I learned this four-character idiom from a coworker, and recognizing it as such, looked it up later.
非夢似夢
비몽사몽
bi.mong.sa.mong
false-dream-like-dream
"Half asleep half awake."
It's actually much easier and transparent than most of these types of expressions that I've attempted. It's a great phrase to know, too. Especially given the way I sometimes feel like I'm working my way through a dream.
There was a thunderstorm this morning. Nice, the hard rain scrubbing the air.
[daily log: walking, 7km]
(Poem #260 on new numbering scheme)
Con chupe de pescado, pues, soñaba sin querer. Al despertar, me estremecí ¿cómo pude saber?
This is my second attempt at a quatrain using English ballad meter, but in Spanish – for which ballad meter is quite awkward. Still, this more or less works, except how it reverts to trochees in the last line. Don’t ask me what it means, exactly. A prose paraphrase: about fish chowder, then, [I] dreamed without wanting to. Upon waking up, I shivered – how could I know?
This is actually a dream I woke up from this morning: nothing complicated or surreal – I was just eating Peruvian style chupe de pescado at a certain Peruvian restaurant in Newport Beach, down the road from where I used to work in 2005-2006. I used to go there for lunch with coworkers fairly often. That fish soup is some of the most memorable food in my life, for some reason. I’m sure if I had it now, it would seem a poor shadow of its former glory – but that would be because of the changes to my own physiology of taste, post cancer.
