Past Lives and Dream Deaths

Girl

I was temporarily convinced that I was girl in my past life. Well, not exactly temporarily. I wrote a section of my work yesterday (from the perspective of a girl) and I realised that I wouldn’t have been able to do it in such and such a way if it had been from a guy’s. I just know how to approach it better like this, I think. Which makes no logical sense, but it’s good to know what I’m okay at and what I’m not quite okay at.

The Collector

I dreamt this dream where a relative of mine died. It wasn’t frightening at all. It was just quite sad, but I think I always knew that it was just a dream, so it didn’t quite have the effect that it might have been intending to have. The most interesting thing about it was the old man that came up to the front of my flat. He stood on the grass, at some distance, and pointed to my door. And as with so much of our dreams, this immediately made sense to me. He would point and stare at whichever household he had to make his announcement to. It was just a natural law.

He came up to the door next and we opened it and we talked. He came to collect something. He was a nameless old man in a blue suit, but I called him the Collector. It was a name I’d made up. I didn’t know what it was that he collected (nope, not the body), but he collected something. And then he did his job with his perfectly straight face and we were like friends. I didn’t blame him for anything. I didn’t see him as the harbinger of some mysterious doom. No, he was just a guy doing his job.

That’s not to say that the loss of a relative was nothing sad. I was sad. I remember crying in the dream, remembering all the stuff that we’d done together, a smile, a face, a joke, and some lost epiphanies. I was really upset. I didn’t wake up in tears or anything, which led to my belief that I must have known that it was a dream, at least on some level, and that I’d wake up and it would be okay.

Reading

I’m now reading Wena Poon’s The Proper Care Of Foxes. This comes after my second reading of Gatsby. I read that a long time ago. I read it again because it’s in my course. I realised as I did that that I had clean forgotten almost everything about it. Now I have to write an essay about it.

Richard Feynman Dream

Never According To Plan

Funny. I think I said on Friday morning that I wasn’t expecting to do any work on Bukit Merah. Things rarely go according to plan. I hammered out a fairly significant portion at about twice my usual rate over the weekend instead. It might have to do with how Friday was a terrible day, and I generally perform pretty good when I’m sad. Like a limit break or something.

I’m sure the writing’s all very rough and will need a lot of editing, but the point of the matter that I wrote fast (for my standards).

Valkyria!

I’ve been playing Valkyria Chronicles. It’s fantastic.

“Entanglement Machine”

Last night I had a dream where I was in a car with a friend of mine and an aged Richard Feynman with white hair and spectacles. It was at night and we were in a carpark testing my friend’s “entanglement machine”. Apparently, that’s a really fancy name for a machine that does nothing but produce a small glob of black mass. We performed one test on my right index finger (like it was a good idea for the off-chance that I might, I don’t know, lose a finger or something), and when my friend applied these wires to the skin, poof, a tiny black glob appeared on my finger.

Great results, and then I said something along the lines of, Hey, wouldn’t it be great if I had a disentanglement machine? I could destroy my enemies! Then, suddenly aware that I said something stupid, I sank into silence. I remember thinking that Richard Feynman was receptive to even the stupidest of ideas, and he started mumbling to himself, Disentanglement… enemies…

We performed a second test on the same index finger (so much for rigorous experiments), and this time, the black mass was more scattered, roughly tracing out my fingerprint. Interesting, I should have thought, but I didn’t because it was a dream. Instead, Richard Feynman pointed to one of the graphs that was the one on… oh I don’t know… something against time. Apparently, the mass was produced at 4 and 6 seconds. This was reflected by an increase in the graph level immediately after those times. But! he exclaimed, what’s interesting is this!

He was pointing to the bits just before 4 and 6 seconds, where there were dips. He got all excited and told us that such dips had yet to be explained.

Just then, a security guard appeared and knocked on the window. He informed us that our car, a cheap old sedan, was slanted. Richard Feynman took it upon himself to reverse out of the lot to steer the car straight, but just as he was about to drive back in, something happened, and this got fuzzy, so I can’t tell you what. It had to do with some other vehicle interfering, mainly, driving across and preventing us from parking.

Somehow that got cleared up and we had to try again. This time, I was to drive. Having not driven in a long time, I drove very gingerly, and it was about here that I woke up.

See, I have these really… strange dreams.

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