The Spy

Vivid dream in the night. A group of us are in a retreat house in China, coming together and praying and doing whatever you would do on a retreat. The house has two rooms linked by a hallway. By and by I realise that there is a gap between the rooms and a secret room has been set up between them, and a spy from the Communists has been planted inside to observe us and to track our conversations. The room turns out to be just about visible when one looks through a window at the side wall of either of our rooms. The spy is an dolorous middle-aged fellow in a beige jacket, and he mostly watches the screen of his own laptop idly or plods around his room. One of the retreat participants is a tetchy native Chinese man, and he berates me for my curiosity. "Do you want to die?" he shouts. "Do you want to be exposed? Don't look at him!" Now a small toddler boy among us is standing at the window and has been studying the Spy intently, while the Spy stares blankly out over his head. I realise that the windows let light through in the wrong direction -- we can see the Spy, but he cannot see us, only reflections of his own small room. No wonder he looks so glum! When I woke up I decided that the man who had nagged me in the dream was the real snitch. And now it is day and all the myriad activities of day beckon me again.

Adventures with Ignatius Noogent

This is a dream from a while ago. I was in Lincoln, Nebraska, and a white supremacist guy called Ignatius Noogent had emerged from his parents' basement and was going about town hunting down and shooting anyone who looked Asian. I ran down the avenue to avoid his bullets. Eventually I ducked into a building and into something that looked like a classroom. As I hid under the table, I realised that the lights and the ceiling fan were still on. Shit! I can't turn those off now; he'll know that I'm here! Now the gunman had entered the building and was patrolling down the corridor, whereupon I woke up in cold sweat, not just out of a sense of doom, but also because who the heck spells the name as Noogent anyway

The Album Dream

A photo album was left in my bag. It was an album with pictures of her. Her parents had compiled it to document her childhood, with pictures of her when she was two, when she was four, then so on into her teenage years up to the point when she left her home and her country. It had an ornate red and white patterned cover. The pictures were arranged so that as you flipped the album through, you would go earlier and earlier in time. It was a mistake, I thought. How could it have ended up here? I should return it to her. I put it on my table. And then that was where it ended.

Dream Diaries

Leifur Eriksson
Took an exam for a course for which I had not attended a single lesson. The course was called Greenlandic Culture and History. The exam was invigilated by the (Greenlandic) lecturers: a gruff man in security guard uniform and a taciturn lady. They gave me a funny look when i stepped in, because I was an unfamiliar face. The lady offered me notes because I did not have any. I was relieved not to find a question about the date of Leifur Eriksson's first landing on Greenland, because I have no idea when that was. The questions were mostly on some sausage and other traditional cuisine, but I could easily guess the answers to them. My classmates, who had attended classes every week, were all Indonesians on exchange.

UPDATE: Leifur Eriksson's landing on Greenland is dated AD 986 (source: Wikipedia)

Getting Chased
Was on the run from a pack of soldiers wanting to shoot us. We were a family (parents and 3 kids) from unspecified place in Europe, a girl and myself. They chased us to a pavilion with a maze decoration (maze with walls that go up to mid-calf height) and gave up and declared a ceasefire. Everyone sat down together and took a rest, sitting on the maze walls, then agreed to resume the chase once dinner was finished. The girl and myself were sent out to buy everyone dinner. Unfortunately for us, both the supermarket and the nasi lemak stall were closed. I forgot that we had to return and went home and slept. When I woke up I suddenly remembered again, and boarded the train back to the pavilion. By chance I sat down opposite the girl from the chase, who was now dressed up like a gypsy, in a purple shirt and a bandana. I asked her if she was going back to the chase, and she said yes. We were both empty-handed.

Bodhi Creepers
Climbed a mountain in Indonesia, somewhat inland from Surabaya. I broke from the group with another guy and went straight up the mountain. The mountain was verdant to its peak, covered by a creeper with large leaves shaped like those from the bodhi tree. The roots of the plant are sparse and hardly held together the loose soil underneath. Halfway up the mountain, there was a pool fed in by a hot spring, dyed pale blue like the one near Grindavik in Iceland. The slope to the summit was gentle on one side and steep on another, and a white building was built into the rock at the steeper slope.

