Category: Life is a Dream

I have been sleeping badly lately. I can't quite figure out why. Maybe it's the summer heat and humidity, the intermittent rain and steamy nights. Maybe it's worrying too much about things I can't control very well – my imperfect health, my overall existential situation, work. 

Whatever the reason, I will wake up far too early in the morning, often before dawn, and struggle to continue with my night's sleep. I will gaze out the window at the pinkening eastern sky, and anti-nostalgically remember distant dawns witnessed while standing in formation in basic training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. I suspect the humidity and heat cause this inevitable mental train to depart the station.

Then I will wake up fully, end up reading something or trying to write something, and then attempt to take a nap. Some mornings, the naps work, other mornings, they don't.

This morning, as thunderstorms brewed, I successfully napped. I had strange dreams.

In one dream, I remembered a story that once made a huge impression on me. The strange thing (or the inevitable thing) was that the story I remembered, in the dream, was a story by Borges about dreaming. A man dreams another man, who grows to become real. In the end, the dreaming man is revealed to have been dreamed by another, ad infinitum. This is the "Ruinas circulares," a quite famous Borges story.

I awoke and found a link to the story text online. I re-read it, as I have done many times.

I made a resolution, which seemed to emerge from that groggy post-dream space, that this should be my epitaph:

Nadie lo vio desembarcar en la unánime noche

[No one saw him disembark in the unanimous night]

[daily log: walking, 6 km] 

I met my stepmother Wendy yesterday – she's back in Korea this time with my sister and niece and nephew. But those latter are staying with friends in Seoul, and so far those friends in Seoul are keeping them very busy – which is fine, since I'm rather burnt out lately. But I met Wendy yesterday, we went to a bookstore and had lunch at an Indian restaurant, and then Wendy came out to Ilsan. She says she likes Ilsan, and I'm happy to host her here.

Early this morning, around 5 am, there was a monstrous thunderstorm, and I woke up. When I went back to sleep, I had a very strange dream.

I was teaching in a very disorganized, slightly overcrowded hagwon. Hm… sounds like reality. There was a very noisy class going on next door to mine, and so I went out into the hallway to see what was going on in the other class, and I looked in and saw only dolls on shelves and toys. No students.

I went back to my classroom, and once again, there was noise coming through the thin walls. Once again, I went to look, and saw only these somewhat creepy dolls sitting on shelves. 

The dream wasn't quite a nightmare, but it was disturbing and eerie. 

I woke up and the clouds from the earlier storm had cleared, and then later I had coffee and made a short shopping trip with my stepmom, and we talked a lot.

Really, that's all we did: kind of sat around today and talked a lot. Two vaguely exhausted relatives catching up, I guess.

 [daily log: walking, 2 km]

You will be curious at this blog-post's title. Who is teaching Bulgarian?

I had a vivid, long dream last night. 

I was sitting at my new desk in the new building, and Jody handed me a new schedule. Lo and behold, there were many surprises on the schedule – changes that affected me but about which I'd heard nothing prior to that moment. So far, so realistic… this happens once a month or so. It's part of life-at-the-hagwon, the "zen" of working as a member of team where communication is never quite what one would hope, due to both linguistic and cultural issues. I try to just shrug at these things, though just yesterday, I had a minor "tantrum" about a change – perhaps that brought on the dream. But then it got weird.

Studying the schedule closely, however, I noticed, written under a middle school block, the characters "бълг". Was this some weird cyrillic typo?

I went to Jody and pointed at it. What's this? She shrugged, and said Curt put it there.

I went to Curt. He was in the hallway moving desks. This is not unrealistic, but the hallway looked like a Hongnong hallway, not a Karma 4.0 hallway. I was self-aware enough, in the dream, to be disconcerted by this. But I was too upset about the schedule mystery to worry about it.

I collared Curt and pointed at the schedule. What's this?

"Bulgarian," he bellowed, optimistically.

Bulgarian? Why would I be teaching Bulgarian to middle school students in Korea? 

Some parents requested it.

Ah, well, that's typical. Customer is king, and all that. Uh, another problem: I don't know Bulgarian.

Curt grinned at me. "You say you're a linguist. You can solve it."

