Category: Life is a Dream

I have been sleeping badly, in recent days. 

On Sunday, I woke up too early but then took a mid-morning nap. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn't. When it works, I often have very strange dreams.

I was on an amusement park ride, a kind of swinging thing, where you swing in parabolic patterns, I guess. Moments of freefall at the ends of the swing arcs. And it was indoors, and I was on the ride alone – no one else was there. But there was no sense that I was trapped, exactly. It's just what I was doing. And somebody was reading some bit of philosophy-type text, over a low-quality loudspeaker. I was having a hard time understanding it, as I swung down… up, to the top of an arc, feeling the pit of my stomach drop… and down… whoosh, and up again. Like that.

Not much of a plot – but that was the dream. Quite vivid, anyway.

Work is really feeling demanding, lately. We have our annual hagwon talent show coming up, which involves extra prep. 

[daily log: walking, 6.5km]

I had a very strange dream in the pre-dawn hour. 

I was traveling by airplane. Maybe LAX to MSP or something like that. 

It was strange, because all the passengers looked like they'd been drawn directly from my facebook feed – all relatives and friends and long-lost acquaintances. And everyone was staring at their smartphones. 

Then the captain announced that we had a problem. We would have to make an emergency landing. Oddly, everyone was pretty calm. The airplane spiraled down in a wide loop, and I saw snow-covered mountains – the Rockies? We landed almost as smoothly as at an airport, but on a blustery, snow-covered alpine meadow. People got off the plane, but it didn't seem like anything was wrong with it. And everyone had cellphone reception, so people were announcing the landing on facebook and other sites, and people were watching news of our own emergency landing. 

But there was some delay in getting us rescued. There was only one helicopter arriving, to ferry out the 100s of passengers. So it would come and go, taking out only a half dozen at a time. A lot of us would have to stay the night. We camped out in the airplane, but it was quite cold. I felt sooo cold.

On the news in the middle of the night, that everyone was looking at on their cellphones, a scandal was erupting. It turned out the same pilot had made an almost identical emergency landing, in the same location, some years ago. How could that be? Especially since there was nothing obviously wrong with the plane. All the passengers and crew realized the pilot and copilot had disappeared. That was just too weird. On the next helicopter ferry arrival, some police arrived, with police dogs, who began looking for the pilot and copilot. 

I was just too cold. I didn't care about the pilot and copilot, I wanted to get out of there.

I woke up, and I had kicked my covers off. I sleep with the window open, and the building's heat had been turned off April 1 – the room was cold, it was chilly outside. So at least that's where the cold came from. The rest is just plain weird. The dream was far too coherent, in some ways. Almost like a movie or novel. It could be one.

I don't know where all the material came from – I haven't been watching any TV lately, so there's no airplane thriller movies enrolled in my dream-queue. I haven't looked at facebook in months, so I don't know how that happened either. It was just strange. What does it mean?

[daily log: walking, 7km]

Wow, that was a weird dream.

I was in some Simcity version of San Francisco – the city of my childhood, mediated by the simplifications of game theory and the fever dreams of utopian urban planners. I was driving one of my old VW Beetles (I owned 3 different ones, over the years – the one I was driving most resembled the last one I owned, with its vato-ized steering-wheel and missing gearshift knob).

I wanted to the drive across the Golden Gate bridge. I was approaching from the south, on those raised viaducts through the Presidio, but the city's skyline hovered off where Marin should be. Furthermore, the toll plaza had been converted into a campground. "Isn't this the plot of some post-apocalyptic movie?" I thought to myself, inside the dream.

Reaching the bridge, there was some strange change in procedure – my car would be taken across the bridge by a robot train, while I had to walk. I shrugged, like Kafka's K, and went with the flow. I left my car to the robot trains, under the management of an angry Mexican, and started walking. I was with some companions, mostly visitors to me while I'd been in the cancer hospital: Peter, Grace, Curt, Helen. They were ignoring me.