Muslim Toilets
I was looking for a toilet in school. Ended up at the basement of this building, which felt more similar to an EPFL building than it is like an NUS building, being octagonal in shape. The door to the toilet on this floor had a sign which proclaimed "There is no god but God, and Muhammad is his prophet". When I went in it was a normal toilet, with walls painted pale green below eye level and white above, except that the left wall is mostly empty and one lonely urinal has been installed in the unlit far side. It occurred to me that I did not understand the implications of using this toilet and I decided to look for another one.

There was a flight of stairs leading down from the basement level. I went down that way. The flight was excessively long, about thirty meters deep. The path is in a narrow tunnel that allowed for two people to walk down side by side. At the end there was a hallway with doors marked 1 to 8. I did not heed the numbers and went straight to the one on the far side. That led down to another long flight of stairs, then another hallway identical to the first one, then another flight of stairs, then another hallway...

Finally I reached a wider room, huge, underlit and dank. The space was inhabited with people walking on crutches, but seemed happy otherwise. There was a row of urinals, less intimidating this time, each one bigger than the usual design and with big porcelain lobes at the side to aid the disabled folk. And from that point there was no more dream.

Wall of Water

The night after OAC 2010 ended I had this weird dream. I watched a simulation of a tsunami spreading across the Indian Ocean from the Arabian peninsula, and definitely inundated Singapore. I was too lazy to run, though, and a few days later I was lazing on some front porch when I saw that huge wall of water approaching the house. For a few moments I was totally resigned to my fate, and was wondering what dying in a tsunami would feel like. Then I woke up.

An Apocalyptic Dream

It was late into the night, and I was looking out of some window, facing north. What should I see but the bright stars of Centaurus and Crux, shining over the suspiciously darkened skyline like diamonds on dark blue velvet. (Of course, under normal circumstances Centaurus would appear in the south instead of north, and you can't see stars, but this was a dream)

Gacrux and Delta Crucis faded first, then the rest of the stars. Clouds gathered overhead, and explosions were set off which seemed, initially, like very loud thunder. Whole sky is dark by now, and my attention is all but focused upon the spectacular fireballs.

Just then, a pillar of fire shot out from above and landed somewhere far to my right.

Switch to school scene, which is quite weird, seeing how fast it happened. I was at school, doing the usual stuff. Mugging, meeting random people, walking back and forth from bench to art room. I was just outside Admin block when a very loud voice said:

"An asteroid is bound to hit somewhere to the east of Singapore in five minutes. Er please make preparations to--"

What did we do? We should have been panicking, but admittedly it was quite pointless panicking, running around and beating people up and such, and the majority just sat around where they were and being confused. A passing teacher voiced my thought aloud. "Rather neat way to die, eh? In just a bunch of seconds the whole country would be like whoosh. Oblivion. There you are and there you aren't."

After a bunch of seconds nothing happened, and neither did anything occur within three minutes after the projected time of impact. The same loud voice now announced that there had been a miscalculation of the trajectory and the asteroid would probably impact in the afternoon at a different location.

Considering the technology and scientific integrity of the day, it was all quite weird the way the impending apocalypse was announced. Still, not as weird as the fact that the school subsequently called a half-day and everyone in school went off shopping.

The question:
If you're at school today and there is five minutes left to live for everyone, who will you find?

Ionosphere

In the village the night before the last I lay down in my bed and knocked on the doors to the subconscious. I came into this futuristic mid-air cruise Zeppelin hundreds of kilometres above sea level. The rooms were bloody big and posh, the kids were playing around but the strangest thing I saw was the sky. From right below to around ten degrees below eye level was the daytime stratosphere sky, clear blue with white clouds below. above ten degrees above eye level was that of evening sky, of a darker shade. Between these two zones was a region occupied oddly by a solid purple band. Right above was another gap, this time in the shape of a decagon, that made a deep dark hole in the sky, leading off to space.

Everything else that happened during the past week had been dampeners to our spirit after the exodus from Yunnan. Just the third day I came back to Fuqing I fell sick; didn't get any better until yesterday. The road trips seemed to be the best parts.

I miss my home!