I did see it as something of a challange. I downloaded a "Teach yourself Bulgarian" file from the internet, and printed out some copies. 

A few hours later, I'm in my classroom, which resembles a converted storage closet (not necessarily unrealistic). There is an annoying concrete column in the middle of the room, and I try to rearrange the desks so the students can see the whiteboard around it. 

My students show up. They are new students – unfamiliar faces. Two of them are speaking something slavic-sounding to each other. Hmm.

I had decided at the start that I would stick to honesty. So I make a long, detailed, impassioned speech, in English, explaining that I am their teacher and that I will guide them in learning Bulgarian, even though I don't know it myself. I don't mention, but have in mind, the fact that some Korean teachers of English are in fact not very good at English. It's not that different. 

In fact, possibly this is what the dream is about, in some indirect way?

That's where I woke up. I thought to myself, I should write this down.

 I wrote it down.

[daily log: walking, 6.5 km]

I think it was 10 years ago this week that I decided to quit my job at ARAMARK in Burbank. It was the beginning of the end of my brief but somewhat meteoric career as a business systems analyst and database programmer. I went on, the following year, to work at HealthSmart Pacific in Long Beach and Newport Beach, but from that December of 2004 I was pretty sure I wasn't going to be satisfied with doing computer work, at least in that vein, indefinitely. Perhaps not coincidentally, that same December was the month when I very intentionally ended my reliance on prescription psychoactives (as treatment for my run-in with dysphoric insanity 6 years earlier).

I was reflecting that my in-Korea teaching career is now extending to nearly the same length as that more conventional career did. It doesn't feel like a career in the same sense, at all. It is in some ways more fulfilling – I get a lot out of the kids, even the desultory post-exam teens like I had this morning. 

I had some idea that writing this "anniversary" post would be somehow cathartic or meaningful, but I think I'm just filling blogspace because I have my rule to post something each day.

The other night, I dreamed I was speaking Korean, almost fluently. There was one major problem with this fantastic scenario: I had no idea what I was saying. 

[daily log: walking, 6 km]

Yesterday evening, I was reading one of my history books and was falling asleep, and had one of those super-quick, drift-asleep-then-wake-up-with-a-start dreams.

I was riding on a bus (so many of my dreams involve traveling, but then, I've traveled a lot in my life). I looked out the window and there was no ground. It was like on a plane – but the bus was still "rolling" – I could feel it. There weren't clouds either: just no ground… a kind of emptiness, under the houses and fields and other cars. That's it. Just a dream-snapshot.

I have been very disconnected, lately: feeling as if I'm floating above myself, too often (I mean, I get that feeling sometimes, all the time, but it has been more continuous). It is hard to explain – I associate it with a kind of low-grade dysphoria, I guess, but it doesn't have any of the other characteristics one commonly associates with depression: no negative thinking or obsessive thoughts, no frustration or anger or boredom. Just a weird detachment.

I'm not sure why I'm even writing about it, except to record it here for looking at later when I try to figure out what I was doing in this time.

[daily log: walking, 5.5 km]

I dreamed I was giving a listening test to my students. This isn't that strange – I do it a lot. It was one of those standard Korean TEPS-style English listening tests, you hear some conversation or short academic-style passage, and then the voice drones through the possible answers: "A bla bla bla; B bla bla bla; C bla bla bla; D bla bla bla." These sorts of tests would be difficult for native-speaking students, too – you have to pay close attention, as often, the possible answers tie in to some detail in the preceding passage. I was telling my students to focus, but I was unable to focus, myself, and I was unable to get the right answers on the questions, either.

It wasn't a very interesting dream, plot-wise. It was just interesting that it was a sort of fragment of my life, re-lived so vividly that my memory of the dream and the incomprehensible questions in it stayed with me all morning, and when I got to work after my vacation, this afternoon, I was trying to figure out if the test really happened or if it was, in fact, just a dream.

[daily log: walking, 5 km]

I have student nick-named Nick (appropriately?). He is a very shy, quiet, unbecoming boy who doesn't always work very dilligently but he's quite smart and well-behaved. 