The walk across the bridge was quite challenging. Reality became Inception-like (as in the movie "Inception," which actually I didn't like that much, but the CGI cinematography is compelling). The bridge began to twist and tilt and bend. But unlike in "Inception," the twisting, tilting and bending was all completely mechanical. The Golden Gate bridge was a giant clockwork mechanism with a million moving parts, like a Transformer car – but instead, a bridge. And it wasn't becoming a robot, it was simply becoming a bridge with a life of its own. So the deck of the bridge moved and shifted and tilted vertiginously until I was first standing on the underside of the deck, and then on the top of one of the great, red-painted towers, without having walked at all, but merely clambered around as the direction of down shifted.

I did not enjoy being atop the tower – I have a fear of heights, after all. I looked down and waited, hoping the bridge would transform again so I could walk safely to the end. When it kept shifting and instead I ended up hanging from a cable, I let go and fell a short distance to the highway deck again. I ran to the north side of the bridge, and found myself in downtown Vancouver, BC. Looking back, the Golden Gate bridge was now the Lion's Gate Bridge, but Stanley Park had been filled up with rowhouses in the San Francisco style. Vancouver is a city I visited several times in my adolescence, but I would not consider the city deeply familiar – the main thing that links it to San Francisco, aside from their somewhat similar urban patterns, is that it is a city from my childhood, rather than from later in life.

I looked around for the robot trains, and I saw them, but my VW was missing. I began to walk. The sun was hot, and I began looking for the ferry. Why did I need to find the ferry? Why did I expect to find it in downtown Vancouver? Walking in the hot sun reminded me of Mexico, so soon I was on the outskirts of La Paz, the southern Baja desert shimmering in the heat. The heat was oppressive.

That made me wake up. I'd put my head under my blanket, like a turtle, and it was too warm. I'd slept later than usual – much later.

Whenever I sleep much later than my usual 6-7 AM wake-up time, I imagine that my body's immune system is fighting something. And the dreams get weird.

Case in point.

[daily log: walking, 7.5km]

I had a very strange dream during that dawn twilight time when I often dream.

I was walking around Paris. I actually did that… about 31 years ago. It is strange how dreams dredge up old material like that. It was quite vivid.

There was a strange building (Centre Pompidou?) and I felt compelled to go inside. Inside it was like some kind of bar or nightclub, but the people were all just standing around – not drinking or eating or dancing or anything. I had this thought that they were ghosts.

I tried to leave the place, but I was unable to do it. It was like a maze, trying to get out. It became a maze – an image borrowed from some movie seen on TV, perhaps – a hedgerow maze with little gold flowers attached the leaves of the hedges. The flowers were like stars strewn across the sky. The sky whirled, as if time was moving rapidly.

I lay down, and the floor was asphalt. This has some precedent in reality, at some point in my past. I felt lost.

When I awoke, it was later than my usual wake-up time. The weather is hot, already at 7:30 am, and the sun is shining in my southeast-facing windows. The fan is blowing, and the air seems a little less humid than yesterday, but still my apartment is uncomfortably warm.

I have no idea.

[daily log: walking, ]

I had this weird dream that I was attending some university, and went to class to find that Captain Bligh was giving a lecture on cladistics.

Actually, this wasn't so surprising – in the past several days, I have consulted wikipedia articles on both topics: Captain Bligh and cladistics.

Here's what's weird, though: the reason I had consulted those wikipedia articles was because they had appeared separately in dreams, previously. So there's this strange conversation going on between wikipedia and my subconscious. I want in on it. I hate that feeling of being on the outside of a conversation where I have a clear interest, unable to break in or really understand what's going on. (Wait… that describes every single day, at work.)

About three days ago, I awoke (as I inevitably do, these days, several times a night, because this medication I'm taking seems to have shrunk my bladder) at around 3 am. I had been having a strange dream where some rioting Koreans were complaining about cladistics. Holding up signs with the word "cladistics" in red circles with red prohibition lines through them. I knew I had once known this word, but I couldn't quite recall what it was. So I grabbed my phone wikipediaed it, right then and there (isn't the 21st century interesting?). I (re-)learned all about cladistics, as I finally drifted back to sleep. I guess I must have studied it, at some point in the past, probably while fulfilling my botany minor as an undergraduate. I do find it interesting.

