Monday, January 12, 2004

Ah..returning to school. There is something to be said about the feeling of welcome at the return to a familiar routine, familiar faces, familiar grouses. As much as holidays provide a well-earned break, too much of a good thing does dull the mind, in a way.

I thought that, perhaps, since this day seems likely to be a comparably "free" day in light of the terrible schedule for the week, that I would indulge in some blog-writing. Indeed, I have tried some times before this to have an entry to make good my too-easily-uttered resolution, but more times than not I just seemed to be harping on rather frivolous subjects, much to my frustration.

The subject of dreams came up during a conversation with a friend just a couple of days ago, and sort of awakened some kind of interest in the subject. Though to be truthful one has always been quite fascinated by the concept of the dream, and one is quite sure that most people would not deny having rather unique and highly interesting experiences with the as-yet greatly unexplored world of dreams.

I personally find it puzzling how dreams can sometimes show one things that one would never have thought of in the waking state, which is why most dreams do seem highly nonsensical when viewed in a logical sense. And yet there is talk that dreams are messages sent by the subconscious to the conscious. I take that with a pinch of salt, for if one were to be so preoccupied by the nature of one's dreams and the hidden meanings they represented as to become obsessed, it can hardly contribute to one's sanity. The same could be said, perhaps, for prophecy. All becomes clear in almost every case, only on hindsight, and it often does one no good to be overly preoccupied with hidden nuances, though of course it is the impossibly curious nature of the human mind to be naturally drawn towards this direction.

It is quite vexing, personally, for in most cases the details of my dreams are lost completely on awakening, and perhaps only the image of someone saying or doing something repeats itself over and over again that I have some memory of that action but nothing else of the dream in its entirety. Personally I cannot tolerate the fact that I cannot remember everything to relate the dreams I remember in more than a vague manner to someone else. In the past month, though, I have had some clearer memories of my dreams, since some of them were singularly weird or amusing, and I have also decided, somewhat subconsciously, to be able to remember more than a passing collage of images from my dreams.

A silly idea struck me - that I should perhaps write down the kind of dreams I have - those that I remember, at least - somewhere. Where better than my blog? Okay, at the risk of scaring everyone off, I am trying my hand at this. The inspiration came from the Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon, to be sure, in which this character called Brianna Fraser keeps a record of all her dreams - a dream diary, it was called. I found it quite perplexing how she could remember her dreams with such clarity when some of them seemed so normal. But it is fiction, one realises.

One dream that I had, which was really quite amusing - and I've told it to quite some people already - is the one where I am somehow in the role of Harry Potter. Now, I would rather you not laugh so hard. It's not very polite. It was perhaps something borne of submerging myself into the story too much as I read the Order of the Phoenix (not difficult too considering I sometimes find myself identifying somewhat with the protagonist in certain subtle ways - I suppose that is what makes the novels so well-liked). That aside, an assuredly more rib-tickling part of the dream is yet to be revealed. Which is that I was sitting for some kind of exams (the OWLs, most likely), and quite absurdly, I had to tie 30 different kinds of knots, some of which were in the shapes of alphabets (!!!) to connect some bizarrely shaped stick segments together. The knots, when completed, also looked like tufts of blood vessels, quite unbelievably. I only managed to tie 20 knots, since for some reason I had not paid attention to a series of lectures on the strange subject and had only glanced through the notes before the exam (in the dream, I distinctly remember that the lecturer who had given that series of lectures through which I had doodled endlessly on my notes was none other than Lim Boon Siong!). Now, don't fall off your chair. Imagine my amusement when I woke up. Not a difficult dream to remember, is it? Of course, there was some more rather boring happenings in the dream, like Draco Malfoy sitting in the table beside mine and sniggering at my failure to complete the paper, and some weird twist where I was given more time to complete the exam (don't remember how that one worked out).

Another dream I had, a little more than a week after the knotty one, was one where I was in some sort of queue. This one I don't remember as well, but it seemed that there was some kind of sale of second-hand books at the science foyer at NUS, and I was in a queue that lead to a counter that was surrounded by many tables and shelves and trays displaying an assortment of all kinds of books. Each of us had some kind of form where we were supposed to pick out the subjects of the books we wanted. For some strange reason, I chose books on theology and was puzzling over which books to pick out of this list of books of that subject. After some time, there was just one person before me in the queue, who was at the counter. At this time, though, this woman suddenly entered the queue just in front of me, which caused no little consternation on my part. She looked remarkably like one of the Chinese teachers from RJ (this must be some kind of conspiracy) and I didn't complain too much in deference to the fact that she was probably a teacher. The funny thing was, when it was my turn and I asked for books on theology, the man at the counter was totally clueless, and I had lost my list of books too, which no one could find even with much searching. The man seemed to think that Chicken Soup for the Soul classified as theological and tried to press on me the whole range of Chicken Soup books, quite absurdly, which I declined, of course. I told him then that I would browse the shelves and see if I could find anything that I liked, and he agreed. In the time that I took to look around, though, everyone in that substantial queue had got the books they wanted but I could not find anything that I wanted. In the end, I left with nothing.

All very bizarre, that's what I think. No one has any definite explanation for the things that happen in dreams, I suppose, but it's good to have a good laugh over such dumb dreams. There was that other one that I had when I was suffering from a growing wisdom tooth, for example, where I was the rather unfortunate subject of a Cruciatus curse. Laughable, indeed.

I had originally wanted to talk more about dreams, but it seems that I have already done something of an overkill here. My apologies for the long entry - I got a little carried away. I shall enter the rest at another time, for ease of digestion. Cheers.

to be continued...

Avaris / 1/12/2004 09:06:00 PM

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