After writing yesterday about some of my students' writing okie-dokie graffiti, last night I had a dream that Nick, specifically, was going around writing strange things on the walls and desks and books of KarmaPlus hagwon. He was also suddenly dressing like a 1980's fan of Depeche Mode or something – vaguely "goth" with piercings and tattoos, too. It was quite strange. 

"What's happened to you, Nick?" I asked. He was just as shy as always, to talk about it. Yet every time I turned around, he was scribbling his name or some diagram on a piece of furniture.

Strange dream: not much plot to it except that. 

[daily log: walking, 1.5 km]

I suppose having read detailed war history all day yesterday, it was to be expected: I dreamed war dreams. They were quite odd, however. The war was being conducted mostly at KarmaPlus hagwon, where I work, and the soldiers were the elementary students. Their weapons consisted mostly of small index cards of different colors, such as I give the students for writing their speeches and notes for debate classes. They would draw various weapons on the cards then put them down in places in the hallway and other students would move theirs around. It was more like chess than war, in some ways – but a kind of free-form chess played on a very large and variegated board.

I think the dream had its origins in the detailed battle-maps of Halberstam's book, with their conventialized, rectangular representations of various units – companies, batallions, regiments, etc. – just like index cards.

[daily log: walking, 5 km]

I had diffuse but unpleasant nightmares this morning waking up. I do not actually have nightmares that often, but these dreams had me convinced I was dying or having some kind of paralytic attack in my bed, and I could not escape. As a result, I felt unrested and eerie all day, and the strange misty weather added to the atmospherics, making for a grim mood. I tried to escape by playing simcity, which I havent played in ages, but I ended up angry at the game. Heh.

I had another strange but memorable dream last night – one of those dreams where you still remember it vividly and in great detail hours later.

I had returned to Los Angeles, only to find myself caught up in some kind of crime drama – like a TV show, I guess. I was trying to find these counterfeiters, but ended up in this woman's apartment who had a child, and the child kept giving me "gifts" of small, living animals. First he gave me a mouse. Then, he gave me a bird. Finally, he gave me a snake. I stuffed each of them into my pocket, even as I was thinking to myself, "I really shouldn't put them all in the same pocket." 

I walked out of the woman's apartment, onto what appeared to be a typical Mexico City streetscape, and found that my car was missing. I had some memory of having driven my old Volkswagen bug to the location, but its distinctive dirty-white color and spots of rust were nowhere  to be seen.

I walked down to the main street and caught a passing bus, which, despite everything looking like Mexico City, was nevertheless a bus clearly affiliated with Los Angeles. When I boarded the bus, I found I only had Canadian coins in my pocket. I held them and examined the for a long time, puzzled and amazed to find such a conjunction of Canadian money, having no recollection of why I would. There were 3 pennies, a nickel, a quarter and a loonie.

The bus driver was kind, and let me ride anyway, refusing the money. He seemed to find it amusing that I had only Canadian coins, and tried to make conversation with me – I was the only person on the bus. Then, a friendly family of Haitians, dressed as if for church, boarded the bus and began to sing, and I looked out the window of the bus to see not Los Angeles, nor Mexico, but Korea.

I saw the luxuriant, green rice paddies of high summer, and men and women stooped over working the muddy fields wearing those traditional, broad-brimmed, conical, straw hats. One old man looked up at me as the bus waited at an intersection and smiled. The Haitians got off the bus and the bus driver told me that it was the end of the line.

I got off the bus and looked around. I was in the middle of the nowhere, and it was hot and humid. I felt a movement and remembered the animals in my pocket. I pulled the snake out – it was pale and yellow and lethargic, its beady eyes slitted closed. It was evident it had eaten the mouse – there was a bulge in the snake's length. The bird had disappeared. I pulled out a length of chain, like a broken necklace, instead. Somehow this had replaced the bird. I felt sadness.

I woke up.

I wonder if I'm having strange, symbolically overloaded dreams because I'm spending less time on my computer at home? Or is it the springtime weather? 

[daily log: walking, 5 km]

It was one of those dreams I kept waking up from and then returning to, this morning way before my normal waking-up time.

It was a skeleton dream . . .