Then two nights ago, I had some dream fragment where I was with some of my students and we had to fight pirates. This isn't that implausible – pirates are fixtures of kids stories and cartoons everywhere, in today's global culture – and thus they come up now and then in class conversations and jokes and creative endeavors. I had forgotten the dream, until yesterday, sitting bored at work because no one had showed up for one of my classes (not that uncommon in the immediate post-test-prep period), I remembered the dream, and recalled that one of the pirates had been "Captain Bligh." Of course, this is ignorance. In googling Bligh, I (re-)learned that he was not a pirate, nor were his antagonists, the mutineers led by Fletcher Christian. Anyway, as before, I find it an interesting story. I find the person of Peter Heywood to be the story's most intriguing: going "native" in Tahiti, returned to Britain, condemned to death for mutiny, but pardoned and a career navel officer. It made me think, tangentially, that I need to get back to my recent aborted attempt to re-read Melville's Billy Budd.

That was all rather digressive, in an expository way. The point being, that last night, these two things came together again in the dream. The dream was borrowing from recent waking life – which is common enough. What is uncommon is that the recent waking life had been borrowing from dreams, in turn. Perhaps if I had been taking better notes, I would find earlier pointers from those previous dreams to waking life, again. Perhaps I could spiral, helix-like, back through dream and consciousness into my own remote past? Perhaps this could be the plot of a hard-to-understand novel that no one would read. Perhaps, Borges-like, just proposing the novel does most of the creative heavy lifting involved, and I can now rest satisfied.

I do need to rest, anyway. I woke up far too early, this morning, and have insomniated myself right through the overcast dawn. But I must go to work – it's Saturmorning and my "naesin semi-vacation" is over.

"Captain Bligh and the Cladistics" should be the name of a nerdcore hip-hop collective from somewhere in Polynesia, or perhaps Long Beach.

[daily log: walking, 6.5km]

I haven't been sleeping well, lately. I attribute the issue to some of the side-effects of this medication, but there may be other things going on too – it's spring, and that means a lot more allergens in the air, as well as many smoggy days in Korea.

I awoke last night at around 3 am, from a very vivid and complex, novelistic dream. The main outline of it was that I invited Vladimir Putin to Christmas dinner – not once, but twice. The first time, it was somehow in response to some kind of weird contest – he was visiting Korea and so there was some kind of contest and next thing you know, Putin was visiting me for Christmas dinner. Of course, I didn't know what to do. I tried to make some svekolny (a kind of Russian beet and garlic salad), but there were also some strange Mexican dishes, as well as sides of things like kimchi. It was all kind of ad hoc, and Putin, with an entourage, showed up and was polite. But when he went to try the svekolny, he made a terrible face and accused me of trying to poison him. This caused the to-be-expected media conflaguration: "American in Korea tries to poison the Russian president!"

Somehow, I convinced the Korean authorities that it was all a mistake, and the case was dropped. And then there was a "fast-forward" in the dream (novelistically), and it was the next Christmas. I sent Putin an email message to his personal email (which I somehow had access to because of the previous year's events). I told him that this year, I would do better, if he came to Christmas dinner.

This time, instead of at my apartment, I borrowed one of my coworker's larger apartments, and coworkers from Karma helped me prepare. I made more Russian dishes, including svekolny, and I also made a turkey and some traditional American food.

I didn't hear from Putin until Christmas Eve, when, unexpectedly, he sent me a message accepting my invitation. This time, the Korean politicians tried to get in on the publicity, and President Park showed up (she was wearing a Korean hanbok – traditional Korean clothing). In the dream, she was being very polite to me, like I was some kind of celebrity, but one of her police protection agents pulled me aside, and told me in a frighteningly cold tone that if I screwed this up, I would be expelled from Korea forever. In the dream, I wasn't worried.

Some of my coworkers were there, and I also invited some of my favorite students – about 20 of them. But when the Russian FSB agents showed up prior to Putin's arrival (to clear the area's security, I guess), they said that the children were too dangerous, and would not be allowed to see the Russian president. 

President Park was put off by this, and she said she would go with the children into the other room. But the children said they didn't want her there, so dejectedly she returned to the dining room just as Putin showed up. 

