inklingfair I had a series of vivid-bordering-on-lucid dreams recently, which might have been brought on by sudden jolts into consciousness during REM sleep and weird hours’ wakefulness because of the baby’s sleep regression.
ONE: The family was dining out, and I had dutifully got everyone masked up before we left home. At the restaurant, I realized with horror that I had left my mask behind. I pulled up the collar of my mock turtleneck crop top (I know, in 2020?) over my nose but then my torso got exposed. When I got up to wash hands, the sink was lined to the brim with a pantheon of icons of vaguely South Asian- and Thai-looking deities with incense sticks, candles, garlands and soft drink bottles. Could it be the coriander seeds in the pho we ate that night? Or that tweet about Brian Fuller being the auteur of occult eroticism (what was that even about?) Cut to: Me in the kitchen of Banuyo about to cook a chicken dish, when I realized I had forgotten some ingredients and had to leave Amy behind. It started raining when I left, so I borrowed an umbrella from the guard at the checkpoint. But before I had gone far, the rain began pouring down in earnest. I went back to discover that Amy had fallen asleep on a bunk bed. I think I just gave up on the chicken.
TWO: Josh and I were in a packed stadium with the roof open, just like right before the U2 concert started in Singapore. The show began with a great heave moving the entire structure, and suddenly the stadium was hurtling through space, with planets passing overhead to the ooohs and aaahs of the audience, anchored down to the floor with artificial gravity. After the concert, we rode a jeepney home.
THREE: Another concert dream. It was BTS this time (I’m not a BTS fan, but several people I follow on Twitter are). I was with three other friends, two of whom are ARMYs IRL. We had sneaked out of the concert venue to probably go to the merch booth or try to get a glimpse of BTS before the show. We were walking down a corridor with the lights turned off, when suddenly they popped out of the shadows and started singing and dancing, in pambahay clothes. I had the presence of mind to take a video of the last few seconds of the surprise performance, then they asked us to go back to the arena. Someone whispered to me: “Do not wait to travel to your garden, go now to your lover’s garden. Do not wait for the greening.” Which made perfectly zero sense.
Perhaps my subconscious still lives in the old normal. I envy it.
Photo by Mohnish Landge on Unsplash