In the dream, I was disassembling my skull in some kind of medical theater, using instructions schematics that looked to be from the 19th century. I was demonstrating how the skull is made of pieces which fit together like an intricate puzzle, to Dr Jo (my radiation specialist) and Dr Neuhaus (my doctor when I had Typhoid in Mexico City in 1986 and nearly died in the scary Mexican healthcare system). Why these two men? The two things linking them is a) being doctors during major healthcare crises, and b) speaking with German accents like mad-nazi-scientists in B-grade thrillers – Dr Neuhaus was German-Mexican, and Dr Jo is Korean but did all this studies and internships in Germany and thus speaks English Germanly.

Once my skull was apart – and how is it that I was working on it so easily, being "inside" it? – then my brain came apart like a package of instant udon noodles (soft but cold and tangled together) but each curve had a clear purpose and role. I knew them all perfectly and spoke about their functions to the watching doctors. I needed to fix what was wrong, but then I mixed up two strands and couldn't remember which was which.

With increasing panic I look to my instructions but they blur in front of me, because … my brain was coming apart. And it went on and on.

That was my dream. 

For the record, what I did to my computer on Monday (which has knocked me off the internet for the last few days) was that I was trying to put Linux on it, and I made a stupid mistake by not paying attention, and so I had no operating system for a while. It was actually a problem I handled with equanimity – much more so than the problem I'm continuing to have with my phone (battery). I think it might be time to get a new phone.

I wonder, though, if the dream and the computer/phone problems are connected. I think they are.

[daily log: walking, 5km]

I awoke  from a dream this morning where I was at some kind of camp/training/retreat. It involved children (my students), but it was half vipassana retreat and half something like the jeollanamdo training at gwangju 2010.

I had decorated my room with crepe paper for some reason, and my roommate was fellow teacher Ken from work. Curt was in the room next door. There were kids running around everywhere. The setting was like some kind of Korean Buddhist temple complex. We were running classes and activities for the kids, but also had to attend other classes ourselves.

I was out walking around on a break between classes and I was looking for Jello. I don't know why I was looking for Jello – maybe that was related to my mouth and eating problems. I paused when I heard a surprisingly deep-voiced girl – maybe 6th grade – giving a speech over a loudspeaker in the courtyard. She stumbled over some of the words. She came into a foyer area and cried because she'd messed up those words. I was trying to reassure her. She looked familiar to me be I felt mortified because inside the dream I was unable to remember her name.

That was the dream.

[daily log (11 pm): walking, 5 km]

I slept in later than usual, this morning. I was busy having a slow-moving dream.

I had gone to visit my uncle in Craig, Alaska. I had further decided to rent a room in town rather than stay out at his place. So I was apartment hunting.

I found this place that seemed half under-construction on the road between Craig and Klawock, a rambling half-old, half-new house built with a diversity of materials, including wood, concrete block, and steel siding. I walked around inside and was dismayed by how messy it seemed, but then in the back, in the area of the new construction, the house was immaculate. I waited for a long time to meet the landlord. Somehow I'd just walked into the place on my own – perhaps I'd been granted permission over the phone?

I looked out the back door and gazed at the sky spattered with gray and the unending green of the nearby mountain, and the infinite random cratering of puddles in the gravel parking area, that, like all parking areas in Alaska, always seem too large for their accompanying structures.

Finally, after a few hours, I met an elderly woman that looked Indonesian or Southeast Asian, accompanied by a Native American man. The woman said something to me about how she wasn't sure she wanted to rent the room to me, but then she turned and said something in Korean to the man she was with. I understood it well enough to react – I think it was something to the effect of would I be messy like the current tennants or clean up after myself, and so I interrupted and said I would be clean – in my stumbling Korean.

The woman's eyes widened and the man turned toward me speculatively. Somehow it didn't seem incongruous to me that a Southeast Asian woman and Native American man would be speaking Korean to each other in rural Alaska.

The woman said to me, continuing in Korean, "Oh, so you speak Korean?"

I took a breath – inside my dream. Dreaming in languages I don't know well always seems ambiguous – am I dreaming the actual language, or some mental construct? This is a puzzling problem that has preoccupied me since middle school. And what's odd is that this is the actual thought that occurred to me within my dream at this juncture.