He sat down and leaned close, almost whispering. "You are very brave," he said. He was speaking Russian, but somehow, I understood him (which maybe makes sense – I did, after all, study Russian for two years in college). 

"Why am I brave?" I asked. He was so close I could smell his breath.

"To invite me back. Because of this, I respect you." 

I felt like I was talking to some kind of Mafia boss. He asked me what I thought about the Panama Papers (here we see the "current events" issue that perhaps brought about the dream?). 

I told him that I thought that the world was showing a double standard – everyone is all for online privacy, but if you're rich and powerful, you're not allowed privacy, in the name of "transparency." This argument is actually one that has occurred to me, but I'm not sure I fully endorse it. In the dream, I suppose I was trying to ingratiate myself with the Russian president, so as not to antagonize him. After all, my stay in Korea now was contingent on success.

I offered him my svekolny. He tasted it, and made the same disgusted, horrified face as he had last time. My heart fell, and I saw the Korean secret service agent glaring at me. 

Putin looked around, and appeared to notice President Park for the first time. "Try some," he said, like a serpent. "It's delicious." 

"I only eat Korean food," she averred, shaking her head.

Putin took several more bites, struggling to eat it. I wondered what I had done wrong – it tasted OK to me. But then again, my sense of taste is pretty deficient, these days.

He did not complain, however. He persevered through the rest of the meal quite politely. He asked me what I thought of Trump. I told him my sincere opinion. He made another face, but he said nothing. President Park was looking annoyed, because he wasn't talking to her at all. He was talking to Curt and Helen, from work. They seemed smitten by him, but I was only impressed with his tact – that he was clearly putting up with this for some ulterior reason of his own.

He left, with his security detail, without further incident. Park and the other Koreans left too. I went in the other room to check on my students. They were very curious to hear how it went. As I told the rapt kids about the experience, I fingered a very short "thank you" email to Putin on my smart phone. I asked him why he had tolerated my terrible cooking.

Almost instantly, I got an answer. "You showed great strength of character, asking me back, and so out of respect I had to eat it. It was truly terrible." His email included a smiley emoticon in the Korean style: ^_^. 

That was a very strange dream

[daily log: walking, 1km]

I awoke from a dream this morning. I was going to medical school in Mexico City.

Although it sounds preposterous, there are elements in my background that make this dream-plot more plausible, at least as a dream, than one might expect. When I lived in Mexico City in the 1980s, one of my coworkers, Joaquín, was studying in medical school (keeping in mind the caveat that at that time, a medical degree in Mexico was a baccalaureate degree. So at that time, I was immersed in a kind of second-hand medical education. Later, finishing my own undergraduate work, I studied quite a few botany courses, from which I derived a kind of comfort with biological discourses. More recently, since my cancer, I have developed a habit of trying hard to understand as much as possible about the various medical situations and treatments I have experienced, which has evolved into a kind of "hobby" of reading online medical blogs.

Anyway, that's just background, in an effort to understand how my brain managed to put together this dream, maybe. It wasn't that detailed. I was at my workplace in Mexico City, the main difference being that I was in medical school too – not just Joaquín. Of course, I was studying things related to cancer. I was having a difficult time, however. I couldn't seem to remember any of the various things I needed to memorize. Finally I looked over at Joaquín, and he just grinned. He had one of the fat textbooks open but was wearing it like a hat on the top of his head.

"What are you doing?" I asked. There was a weird echo, and when I looked around, I wasn't in my workplace but rather inside a hospital – kind of a cross between the Cancer Center here in Korea and the hospital where I spent some time in Mexico City. 

Joaquín looked like he was ready to perform surgery – except for the book on his head. He didn't answer for a while. So I asked him again, "What are you doing?"

Finally, he said laconically, "The knowldege runs down from the book into your brain."

[daily log: walking, 7.5km]

I have had terrible insomnia, the last few days. It impairs me sense of feeling productive in my life, and renders me even less motivated than usual.

I suspect it has to do with the discombobulation of my regular schedule due to the long weekend, but mostly due to my apartment flood, last week, which forced me to make do with a temporarily altered sleeping arrangement – substitute bedding that is less comfortable.

