Rewrite

Every now and then, this blog will regurgitate a relatively reflective post, usually due to a special event witnessed/experienced by the author…like this one here, or maybe even this one.

Here’s another addition for the record. And this time it’s a bit different, for it actually occurred to me when I was unconscious and possibly in the throes of REM sleep.

Yes this is about a dream I had very recently.

Early this evening I arrived back at Brooks Residence of the University of Ottawa, having spent much of the weekend away in Southern Illinois participating in the annual Malaysian MidWest Games. Although I had slept for a significant portion of the 22 hour drive back, yours truly still felt depleted in terms of energy; a Statistics class was going to commence at 5pm, and I decided I needed my wits about me for that brain churning session, thus I grabbed my blanket and curled up for an hour’s nap at 3.45pm.

As is wont to do with dreams and their ilk, I found myself visited by entirely random visions in the last few minutes before I was due to wake. I’m sure that all of us have had that sensation before-being straddled in the middle of an incredibly realistic dreamscape, experiencing thoughts made “real”, meeting illusionary acquaintances, only to find oneself shaken roughly awake by the ridiculously annoying twangs of the alarm clock set to stun nearby or the droning snores of one’s roommate.

And then when you do wake – amidst all the heavy fluttering of eyelids and grating vocal chords – you discover that the degree of your dream retention is ridiculously abysmal; trying to mop up an ocean with tissues would be easier.

On a whole, I have had many weird + frightening dreams before. I have seen one of my own characters from my Legacy of the Fallen series appear on my doorstep and attempt to murder me, hell bent on seeing the livid body of its creator buried six feet under -

Then there was that one where I spent my entire REM session in absolute terror as I watched my own brother get trapped in a burning house – our burning house. I remember the Irving of the reverie ran around the entire structure, feverishly looking for a way in but failing miserably each time. Screaming in despair, he watched as the flames licked the entire establishment down, and when they finally died down and people were able to inspect the ruins -

The clothes my brother had worn were arrayed neatly in the middle of the house – all that was left of him. They were completely unscathed, and would have been near perfect…save for the fact that my brother was not wearing them.

I awoke from that dream, in the middle of my bunk at RMC, crying.

I thought those escapades were scary enough in their own right; this post was not written to say they weren’t, but to acknowledge the fact that there are some other figments of my imagination which can rattle me harder when they appear in my dreams – better than the fear of death it seems.

This evening, I dreamt that I finally returned home to Malaysia. I had spent 20 months overseas in a foreign land, and was finally able to reap my reward – that of a four month break on familiar soil with familiar people. I think the fact that this component appeared in my REM thoughts is a subliminal idea of what keeps me going daily @.@

The first inkling I had that things were wrong was when the dream took me to the touchdown at KLIA. My parents were there to greet me…and they literally did that. We said hi, and that was it. No hugs, no profound joy at reunion after years of being apart. No emotion, all dead. My siblings weren’t even there, and when I saw them later on in the dream, they deserved Olympic medals for setting new heights of indifference to my persona.

Dad asked me where I wanted to go for lunch-where I wanted to have my first local meal back home in 20 months. I opted for a simple fried char kuey teow at some random mamak stall. Oh the horror-tak sedap!! The thing tasted like celluloid dipped in brown sauce with plastic shrimps and rubber vegetables @.@ I would later try my favourite chicken rice balls in the hope that they would be better…I might have as well sampled my own balls for all the good they did to my tastebuds.

The days spent around the house were a random mess of indifferent family members, a dog that did not recognize me (and seemed hell bent on keeping it that way), and the overhanging feeling that I was not wanted in the household any more.

You’ve been away for too long.

You’ve moved on.

We’ve grown up >.<

Gone were the usual evenings of playing sports with my dad in the evenings – an event that my persona
in the airplane home had so dreamt of doing; all the “surprises” and “gifts” that I had brought with me from the land of the maple leaf were treated as formalities…the kamu beli kami tak kisah, tapi kalau tak ada kami marah kind of perception.

I had spent many months alone in Canada…who would have thought the same treatment would be extended to me even back home. If anything, it was worse-knowing that a familiar surrounding is familiar to only you, and not vice-versa with a conglomerate of some convoluted incarnation of reverse perception-left the dreaming Irving all empty inside.

Is this still your home?

Did you also think it always would be?

At this point, I remember, I woke up from my dream. My alarm clock was buzzing loudly – 4.35pm, almost time for class. But my thoughts were full of what I had just seen, and I actually wanted to see more of this microcosm of fear. I closed my eyes again.

I saw three childhood friends riding their bicycles near the place where I used to play with my friends in the evenings when all of us were growing up. I had not seen all of them in years, these two boys and one Eve descendant. At that very precise moment I realized that they had changed in so many ways; I saw that they had moved on-were married and had their own children…oh why did you not tell me this was the way things are now; this I asked them.

Only one of them admitted he remembered me.

The other looked like he was trying to forget. The third ran away in absolute denial.

So so lonely.

Old flames and recollections passed over the brow of my dream avatar. He read the newspaper: the country had changed beyond his wildest dreams – gone were the familiar faces of stoic leadership, the incumbent glories of governments once acquainted with. Indifference from the surroundings turned to hate, and hate to rejection.

I found myself longing for Canada, for the shade of the maple leaf.

And the knowledge of this emotion shocked me the most. I awoke fully at last; beside me my alarm clock lay buzzing still, singing a tune of the real world to my blundering senses. Just like when my characters in my novels hunted me down, and with sensations similar to when I watched my only brother disappear in incendiary pain, I felt the emotions of the dream extend into real life.

And I pray none of you will ever experience such desolation ever. The scariest part was that it was fleeting; that it was all imaginary..but yet, you know that deep down, it was all real.

“Even meaningless imagination is the driving force that creates you.”

-Rewrite, Asian Kung-Fu Generation.