabbed my arm and pulled me into a janitor's closet where in claustrophobia and unflattering light he stole a kiss. But I was too cool and collected. I felt nothing--except antipathy against his green plaid shirt, a shirt I had never seen him wear before. I turned to leave as he pulled me back. Promise me, he said. My face was frozen solid as were my eyes and tongue.

Oh, how fragile is love...!

[dream] Glory in gray

I was in London. Early to mid forties in age, I suppose. Under the gray sky were the gray streets along which I walked, wearing gray slacks, gray turtleneck and a woolen gray coat that fell past my knees. I had success. But that was all I had. I wandered the streets aimlessly until I could walk no more.

Back in the hotel suite, I sat next to a luggage I left open in the middle of the room. Some personal belongings were scattered carelessly around the floor. And I just sat there in dead silence, not moving, until time stood still.

This dream dates back to my college days. I'll have to wait another decade to see if this dream was a prophetic one.

[dream] Knulp

Along the green pasture I began a long journey on foot.
There were sheep and herding dogs and tranquility around.

I woke up with the sun shining in my eyes.

Henceforth I begin a long journey, one different than the journey I have led so far.
I have finally accepted the person that I am.
And that changed everything.

[dream] Small heart still beating in my hands

I was just moved into a new apartment. Seven floors up, it had a balcony looking out to a marvelous cityscape. With the final dust settling from the move, I grabbed the red nylon leash for my new dog, a black and white Jack Russell, and handed it to a friend leaning against the railings of the balcony. The dog followed the leash. With my back turned to him, my friend threw the leash out the balcony for reasons that went unsaid. And the dog jumped through the railing to follow it.

I gasped in horror and ran downstairs. Miraculously, the dog was still alive. But I could not find a veterinarian anywhere. I held onto the bleeding dog, heartbeats of its poor little life numbered in my own hands.

[dream] Rain

I was wearing a white dress. As I walked down the street rain started coming, heavy drops in slow steadiness. The dress eventually soaked in rain. It felt liberating.

Vincent Desiderio, Woman in White Dress, 2003.

[dream] Ugly

And I looked in the mirror to find myself distastefully ugly. He was near, I knew, so I went in frantic search for my make up set. I needed something, anything, to cover my deplorable looks.

How true some dreams are!

080217

He was rowing me across a body of water in a small wooden boat. A faceless man, he was an assassin by trade, I overheard someone say. The water was calm and I felt equally calm at heart. When we reached the other side, the man simply vanished into thin air. I sat there a while as the boat rocked gently from side to side, occasionally banging against the dock. Then I grabbed the oars and rowed back to where I came from.

Back on this side of shore, wedding preparations were under way. I was to be the reluctant bride marrying a man I had never met before. I regretted leaving in the land of Hades to come back to this.

080205

Physically and mentally weary, I go and sit across the table from my mother. She is in a middle of a conversation with someone next to her. As I sit, she looks over and says, "don't you think so?" in the most comforting tone of voice. Without looking up, and in dry monotone, I say, "I don't know, and I don't care." Regret sets in immediately, giving me all the more reasons to keep my eyes lowered.

I woke up from this dream in cold sweat and tears. The gusting winds outside rattled my bedroom window. I looked over at the clock. Only 2:44AM. Then I treaded back and forth from fragments of indistinguishable dreams to the lit numbers of the alarm clock throughout the night. It was the least restful night I have had so far this year.

When my mother dreams

On the eve of my mother's birthday, my family gathered at my new apartment to celebrate. After the meal as we shared the dessert and coffee, my mother began to talk about a dream that she recently had. She was much younger in this dream of hers, early thirties perhaps. She was walking somewhere, holding my sister's hand and carrying me on her back. After a while, she realized that she lost me. She looked everywhere, but I was not to be found.

My mother never dreams. Other than the three "pregnancy dreams" that she's had (and subsequently giving birth to three daughters), she only spoke of one other dream--a chillingly prophetic dream that she had twenty-five years ago. In that dream, she came walking down a mountain--she was part of a funeral procession that had just buried my father. We would not find out about his fatal illness for another year afterwards.

Disconnect

I killed a woman in my dream. A complete stranger, she was a young sales clerk at a small boutique clothing store in Vancouver. My murderous deed harbored no rage or resentment--just eerie calmness and indifference. She offered no resistance and let out no scream. She simply took my stabbings in stride, as if it were her fate. When her body turned into nothing more than a conglomerate of dying cells and coagulating blood, I dismembered the corpse and stuffed all the parts in a large sack. Then, with the sack slung around my shoulder, I started wandering the streets of the dark city in its late hours.

Before the strike of dawn, I entered a hotel and found my way to the basement where, in a secluded corner, was a row of portable toilets. Inside one of the empty stalls, I opened the sack and reached in. I felt the cold, rubbery flesh of her right hand and grabbed it as if to shake hands, and pulled it out. Along with the hand came the arm, the shoulder, and a portion of her chest. That was all I could find in the sack--other body parts had disappeared. I dumped this chunk of blue-gray flesh in the toilet and left. There was no guilt, no remorse. In fact, the beat of my heart was calm and steady, and my mind was sharper than ever. Leaving the hotel, I thought about an alibi. Thanks to my clear thinking head, there was no need to think so hard or for long. At the time when the young clerk was killed, I was at another place, involved in some innocuous activity. The murder was carried out by my other self, the one that separated from my ego, an existence that was me but no longer me.

