Paul Souders designs websites for Mercy Corps
It’s midnight and I just woke up from a dream about a movie that Hollywood™ should totally make. It would win Best Picture, hands down. The elevator pitch:
Modern-day Rashomon with gays in the military, careers on the line, each retelling progressively more unbelievable. Did I mention: Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt make out? Topicality bonus: Abu Ghraib!
3 am, suffering the usual insomnia. Out of idle boredom I’m browsing Wikipedia, entirely because I can. Although, as Wikipedia itself helpfully notes, as of “June 2007” I would, actually be able to do this from China. I’m trying to remember if I looked at Wikipedia at all the last month we were there...
What I’ve learned recently [with the usual disclaimer that this is stuff anonymous unqualified strangers assure me is true]:
Reading over some posts from before our move to China I was reminded of how frequently I used to dream of being underwater.
I’ve had underwater dreams my whole life, and they leave me feeling euphoric. I always supposed that they were a side effect of unusually happy or effortless periods of life. I certainly haven’t had a water-breathing dream in a while, that’s for sure.
But what if I’ve reversed the causality here? What if the dreams don’t reflect effortless daily life; what if said life flowed from the state of mind that also produces water-breathing dreams? A year ago, Jenny and I were swimming two or three mornings a week at the Gabriel Park pool — a wonderfully amniotic way to start a day, and surely conducive to dreaming about water? I learned to swim almost as soon as I learned to walk and it’s one of my favorite activities. It’s not such a stretch to suppose that water dreams, swimming, and effortless daily life are non-orthogonal dimensions in my subconscious universe.
I’m going to try a little experiment on myself. I’m going to try to make myself have an underwater dream. Xiamen doesn’t have any indoor public pools, so we can’t go swimming every day. But I think if I visualize gliding through sun-spattered undersea gardens several times during the day, I could induce such a dream. I think of this as kind of a brain hack: dream about the ocean, make myself happy.
Long, languid, atmospheric dreams of American landscapes occupied my sleep last night. Shopping malls, brick houses on tree-lined streets, farmland under an autumn prairie sky, an abbey set among pine trees. The dream action was the usual David Lynch stuff — vampire priest drug dealers, water-breathing dogs that are actually weasels, and so on — but it all happened in those landscapes. We saw Cars on pirate DVD a couple of weeks ago and the landscapes made us cry. I find it faintly amazing that I had lived my entire life previous to six months ago in a land with unused spaces.
Also: sparse as these dream landscapes were, the actors moving around in them were all American. Wobbly, big-stomached, smiling Americans, only a few of whom were Asian. Probably the most racist thing I find myself thinking is “I am so tired of looking at Asian faces.” This thought is disturbingly racist because it’s completely non-rational. It’s not because I don’t like my Chinese friends (because I do) or find Chinese people unattractive (because I don’t); it’s because I’ve always lived (and, more importantly, grew up with) American faces. The primitive lizard part of my brain (actually, probably the monkey part) is naturally drawn to faces like mine. Upon reflection, I’m not just drawn to faces like mine; I’m used to seeing many different kinds of faces during a day.
So I was lying awake in Singapore, thinking about a post-to-be-created that ran something along the lines of “why the summer of 1988 was so important in my life,” which mentally evolved into “three-month periods of my life that I’d like to live over again,” which eventually drove me out of bed to write this:
When Jenny and I visited my hometowns of Lincoln and Scottsbluff, Nebraska in the summer of 2004, a profound feeling of gratitude overcame me. After a night out drinking in Lincoln, Jenny (not a big drinker) drove me around town while I dictated various Signficant Things that happened to me on given spots. By the end of the night the sense of gratitude had reduced me to tears. I can only express it as, “I can think of no better afterlife than to re-live the life I have already lived.” Meeting Jenny in 2003 surfaced this precise feeling for me. Almost daily I would have this deep feeling that I am the luckiest guy in the world. In the past few months, with the stress of all our recent big life changes, I haven’t taken a moment to remind myself of this.
I know I should be writing something observant and pithy about Singapore, how about this: we’ve been away from Xiamen for eight nights now and haven’t slept in an air-conditioned room for any of them. Or had a hot shower. Vicky’s shower has an on-demand water heater of some European kind but I’m too lazy to figure it out; the hut we rented in Malaysia had only the most notional kind of shower. Basically an open tap with a showerhead, next to the toilet.
Singapore insomnia is just like the Oregon (or Nebraska, or China) kind. We have to get up in an hour to catch the damn plane anyway, and the neighbor’s dogs have been barking all night long.
