When I returned, she was still drawing. On the wall. Why, I asked her. Because it is a wall, she said. But why, I asked again. Because a wall is a construct that stands between this space, where we are, and the next, where they are. I didn’t get it. So I told her, I don’t get it. She smiled. Skipping away from the wall, she was careful enough not to spill the light blue liquid in the cocktail glass that she was holding in her left hand all along. She looked at the wall carefully, as though to make sense of it. To make sense of her drawing, I suppose.

It was a big tall wall. And on it, a big tall drawing. Bluish. Vague. In her right hand was not a straw; it was a brush, its bristles wet. A mosquito flew by my ear and, reflexively, I slapped my own face. I woke up. I didn’t sleep well last night.

So why, I asked again, are you drawing on the wall. She skipped back in, with her cocktail glass, brush and all. Why do people scribble on toilet doors, she asked me back. Why graffiti, she asked me again. Why do dogs pee on lampposts. Why was Kilroy here, there and everywhere. Why do you sign letters. Why do you label things. Why do we define. And why do you want to know why. The mosquito landed on her cheek, her nose only an inch away from my face now, and I, reflexively, slapped her.

I woke up. I didn’t sleep well last night. On my palm the remaining of the mosquito, and a speck of blood: mine or hers? So why do you have to know why, she asked again. Because, I said, I don’t get it. I just don’t get it. Still not, she asked. Still not, I said, but I still really want to know why. Well, she said. It really doesn’t matter. Just enjoy it. And from that moment on, as though rescued by the baptism, I do.

At the end of the exhibition, she punched a window onto that very wall, right at the middle of her bluish drawing on that very wall, a drawing of the world according to the mapmakers. She then cut that rectangular hole that was the window into small pieces, and sold them away. I framed mine as a reminder of nothings. ]]> http://tintinwulia.com/?feed=rss2&p=1297 0 http://tintinwulia.com/?p=391 http://tintinwulia.com/?p=391#comments Sat, 02 May 2009 13:22:39 +0000 http://tintinwulia.com/?p=391 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.