Category: Life is a Dream

Last night I dreamed I was giving students tests. Somehow, this shouldn't be surprising. But they were math tests.

It was mostly to my elementary students from Karma, including, especially, the highly talkative and distracting sixth graders from the ET2 cohort – these kids, among all my students, are the ones who have best figured out how to get me "off track" by asking random questions of intellectual curiosity, and who exercise this ability quite regulary to ensure we do the minimum amount of textbook work possible in a given class.

The same thing was going on during these math tests. The students kept trying to change the subject. The location was odd – it wasn't Karma, it was more like a midwestern American school, maybe. I don't even have much familiarity with midwestern American schools, so I'm not sure why I say that. Actually, if I recognized the building, it was the place where I started fourth grade in Oklahoma City, during that traumatic year that started with the 4 months in Oklahoma City and ended with my parents' divorce.

I have no idea what the symbolism is, of giving math tests to my Korean English students in a setting from my own childhood.

During the dream, when I collected the tests, I sat around scoring the tests with coworkers. The coworkers included fellow teachers from Karma, from Hongnong, and even from LBridge. And then the strangest part of the dream: one of the students, I think it was a girl named Hyewon from the ET2 class, got up and gave a presentation on why she got a bad score on the math test. As an English language speech, it was quite well-done and coherent and even interesting. As an excuse for doing badly on a math test, it was unlikely. She quoted the French philosopher Deleuze.

That's surreal, of course – Korean sixth graders don't quote Deleuze.

I looked down at the copy of her test that I'd scored. It was covered in red marks that I couldn't remember making. I couldn't understand the math, either. There were some computers next to me, like the ones in the staff room at Hongnong. I looked up and the vice principal was glaring incomprehendingly at the student's speech.

I woke up. I'd slept the longest I've slept uninterruptedly in a very long time – just over 8 hours. I've been struggling with my "wake up too early and can't get back to sleep" insomnia, lately, so I felt very good about this.

I thought about my dream, and had some rice and coffee (not mixed together) for breakfast.

Rats can be made to laugh, apparently. They like to be tickled, according to this article.

I had a pet rat, once. I found a rat to be a surprisingly affectionate and comforting pet. I remember that he would “purr” when he was curled up and I was petting him. My rat was named “Fnugus” – which was some strange, unpronounceable whim of my adolescent mind. I ran across a picture of my long-ago pet rat, recently, in my collection. It’s not a great photo, but it made me nostalgic.

Fnugus RIP – 1979~1982.

Nostalgic for a rat. Rats!

I awoke from a dream in which I was "back in" the Army.  These sorts of dreams are not that uncommon, really, for me – my own rather impactful military experience, combined with media images of military life (because of Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.), and combined with the fact that I live in the neighborhood where I was in active service (Northwest Gyeonggi), means these memories pop up pretty easily and frequently.

The dream was strange in that genre, however, because it was a dream in which I was "happily" in the Army – this is not common at all.  I was some kind of officer, it seemed.  And the soldiers under me were my middle school students.  This makes sense.  But this wasn't goofing around – this was serious Army stuff.  We had to establish a camp amid bitter cold winter weather.  But it was going well – unloading trucks, setting up these large tents, establishing a secure perimeter with guards.

There wasn't a lot of "plot" to the dream – it was mostly atmospherics.  Dreams are sometimes like that.   The feel of the "Team Spirit" joint US Army / ROK Army exercises that I remember from 1991, but populated with people from my current life.

Then my father showed up.  He wasn't helpful.  He got in the way, and he needed help.  This is psychologically transparent – viz. Dream Interpretation 101.  But I haven't had much interaction with my dad lately, so it's interesting that it dredged up from my subconscious just now.  Is it the change in weather?  

I awoke to an almost chilly fall rain, plonking outside my open window; rice and coffee for breakfast.

…only to find that Hongong Elementary had become surrounded by a primeval forest.

I wandered up and down somewhat familiar halls, but each time I looked outside there were only trees and ferns and streams and the peering eyes of barely-seen animals.  There were very few students – it was summer vacation.  I saw one girl, a 2nd-grader who I recognized, but she was too busy talking on her cellphone to even notice me.

I then saw the principal.  I bowed to him appropriately, but he didn't recognize me.  I went to the cafeteria, and only teachers were there.  It was dark inside, because the windows were all covered by thick, lush, green vegetation.  The vegetable garden on the west side of the cafeteria was shadowed by immense, ancient, gnarled trees, but the field to the north had been replaced by a face of rock, strewn with wet moss and miniature waterfalls and tiny purple flowers.

