crack crack

Something hit and I had to take a distance from myself today. I saw so many jumbled emotions there, like if a firework had strings attached to each of its tiny explosions, each of its other ends tied to its source. It’s not that dramatic, but for the purpose of this entry it should be. And for the first few hours it was, until I pulled each tangled string gently and said to each of them, it’s okay. It’s okay. It’s okay. And so on. Softly like a fluffy lapin jeune, then I could feed myself again, a variant of cold soba with miso something. Lactobacillus Acidophilus.

The differences between anger, disappointment and sadness are not that subtle, I found. There are definite lines between them, and those lines are not thin. The lines themselves, though, come in gradation of colours, like the rainbow. A liminal rainbow, so to say. I went through all my saved, colour-coded history searching for each moment of anger, each one of disappointment and each of sadness. The archive was quite dusty, but it was intact. I didn’t cry. No, I did, actually. Eventually.

One of the reasons I write is to remember. Whether or not my memory ends up subjective is a completely different problem. When I said the archive was intact, it might be objectivity: my memory is in fact inaccessible to anyone including me. What remains are just stories. Stories I believe, and I regard as what truly happened. All of us shed skins, it happens so naturally, and it’s painless.

So which ones were anger, which ones disappointment, which sadness? When I tried to classify them like Darwin did on his butterfly farms, I found myself smiling. The wind has apparently blown all the dust out of Oz and I’m finally writing again. I could see anger, I could see disappointment, I could see sadness. With you, what I knew, what I believed, what remains is solely sadness.

It’s a deeper kind of sadness, the one that’s a bit cream-ish in colour, like the very core of an atom, dissipated. I wish I could read this to you, eye to eye, with nothing in between, not even writings. Not even rainbows not even butterflies not even Darwin no matter how beautiful. But that is only the shape of years to come, when unpredictability meets with stochastic chance, the loveliest twin I’ve never known I had. So I can only thank you, for whatever grief it takes, four weeks of sorrow, forty days of silence – it is wise of us to take our time – each a breath of fresh air.

Our bodies are merely vehicles of the perpetuation of memories.

Proteins cease with deaths and are reborn with birth. Eternal memories are then transferred to new neurons, forming new networks of old meanings, perpetuating ancient behaviours.

I woke up from a dream where the logic was, every time I would click on a YouTube link, my left neck would twitch. There was something fair and deserving about it, and so I just played along with it until the certain moment where my waking awareness caught on. I woke up and I remembered I thought about Papa before I went to sleep, and I remembered that when I was in high school, I felt that my grandpa’s hand was on my shoulder the whole week following my dream of him.

Stories are formed in our heads both in waking and in sleeping. I would love to choose my waking logic as the logic that makes sense, but what if one day I found the light switch in my waking life, and woke up in a sleeping life feeling grateful that I was saved from the waking nonsense? This is not a scary thought. Perhaps this is what dying would feel like. Afterlife is just another place for the mind, if it does exist.

I woke up to Facebook. Charles Esche’s status, 4 hours ago, has attracted 23 likes, and Anita Toutikian has consistently commented on it, discussing with Charles. I decided to switch my light on – I won’t be trying to sleep again, because that will only reiterate that I can’t sleep. I decided to start writing and to not believe that it is my premenstrual syndrome that has kept me from being creative. Certainly I could have just tried to sleep, while wondering why I couldn’t sleep and blaming my hormones for it. That is just another option.

My dream of my grandpa went like this: we were on a beach, sitting around a table with beach umbrella. He wasn’t looking directly at me, he wasn’t talking to me. But somehow I knew he knew that I was his granddaughter. When I woke up, I chose to believe what the dream meant, until at one point I chose to believe another meaning. It was an easy choice to make, as though I knew both all along. I feel I can believe both now, as much as I feel I can believe neither. The warm feeling that I felt on my shoulder the whole week after that dream was interesting, just like how my left neck twitched: perhaps it was Papa trying to wake me up?

I woke up to my waking sense. The twitch somehow felt like what it felt when the Chinese doctor that was really an electro-acupuncturist applied some pulsating electrical current to my bursitis-ridden knee a few weeks ago. Now that I have integrated my waking memory to make sense of the world, I suspect that that is what the twitch was: my body pulsating its own electrical current. To heal itself perhaps, to think of it positively.