* * * * *

This dream was had in 2006, shortly after my trip to Vancouver and Seattle. I had it posted on my Korean blog, until a few protests soon came my way for its violent nature. This had me worry that I may have hidden inner desire for violence. The real meaning of the dream, however, did not hit me until this morning, as I stood in the shower lathering my right arm. It was really about the growing sense of disconnect between body and mind, between reality and perception / interpretation, between reason and emotion. The portrayal of violence was only a vehicle locking the real meaning in symbols. There is nothing puzzling about suddenly remembering this dream and realizing its meaning after all this time, and why it had to be this morning.

l'obscurité

It is a small house where we are. All is dark, except for the bright light shining down on us. We are both naked. I hold him in my embrace, lying there on the floor, feeling the cold concrete against the skin on my back. His body is slumped over mine as tears roll down his cheeks--he is in frightful pain. Whether his suffering is physical, mental or emotional, I do not know and I dare not ask. I simply hold him, hoping that perhaps, if I hold him long enough, some of that pain will transfer over to me and leave him in peace.

In the periphery of this scene stands a woman. Dressed in black winter suit, she stands there without emotion or expression in the unlit corner of the house to observe us. She is as caliginous as the darkness that envelops her.

* * * * *

Last week, I had a dream that was thematically parallel to this dream from a year ago, waking me up in panic before the first light of day. After some hesitation, I started a new diary just so I could write about it. There are certain thoughts that I would only rather keep within my well.

Ravens

We were sitting on a park bench, he and I, exchanging a pleasant conversation of unimportance. In the periphery of my vision I saw a man standing some distance away, straight ahead from where we were sitting. I turned my head to see who it was.

It was him. He was sitting next to me, talking, while at the same time standing at a distance, watching me. I was not at all surprised to find him present at two places simultaneously.

Then I stood up from the bench and turned around. There was a hill against a backdrop of stormy clouds. The hill was literally covered with ravens, hundreds--no, thousands perhaps, fluttering their wings or simply moving about. Not a single one of these black birds was to fly away.

* * * * *

Could it be true that my dreams have some prophetic qualities? This dream of mine was had not last night, not a week or even a month ago, but on this very day exactly one year ago.

From The Solitude of Ravens by Matsuhisa Fukase

p.s. This is my 100th posting. Many are hidden away, and some have never seen the light of day. I don't always know why I write. Sometimes I wonder if the purpose of writing is to forget, like scanning and digitizing a file and destroying the document, so I can make room for other thoughts.

J'entends

I dreamt I was losing my vision. With strained eyes I tried to read the words, but they were a blur. And this, all while mindfully perceiving the silence abound.

This should have been to me a nightmare, as vision was regarded to be the most critical of all my senses. But in the dream, I was quite unperturbed about the blurring eyesight. I should have waken up in cold sweat. Why did this dream not bother me?

The answer was had one late night in Messiaen, as the music faded into the deadening silence in the last movement of Quatuor pour la fin du temps. With the growing sense of distance between the world and the eyes with which I perceive this world, only music still finds a way to the very core of my being. The dream was merely a reflection of my rearranged priorities.

虎 , 龍

During my late morning nap, I dreamt of a legendary animal. It was half tiger and half dragon, beautifully golden in color. Its tail, easily three times the length of its body, was tangled around its own torso and neck, debilitating the animal. I began to undo its tail from the body, starting from the end. However, neither the beast's magnificent beauty nor its incapacity to free itself moved me. I felt nothing but distance and detachment. As the irony would have it, this creature...was me.

I was awakened from my dream by a phone call. My sister, who was taking a day off work, wanted to come over with mom. I said no--it was the first time I ever refused a visit by my family. I fell immediately back to the unconsciousness of sleep brought on by deep exhaustion. By the time I woke up, the sun had already set and my body had succumbed to fever yet again.

A Wistful Fairy Tale

A castle with a grand staircase built out of cold, gray stone blocks.
A contract-bound woman.
The pain of lovers separated.
The ultimate elopement of the lovers to the "new world."

The unusually narrative dream of last night was full of high drama and intense emotions. Throughout the course of this dream, I went from being the unseen observer to an insignificant extra to, eventually, the story's protagonist. The gusty winds woke me from my tiresome dream. As the morning light began to fill my eyes, the delicate details of this dream fell through the crevice of my mind like the grains of sand in the fist. But its operatic ending, with a soprano singing a beautiful aria as the lovers disappeared into the night, is still resonating in my head.

The Awakening

I dreamt I was in Michigan again.

I was swimming from Lake Michigan towards Lake Portage along the channel. The sapphire blue water, glistening beautifully in the warm sunlight, felt pleasantly cold against my body. Midway through the channel, a wave of current rushed toward me, pushing me back toward Lake Michigan. I kept swimming on, but another wave pushed me back. Every attempt I made only pushed me out further into the middle of unfathomably vast body of water, until I lost my way back.

But dear Kate, I will not have Edna Pontellier's fate.

[dream] 071116

He asked me a question.
I did not have an answer.
The look of disbelief in his eyes silenced my dream.

[dream] October 31, 2007

A man was selling watches. The small store with dim lighting had rows after rows of them displayed, each box stacked on top of the other like the blocks of Ennis-Brown House. It felt eerily silent and static. Only upon examining all the watches did I realize that every one of them had stopped, each one displaying a different time. I had to pick one of these dead watches, dead like the old lady who made them, whether I wanted to or not.

* * * * *

After weeks of silent sleep, dreams finally returned. This first dream proved to be prophetic, not unlike the Asian superstition about shooting stars. A little death occurred that day. It was an ugly death for something so sweet and beautiful....