I saw fellow-foreign-teacher Moyer, and another group of foreigners who were ignoring him and who I didn't recognize.  I went over to speak to them, and one woman said she thought she knew who I was.  I said to her that she looked familiar, too.  I sat down to eat the standard Hongnong cafeteria lunch – some kind of soup, rice, not-so-good kimchi, one or two other banchan.  But there was canned iced coffee, too.

Suddenly I was uninterested in eating – I felt compelled to leave.  I made my way to the main entrance of the school and walked outside.  I had to walk across a log across a stream where the soccer field should be.  At the log bridge, I ran into Mr Lee and Mr Choi, but I was in too much of a hurry to stop and speak to them.  They called after me.  I went up a steep mountain path, and suddenly I came to a parking lot paved in discarded plastic containers.  And suddenly I was at Mad River beach, which is west of Arcata.  It felt unnaturally warm, though, and there were still too many trees around.  And then I was running, barefoot, alternating on redwood forest trails and the narrow one-lane, perfectly straight Arcata bottomland roads.  The old asphalt of the road felt rough and real under my feet.  It was raining.  And there were Koreans looking at me curiously – why is that man running barefoot?  I felt like a wild monkey in a wildlife park.  I felt free and afraid.

I woke up and had rice and kimchi for breakfast – I stir it together with some seasoned salty seaweed and a dollop of bibimbap sauce and a bit of cooked egg that I'm trying to eat before it goes bad, as kind of poor-man's bibimbap.  But I had canned iced coffee, too.  The summer morning sun is glaring in my window.

I had dream in which I was riding around Ilsan in a minivan with some people I didn't know.  The streets were dirty, more like Yeonggwang than Ilsan, and there was a row of decrepit and unhappy-looking palm trees along the street, such as you see in 2nd tier urban aglommerations here at the southern end of the peninsula but almost never in Seoul, where the few-degrees-colder climate seems to put a stop to such fantasies.  I said I needed to stop at a bank.

We stopped at a bank, but it was only a collection of ATM machines – there were no employees inside.  I went to an ATM machine, but there was nowhere to put my ATM card – no slot.  The machine was very new and large touch-screen display.  But how could I use it without knowing where to put my card?  I couldn't find an "English" choice on the screen, either.  I walked to the next machine – same problem.  I turned around to see that one of the men from the minivan was following me around as I tried to find an ATM that had a slot for my cash card.  He had a black and white beard (beards are very unusual in Korea).  I tried to explain my problem, and he smiled sympathetically but had no useful advice. 

I decided, in my dream, to go back outside.  I walked over to the minivan with the bearded man, but some policemen had showed up.  They were "inspecting" the minivan, and arguing with the driver.  Suddenly, a man jumped out of the back of the minivan and took the policeman's wallet and ran off toward the bank.  As the policemen turned around, the back of the van opened and 3 or 4 Mexicans (yes, Mexicans) jumped out and ran off among the apartment buildings of Ilsan.  One of them was a grandmother.  Whaaaa? 

That's when I woke up.  What does this dream mean?  It means I shouldn't go to sleep listening to NPR with reports on Arizona immigration enforcement and the financial crisis. Or maybe it was the pizza I ate.

Yesterday I had dinner with my fellow foreigners-in-Yeonggwang at the Pizza Club in Yeonggwang.  Dan is also leaving, returning home to Oregon.  Donna (the other f-in-YG from my April "cohort") has renewed at her school, and is therefore staying.  I will miss these people, although I acknowledge I didn't socialize with them that much.    Perhaps some of them will come visit with me, some weekend, in Seoul.

I had a very strange dream.  I was gathering lint. 

I was on my hands and knees, on a carpeted floor (itself rather alien, given how rare carpeted floors are, here in Korea), picking up little bits of lint.  Once I'd gathered a small handful, I'd stuff it into a plastic "Family Mart" (convenience store chain, here) bag.  Then I'd get down and get more lint.

I wasn't the only one doing this, in the dream.  I had students and friends helping me.  There was a lot of lint to be gathered.

That was the whole dream. It was stunningly vivid.  And utterly pointless.

OK.  What the hell does a dream like that mean? 

I dreamed last night that I was starting a new job.  That's really logical, given that I've traveled to Ilsan to meet with my new boss to work out some paperwork on getting my visa renewed.

But in the dream, the new job was not my "real" new job.  It was something like one of my old computer-related jobs:  database design, business systems analysis, web-based application support. Nevertheless, the job was in Korea.  In Ilsan.  My new coworkers were Koreans, and they were showing me around the building where my new job was, and we were bowing to various bigwigs, per appropriate Korean custom.