I woke up to the memory of attempting to freeze our 6 kilograms of strawberries. I went to the freezer and checked on them. They’re well on their way to gelidity, frigidity, frozenness, whichever word can or cannot express it truly. I remembered that before I went to sleep I thought of Mama and my attempt to prepare myself to be an adult orphan. Sometimes Papa lives through her for me, like when she said that we did have a vacuuming device for freezing food: Papa bought it just in case (like he did buy many other things because it looked technologically cool to do at the convenience of your own home). What will happen when Mama dies? Somehow, my attempt to feel this made a part of myself believe that there is a logic to having kids. Something lives on. Stories live on.

Although all stories are really what we choose them to be.

I woke up to Skype. For a moment there was a remaining for Daniel’s online status, and I felt some kind of joy. A few seconds later, the software finally came to its waking sense and said that Daniel just went offline. My left neck has stopped twitching.

Like always, these ducks were marching past a pond. Their feet flapped, muddling. One stopped in front of me, flapped its wings, and said:

Yaaay.

Softly. I was sitting down looking at them, with some friends. The spectacle of a duck saying such a thing instead of its usual quack was extraordinary. So I thought I had to say something smart about it. I struggled with my brain for a while and finally muttered:

Ducks. In … a … pond.

Nothing too smart. I woke up.

This is Daniel Wolfson’s dream, told to me.

In my dreams, logic goes in reverse. Once, in there, I saw my ID card — which was slightly bigger than it was in un-dream (or, the waking world, to avoid using the word “reality”), therefore might be fake and, in fact, was confirmed as (in that dream) only a reproduction — slipped away from my hand and instead of falling down to the floor actually started to float up in the air. It kept floating up, and up, and up, until it almost reached the ceiling. At one point before the ceiling, however, it touched a surface that I was unaware of previously. I knew that it was some kind of a surface because that surface suddenly rippled … like the surface of water touched by an object.

I gasped. I was underwater! I was underwater the whole time and did not realise that I was, until I saw that ripple. Immediately, the world changed — I was breathing underwater. That was how it felt to breathe underwater. It could not be anything else, because the card floated up. Only under water can objects float up.

This is the way most memory served me in my dreams as well: in reverse. As one event was happening, a memory was built to explain it. When a dream started with a scene whereby I could not open a door, for example, suddenly I would realise that it would be impossible for me to open that door because, in the dream, I remembered that I have lost the key just a few days ago.

Some of my dreams also feels like a reverse explanation of something that was happening in parallel in my waking world, like an alarm clock that failed to wake me up fully. Let us call this X. Upon hearing X, in my dream, my logic would construct a whole story to explain that sound — failing to get sufficient information from my senses — and it would work in reverse. X — now representing that loud inexplainable ringing-like noise — must have happened because of Y, and Y must have happened because of Z. Then, offering that explanation to my brain, my logic would have to put it in order of normal time (which is, forward), so that it makes sense. It would say, once upon a time Z happened, and so as a consequence then Y happened, and that was why we now had X. And so I would have a complete forward (non-reverse) dream-story in my head of how a friend told me she was going to call me up (Z) and so I was waiting for her call (Y) and finally the phone rang (X). This must have happened in a split millisecond.

Then when I woke up, I would exclaim, “what a coincidence!” — referring to the ring in my dream that somehow blended into the ring in my waking world. Dear old me. It was not a coincidence. It was my brain struggling to explain a phenomenon and constructing a whole story to support its theory of what that loud ringing noise was, having limited information from the waking world because it failed to wake my senses up fully.

Once, however, I remember seeing a character in my dream that was, although he stayed in the background, quite memorable. I thought about that character the whole day. Later that day, I somehow discovered my old journals, and started to read through them. On one page I saw my note and sketch of a dream I had approximately twelve years earlier. Eerily, that memorable character from my recent dream was in that old note. Lucky I sketched him — I could say that character (the old one) looked exactly like him (the one I have just dreamt of). I never remembered that old dream before that day. I always remember it now, together with the newer dream where that character had reappeared.

Had I not sketched that character twelve years earlier, I would not have known that the appearance of that character in my new dream was a reappearance. This unawareness of that reappearance made me think that my memory in one dream does not always connect to my memory in the other. It is as though one dream is a universe within itself, isolated from another.

It is amazing to think that it is possible to have a separate universe within myself. But it is even more amazing to think that this one character lives in both universes within myself, and I did not even know him. I still, actually, do not know him.