The fact that I spoke Korean, however badly, somehow gained the trust of the woman, although after our halting exchange, she immediately began to criticize my ability, in a nagging, somewhat intrusive manner. "How long was it you were in Korea? How is it you can only speak like that?"

I finalized my rental of the room at the place and went outside, feeling uncertain about whether the construction going on at the site would be completed when I came back to move in – although I ccouldn't recall when, in the dream, I was supposed to move in.

It was overcast and drizzling – very typical Craig weather. I went to get in my uncle's truck (which I guess I'd borrowed and was driving around) but found someone had attached a boat trailer to it. My uncle suddenly walked out of a nearby hardware store that I hadn't noticed before. In that instant, in a very dream-like way, Craig, Alaska was resembling White Bear Lake, Minnesota, with many more – and more stately – houses, and decidious trees and streets meeting at right angles and mini-malls near intersections, with the water hovering in the distance looking much more lakey and less fiordy.

My uncle was grinning.

"What's this?" I asked, gesturing at the boat trailer.

"I don't know," he said in his laconic manner. "But I like it."

We got into the truck and drove back down the Port Saint Nicolas Road toward his house. The windshield wipers did most of the talking.

I woke up when we reached the bend at the head of the fiord, aroumd mile 7.

I didn't even realize I'd slept in until after I'd made some coffee and sat down to write this dream – the light coming in my window didn't feel "late."

Here is a picture I took in October, 2009, from my uncle's porch, looking out eastward toward the head of the fiord.

[daily log (1145 pm): walking, 5 km]

I dreamed I was sitting in the dim living room of the “San Marino House.” That’s the in-family name for the house my great-grandparents, John and Isabel Way, and later grandparents, John and Alice Way, lived in in the San Gabriel Valley east of Los Angeles. The house was in the family from the 1910’s until its demise in the 1990’s. I had the opportunity to live in the house for about half a year in 1992.

With me in the crowded living room were some coworkers from Karma, and some other people that were allegedly in my family but that I didn’t recognize. My emotional state, in the dream, was strong: I was seething with anger and frustration, but it wasn’t clear what had brought this about.

The people around me were chatting about the built-in bookshelves in a kind of deprecatory way, and I finally went outside, only to find there was a giant canyon yawning where the back yard and 1920’s-era swimming pool used to be. There were tour buses parked and people milling about. I was feeling claustrophobic but found I couldn’t escape the crowds.

I went back inside. The dim room and the complaining people depressed me as I lay on the floor. Seeking some kind of distraction, I found a trail of ants leading into the kitchen, and followed it. My grandmother was in there, boiling silverware (she was a bit of a germophobe and always boiled her silverware). She had a collection of guns on the kitchen table (this was especially strange given she was a devout Quaker and pacifist in real life).

My grandmother spoke to me in Korean, and I stared at her, uncomprehending. Finally, I left, going out into the driveway area, where I found a handsome black horse. The horse was spooked but tethered and unable to move much. It rolled its eyes and snorted at me. I untied it and watched it run away down California Blvd toward Cal Tech.

I woke up puzzled by this dream. I don’t know what it means. I would give it a cuil number of 5 or so.

The San Marino House no longer exists. Here is a scan of an ink portrait I drew of the house in 1992, from the southwest corner of the lot looking toward the front porch, with all its encompassing greenery.

[daily log (11 pm): walking, 5 km]

I haven't been sleeping well. I sleep for an hour or two, then wake up. My mouth gets dry, my bladder seems small. I try to go back to sleep and mostly I succeed, but last night I was awake for about an hour. I was reading my Chinese philosophy book, about the guy called Mo Tzu, who came between Confucius and Mencius who are the two I already knew about, in around 400 BC. According to the book I'm reading, on the one hand he was focused on "universal love" and on the other, he was a committed authoritarian and believer in spirits.

I went to sleep and dreamed I met Mo Tzu, except he was dressed like Don Quixote and was wandering around ancient China. I think this happened because the author I'm reading referred to Mo Tzu's social class as "knights errant" – essentially mercenaries who went around renting their services to sovereigns.

Mo Tzu Quixote was accompanied by a cartoon-character Sancho Panza sidekick, and was reading to a crowd of Chinese peasants from the King James Bible. Where did that come from? The peasants were enthralled but then some wise man came with some soldiers and told the crowd to disperse.