And then they insisted that I see the mall attached to the building.  We were walking around an Ilsan-like mall (like the one here called Western Dom), but my dream coworkers were my new coworkers at Hongnong, Ms Lee and Mr Goh, along with other various Hongnong teachers.  Despite that, we were talking about databases and annoying end-users of data-intensive websites, and making sure that code prevents SQL injection, and how to make stored procedures effecient when you couldn't know which search parameters you were going to get ahead of time.  Yes, that kind of thing.  Although it seemed like they were insisting I should know more about Korean history, too.

But then, in the mall, some woman came up to us and said we should take a class about the mall.  "A class?  About the mall?"  I asked.  "Yes, there is so much to learn about this mall," she insisted, excitedly.  So we went to the class, where we got pitched a neverending spiel about all the different stores and restaurants to be found in the mall.  This was so boring, I woke up.

What… did I fall asleep with the television on?  No. 

Dreams are strange, and even when they appear to be meaningless, they nevertheless reek of some obscure meaning.

Walking to work in the morning, the sun not yet having cleared the hills to the east, with the biting wind, blowing snow, the crunch of ice when the temperature is no longer close to freezing – I am reminded of my last year as an undergraduate, at the University of Minnesota. I was a student there, but I was a commuting student – I lived in a sort of commune of friends in Saint Paul, 10 miles away to the east. Being a commuting, full-time student and working nearly 30 hours a week meant that I didn’t spend much time at home. I would leave before dawn, and I would get home around 11 or midnight, each day. I had no car – I relied on a combination of extensive walking and buses – much like my lifestyle now, here in Korea.

There were many Winter mornings or nights when I would walk the mile along Fairview Avenue from where the house was on Portland Avenue in Saint Paul to where the number 16 buses ran along University Avenue. With the Minnesota weather so cold, this always made me feel like an arctic explorer. My walks from my apartment to the bus terminal in Yeonggwang along highway 23 feel very similar, these days. Both hikes have the feel of being an arctic explorer of a bustling suburban wasteland. Sounds about right.

I used to set up in the Expresso Royale in Dinkytown, in Minneapolis. That’s where I did my studying back then. I never studied at home. Just like I did my graduate degree in a certain cafe on Locust Street in West Philadelphia. Now that I think about it, I believe the Expresso Royale wasn’t called that name, back then. But it utterly escapes me what its name used to be. It was – and remains – the archetype college cafe, for me, even now. Although its more recent incarnations are less funky and more gentrified, it’s still there and still hospitable. Back in the 80’s, it was open 24 hours a day, and there were several times when I ended up studying all night there, not so much in the desperation of a typical student all-nighter but because I’d missed the last 16 bus back to Saint Paul, and rather than walk home 10 miles in 0 degree (F!) weather, I would just put in a night of casual study. There used to be a big shelf with board games, that denizens could use.

I had a couple cafes in Ilsan that I would frequent, in similar spirit. Most places that I have lived, there have been cafes – or rather, I have found them – and I have lived in those cafes, more than in any other spot. It’s just my nature. In Ilsan, there was the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf franchise in the La Festa shopping center, only two blocks from my apartment. And there was the Rotiboy, a block down from where I worked. When I lived in Uptown, Minneapolis, prior to that, I would spend many, many hours in the Dunn Brothers location on Lake Street at Humboldt Avenue. Prior to that, there was that rather bland Starbucks in Long Beach, off of PCH a block east of the Circle. Before that, there was my favorite single Starbucks location anywhere, in downtown Burbank, where I must have racked up veritable man-months over the years of working close by. I can work my way backward in the ladder of my life by hopping from cafe to cafe. It’s a continuum of coffee and close reading.

If there’s anything I miss about my many previous incarnations, in my current life, that’s it: there are no real cafes, in Yeonggwang. Not the kinds of places where people hang out for hours and maybe vaguely work or socialize. I will race off to Gwangju, sometimes, only because I’m desperate to spend a few hours sitting in a Starbucks or one of Korea’s many native cafe chains – Hollys is recommendable, if only for their always reliable and free wifi. As I think about what’s next, for me (my current contract is already winding down, with about 3 months left), I wonder if that could be a deciding factor. Probably not – it’s not really an indispensable aspect of my lifestyle – it’s only a much-liked one.

Hmm. I set out to write about Fairview Avenue, and commuting through snow. I ended up writing about cafes. In my mind, because of Expresso Royale and Fairview Avenue, trekking through sub-zero temperatures in blowing snow to get home at night is indelibly linked to the idea of long, enjoyable hours in cafes. Such is memory.