CAVEAT DVMPTRVCK

The dream that I was struggling with as I woke up this morning was not very narrative in structure, more episodic but repetitive. The below is a summary of something that in the dream was more circular.

Andrew and I had ended up wandering around some large underground space (which bears relation to some of our explorations in Seoul yesterday), but I became convinced we were in a space station. Yet, for a space station, or for an underground mall, it was quite strange. Everything was wood, like the interior of a restored wooden faux-Victorian shopping mall – all high ceilings, high Belle Epoque stained glass, wooden floors, balconies and balustrades.

Although the place was very finely  wrought and beautiful, it was overlain by decay and disorder. There were hundreds, if not thousands, of squatters living in the various rooms and halls. There were sleeping bags and tents set up, like an Occupy encampment, and there was IT equipment everywhere, just scattered: racks of servers, racks of routers, wires laid out willy-nilly on the floor. Hippies sat cross-legged with laptops, and would reach out and grab a dangling ethernet cable.

Andrew and I were searching for my Great Aunt Mildred (my mother's mother's sister). Andrew never knew "Aunt Mid" – she's not on his side of the family (recall that Andrew is my half-brother, so his maternal relatives are not the same as my maternal relatives). I was quite close to my Aunt Mid before she died in the early 90s, in a strange way. We shared a passion for left-leaning politics and academic-style speculative sociology, and we had exchanged long series of letters at various times on various topics.

I wasn't sure why we were looking for her, because even inside the dream, I already knew she was dead. At some point, because of this, we shifted the focus of our search to finding our sister.  We were wandering in and out of the maze of interconnected rooms, brilliant with sunlight shining through high windows and glimpses of dark space, too.

I would ask, "Have you seen my sister?" of various random old men eating bowls of rice or hippy children chanting songs in circles.

Suddenly this woman presented herself, very solicitous and manipulative. She was short but she was quite fat, and had a round, Caucasian face with close-cropped gray hair, like a Buddhist nun. Definitely NOT my sister.

"Who are you?" Andrew asked.

"Why, I'm your sister," she said, nonchalantly. She was trying to get us to go through this doorway. The room beyond was dark. Andrew was very sceptical, and was pulling away. I was following along, not out of trust but more a kind of curiosity.

"Where are we going?" I asked.

"Trust me," she said, but there was something disingenuous in her smile.

The whole situation played out again, with slight variations. And again.

Eventually, I woke up.

Yesterday afternoon I went to work again, to do more student-speech scoring for the month-end testing. I came home even more exhausted (and hungry) than Monday evening, but brother Andrew had thoughtfully started some dinner so I was quite pleased.

Andrew and I ended up watching a movie (from among my collection of movies, I've been showing him some of my favorites) – this time, we saw The Good, The Bad, The Weird (I've blogged about that movie several times before).

So in fact, I went to bed pretty late. I didn't not experience the blessed, uninterrupted sleep of the previous night. I was restless, and woke many times – more back to a hospital-style sleeping. I'm not sure what's behind that – obviously, tiredness from work isn't the sole factor in providing good sleep.

One snippet of a dream I had (actually from a short nap yesterday afternoon) was funny and worth sharing: I dreamed I was playing with my smartphone (an Android based Samsung Galaxy Tab) and all of a sudden I discovered an app that was labeled "stop cancer." In the dream, I thought, now why didn't I just use this app, instead of all that surgery and stuff? I remember feeling really annoyed, in the dream, that I hadn't found the app sooner. What use is a useful app if it's not well publicized?

I awoke from an evaporating dream-scene.

I had taken the light-rail to the University of Minnesota. That places the dream in a hypothetical future, as the light-rail line going through campus is still under construction as far as I know, and certainly was never a feature of getting to the U that was a part of my experience of it in the 80’s and 90’s.

I stood on the Mall facing Northrup Auditorium, and it was a hot, overcast, humid day just as we have been experiencing here in Seoul. I began to look around more carefully. The campus seemed weirdly deserted. Was it a holiday?

Then I noticed that the Walker Library looked strange. I went closer, and realized it was just a “false front” – like those buildings made for Hollywood movie sets that have only the façade and nothing behind. Looking around, all the buildings were like that.

Looking back toward Northrup, I saw that it, too, was a false front. And so I walked up the stairs and tried to peer around to see what was behind.

What I saw was a breathtakingly beautiful although modestly sized Korean Buddhist temple, the doors wide open and a golden Buddha gazing down. A single monk sat inside the temple, in meditation.

I awoke then and everything dissolved as fiction, like at the end of Garcia Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude.

Below, a web image found of Northrup, looking toward it from near the front of Walker Library, I would estimate. Northrup is on the left.

Also, this image of a Buddha inside a temple (from 법륜사, taken by me last September).