Dreams

It is always the dreams that get me. For a time, I thought I was over all of it, until a fresh dream slashed that fantasy into ribbons. I woke up the morning after that night with dried-up trails on my cheeks, as I always do when the dreams come calling.

The first one had been the day after the tragedy. And it was a tragedy, the biggest one in all of the thirteen years I had lived up till then. The only times I detest having a good memory are when I think back to that day.

I can recall every single excruciating detail. Waking up early because I had training later that morning, Getting the news from my cousin who lived in the same block of flats because we could not afford a telephone line at home (and would not for another four years). Slipping out because I was overcome with fear. Because I childishly believed that if I didn’t confront my worst fears, they had no way to touch me.

Was I a dumb kid? Probably.

It happened anyway. Even though by the time it did I had already recognised it as my worst fear in life, the pain and suffering it brought along with it was bigger than anything I had imagined. In his novel ‘Duma Key’, Stephen King wrote that it was the things that we can’t imagine that will always hurt us the most (paraphrased). When I first read that book, a lot of things about that day in 1994 made a whole lot more sense.

There was so much I hadn’t considered, all manner of pain and hurt I hadn’t known existed until they consumed me whole. I would be trapped inside that oblivious plane for a long time, and I still have one foot in it. It didn’t stop me from carrying on with life, but my existence was forever tainted with a black mark signifying but one of the many cruelties of life.

But I digress. The point of the digression is – I made it out. Somehow. Not quite sure how. But I did.

The dreams. They are the weapon, the bait that lures me to abandon real life and hide away inside the fantasy life they offered. Only if I did try, and I have, they would disappear the moment I reached for it.

That first one was actually quite peaceful. It wasn’t long, and it had a certain finality to it. Our time was over, and that was that. Let’s just say goodbye and get on with it. The theme was white. She was in white. Her face was a fair shade, and she had a smile like the one I saw in the Louvre six years later – if only from a distance. The afternoon and the night before had been a living nightmare for me, so that first dream was quite a relief.

The ones after, though. At best, bittersweet. At worst, poisonous.

A lot of the time, they had triggers. Something innocuous that happened during the day. I would not accord any significance to the event until the dream later that same night. In one particularly horrifying instance, we were free-falling together after jumping from some high-rise building. I remember I was overseas at the time I had that dream, because I remember thinking how the dream site reminded me of home. Big, tall blocks of concrete all pastel and flat.

And I was about to hit the ground. The fall was taking a while, but the end seemed certain. As I looked into her eyes, I saw something I did not recognise and still don’t. Regret? Sorrow? Probably just a projection of my inner turmoil at the time. Or maybe she, or who/whatever was wearing her face had been tasked to harvest me but was having second thoughts.

I didn’t hit the ground, though. Just as I was about to close my eyes and embrace the grey, hard floor, she flung me towards a grassy slope just next to the block of flats. I landed on my back among the stalks of lallang and other wildflowers and grass. That was also when I woke up.

And then there was the night I slept late after watching a bit of Grey’s Anatomy or some other medical drama, and had a dream that I had been admitted for emergency surgery. She was right there by my side as the faceless doctors and nurses wheeled me into the operating room. As they fitted the mask that would deliver me oxygen after I was sedated, I remember hearing her say that I didn’t have to hold on if it was too difficult. That all she had was my best interests at heart.

She always did have my best interests at heart. She would even lie to me if it would yield the results which she believed I would need. When I was nine years old, she lied to me for almost the whole year that I was lagging behind one of my cousins academically. She knew I was competitive. She lit that fire and watched me burn my way to the top of the class, where she claimed my cousin had been for the last two years.

A few years after that, my cousin told me that he had never been top of his class. But it worked, and it is hard to deny that it had been indeed in my best interests considering that I stayed within the top three positions all the way until secondary school.

But in that dream – there was a harder edge to her voice when she told me not to fight it. It sounded like something was forcing her to say the words she didn’t really want to say. It reminded me of an evening in the hospital where she told me not to visit everyday since her condition wasn’t going to change anyway. It sort of made sense, but I felt like she had not meant to say that. That she had had to lie to me for some reason she did not like.

Her last words gave me reason to wonder if she knew that we would never see each other again. I think she did. I think she hadn’t been strong enough to say, “I love you” and, “goodbye”. Instead, I was left hanging.

I sensed that same reluctance in the hospital dream. It was enough to make me punch the dream anaesthetist who had come to put me under, and kickflip my way out of the bed. Feats I would have struggled to accomplish in real life. I woke up just as I dove through the doors of the operating theatre and called out to her as I saw the figure of her back. She was turning slowly to face me, but I woke up before she finished.

I also woke up before seeing just how much her face had changed after telling me that I didn’t have to fight on.

It does not take a psychologist to deduce that these dreams are reflective of just how much I miss her. The ratio of my life is now split 1:2. We had thirteen years together and to date I have lived twice that time without her in it. The dreams have been spread fairly thin over those years. But each time they come, I feel the pull as strongly as I had on that day itself. And the end of that hospital dream had been especially disturbing because it was the first time I doubted that these might be more than just the neural gymnastics of a tortured mind.

There was something wrong with her face. I could have sworn I saw razor sharp knives crowding the mouth which had once needed dentures. Dentures which had once fallen from our fourth floor unit as she was peering out the kitchen window at something or other. Her kind, black eyes – or at least the left one – had become a glowing ball of crimson fire.

In any case, dreams are dreams. There is more we don’t know than that we do know about them. And like I said earlier, they are spread pretty thin and aren’t that regular an occurrence.

The problem is, I think I saw her at the supermarket the other day. And then again, at the KFC. The barber. The doctor’s.

Last night, she was outside my window. We live on the seventh floor.

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AUTHOR’S NOTE: Those who know me well will remember that the 16th of November is not a date I look forward to. The date marks the death of my mother in 1994. She had been hospitalised for eight days prior to her passing, and her cause of death was marked as a pulmonary embolism.

I never got to say goodbye to my mother. And her untimely passing, along with other pressures in life, led me down a dark path of depression and anxiety which went undiagnosed until I was almost thirty years old. I guess I just couldn’t deal.

The dreams I mentioned in this story did take place – but they were nowhere near as horrifying, They were indeed bittersweet as they would remind me of the life I did not have. The hospital one was especially harsh for me because…well that was the setting of the last eight days of her life and I never saw her alive outside of one after that.

It seemed a bit morbid to write a story like this, but I did it primarily because I didn’t want to crumble into a soggy puddle of tears when I thought about her this year. This year has been about change for me. About staking my own path out in life. So I thought this was a good way to pay tribute to her.

I love you, Ibu. I always will.