I was sitting under a tree having given up trying to follow Mo Tzu. There was a line of ants walking, and I followed it, only to realize they were marching in a circle around the base of the tree. I collapsed in annoyance and disgust. The sun was setting, and it was cold.

I woke up again, feeling cold, my mouth dry as flour. 4 am.

Despite my slight addiction to political blogs and world-events newsfeeds, my dreams rarely seem overtly (geo)political in nature. Last night, however, I had a dream that was a bit like watching a major world event unfold on the internet – or really, two world events happening in parallel. Further, they displayed an interesting symbolism vis-a-vis my status as a U.S. expat at this stage in my life.

In the dream, two major political events were unfolding at the same time.

On the one hand, in Korea, a rather sudden and almost entirely peaceful reunification was taking place, somewhat in the style of the German reunification of the early 1990's. The air was full of optimism, as Seoul's TV networks and reality shows were allowed to wander freely in Pyeongyang, while many, many North Korean economic migrants were welcomed with essentially open arms into the South, and Park Geun-hye and Kim Jong-eun made joint appearances at conferences, discussing a "uniquely Korean" federal solution to reunification.

It was all the stuff of political fantasy, of course – I find such a scenario incredibly unlikely, though I wouldn't put the statistical chances at exactly zero.

The contrast, however, was that just as this was unfolding in Korea, in the U.S. a civil war was beginning, as Tea Partiers and other right-wing mal-contents, unhappy with yet another loss at the never-ending game of legislative obstructionism, decided that it was time to "Live Free of Die," as the revolutionary New Hampshire flag would remind us. They began a series of targetted killings and terrorist acts, including assassinating several Democratic Senators, while the state of South Carolina once again announced it was seceding, in response to some federal intervention in the matter of voting rights and healthcare. The U.S. Army was mobilized (again) to do something about the secession, as Texas and Tennessee followed suit.

Once again, this is the stuff of political fantasy, and not necessarily likely.

What I found interesting psychologically was how this plays out as a kind of dream-representation of my expat status, or of the reasons behind it. I left the U.S., in part, in 2007, because of a sort of feeling that the U.S. polity had reached such a senescence as to make it "not worth trying" to make a life there "work" anymore. Obama's election in 2008 seemed to offer a sort of chance at redemption, but his subsequent political ineptitude (not to mention outright failure to keep promises) has only confirmed my initial judgment: these are the last days of the Roman Republic, and we should remember that the glories of Caesar were largely only Caesar's, and that the victors write history, in civil wars too.

Make of it what you will.

Happy Sunday.

Last night I dreamed I was wandering around the Seoul subway – which is maybe realistic given I've been taking the subway a lot more, recently, due to my many visitors, than in my usual lifestyle.

The subway was full of people from previous periods of my life – from my work in Burbank or Long Beach, from grad school at Penn in Philadelphia, from the US Army, from my undergraduate years at Macalaster and the University of Minnesota. I found a group of people that included some Burbank coworkers along with some acquaintances from my undergraduate years in a long pedestrian passage of the subway, where they were apparently staging a talent show.

I was invited to join in, but I said I had no talent. So I sat down on the floor to watch. There were several children performing a puppet show, but the stage-window apparatus fell down, so they were just sitting on the floor holding the puppets up. All through this, regular subway patrons kept walking past, oblivious.

Many of the people present were discussing the puppet show, saying how badly the children were doing. One girl had on a frilly dress and was weilding a dragon puppet and was having trouble disentangling the long tendrils attached to the dragon-puppet's head from the ruffles on her dress. You could see she was on the verge of tears with frustration. A boy had a puppet of a hunter or soldier, but he wasn't holding it up above his head, so he was blocking the view of it with his head and other arm. I felt compelled to defend the children's efforts against the criticisms of the audience, but I was being ignored. Finally, I gave up and wandered off through the subway again.

I awoke and it was 4 am. My apartment had become quite chilly – the weather station on my phone said it was 5 degrees (C) out.  I know my mother – staying with me currently – doesn't like cold, so I closed my window. I lay awake for a long time – for some reason the fragment of dream stayed vividly with me.