Yesterday morning, I woke very early (3 am), and then lay down to take a nap later on, after the sun came up. During that nap, I had a very strange repeating dream. It repeated many times. I was a police officer. I was going down an escalator. My colleagues – the other police officers – were all children. Yet they were more aware of what it is we were supposed to be doing than I was, and they were telling me what to do. I was at a loss – so much so, that I couldn't make it to the bottom of the escalator, no matter how hard I tried. I could see that I was needed at the bottom, and everyone was telling me to go there, but I couldn't get there. As I looked around, the whole arrangement of the moving stairs was like a complex Escherian machine. All the children were leaving me behind. On and on and on…

I awoke from the nap and took a walk outside. The weather is springlike, despite it being the midwinter festival. I went into a bakery and bought a sandwich, the first since my surgery (and in anticipation of my next surgery, coming up tomorrow). I had all these preconceptions of how I might enjoy that sandwich, but they were preconceptions that were mostly based on experiences from many years ago. In point of fact, eating the sandwich wasn't really very enjoyable. I hate when that happens.

[daily log: walking]

Yesterday dawned as the first truly cold day of winter – my phone reported to me that the outside temperature was -8°C (17°F). When the temperature drops, my sleeping is disrupted because of Korea's ondol heating system – the floors themselves are heated with hot water, radiator style. But, since I sleep on the floor…  well, when the floor becomes hot, that wakes me up – I don't understand how Koreans can sleep on hot surfaces, but they do: even when they use Western-style beds, they put heating pads on them for winter. I often have to migrate to my sofa in the winter for sleeping, because of the hot floor problem. I find sleeping on a hot floor unbearable.

Anyway, I had strange dreams because of my hot floor, before I woke up. 

I was in some global-warming future, I guess. That makes sense – the hot weather part. I was amid some sort of cluster of industrial warehouses, looking for a way home. I was lost, but I didn't feel any anxiety.

I was dreaming that I was very old. I was so old, it was the future. Buildings had forgotten the ground, and engineers had become heroes, who were remembered in parades. Televisions knew my name. I was so old that the future thrummed above me in the sky like a drone, and so old that my death was planted in the ground beneath my feet on the street, like the cracks in pavement that come about as the roots of trees burrow beneath. There were white plastic faucets sprouting from the walls, but they had no water. Only poetry would flow from the white faucets. I was so old, that the president was a child, so I finally was allowed to leave school. I stood in the street. I remember that I was wanting to make one last poem. I lived in all the cities, but all the cities were only one city, and their maps streamed and sparkled like liquid around me, like raindrops in beams of sunlight.

I woke up and tried to write it down, but even as I wrote it, it was like the end of 100 Years of Solitude, and it all faded away.

[daily log: walking, 6km]

I used to post, on This Here Blog Thingy™, a little item I called "Notes for Korean" – these were just an effort to record vocabulary I had run across or had some difficulty in puzzling out, and so I wanted to record it, mostly for my own future reference. I stopped doing it, first because of laziness but also because it didn't really seem to belong in a "blog." But I have decided that it was sufficiently useful to me, in the context of this blog's role as a personal aide-memoire, that I shouldn't worry about the latter, as long as I can overcome the former.  Hence, with very minimal fanfare, I resurrect my… 

Notes for Korean (finding meaning)

• 뻔하다 = to almost do something, to barely escape doing something
  e.g. 달려오는 자전거에 부딭칠 뻔했다 (from my TOPIK in 30 Days vocab study book)
• 보복운전 = retaliatory driver (meaning, a road rage person?)
• 쩍벌남 = a "manspreader" (a guy who hogs space on a bus or train through a blatent open-legged posture – learned from my H2 class)
  
• 편 = lit. side, but used in a periphrastic, "… to be on the side of…" to mean "… to tend towards… " or "… to lean towards… " in the sense of behavioral inclination, e.g. 나는 친구에게 서운한 일이 생각면 바로 이야기를 하는 편이에요 = If my feelings are hurt by my friends I tend to tell them right away. (found my TOPIK in 30 Days vocab study book, but not explained there – I found explanation, of course, in KGfIL, the best Korean grammar book in the universe)