The Weekend REM Theatre

"stop takin pikchurs of those hipposhrooms n come on9 baby"

Phoebe, in the Kok Boks

The granddaddy of all non-sequiturs.

The weekend had been - how do you say - comatose? I slept half the time catching up on all the ZZZ's I've missed through the school week. You see, I won't make time by abandoning my life little pleasures to make way for responsibilities, work and other such beasts, but they still require my attention or they threaten to eat me. Unlike the sane people who makes a choice between the two, I simply take both in without compromise or quarter, and time, time, time; where must this come from then? I can't do so many things in a day without time, can I? So I do the insensible thing and siphon what I need from my bedtime till I'm left with some tattered sleep between 3 to 5 hours in length nightly. And especially in the past week, it had been more 3 than 5. This simply resulted in overlong day naps and narcoleptic meditation space-outs at the most inappropriate of times (classes, mostly). I believe in hedonism. Life is all about the pleasure of the senses right now. Why wait for heaven if you can be happy now? I don't even know if there's really a heaven somewhere in the clouds or way out there in outer space - so yeah, I think we ought to always make the best of what we already have. Reminds me of that dog and his bone and his reflection in the river story, hmm.

On Saturday or Sunday, either in the evening or afternoon, Phoebe called me while I was deep in sleep; waking me up from an absolutely ridiculous dream. I was back in my grandmother's house in Malacca and to my surprise, it had been invaded by cute baby pygmy hippopotami. They were scampering all over the place on their short stumpy legs at high speed, bumping into things and each other. In fact, they seemed more like little dogs than hippos, and they yelped and whined too. I grabbed one and held it up, and it squirmed adorably in my hands, trying to struggle free to go back to playing with the other hippopotami. It felt kind of firm but elastic - springy, I think. Hold a button mushroom in your hand and press it, and that's exactly how it felt like. At one point the hippos ceased being like puppies and divided themselves into two factions and each declared war on the other. They all wore helmets and carried rifles and the living room was completely turned into a battlefield with mini-trenches and little explosions. SO CUTE, RIGHT? There was also a crab which was inexplicably garbed in full metal armour and was crawling slowly across the battlefield like a tank. I stood amidst all this with a camera in my hand, trying to get good pictures of these awesome pygmy hippos when Phoebe called me and woke me up.

"Aw, you called at the wrong time! I was trying to take pictures of the hippopotamushrooms!" I declared as indignantly as I could with a voice was still thick with sleep.

"You're sleeping aren't you?" Phoebs giggled. "What are hippopotamushrooms?"

It took me a moment to orientate myself and tell her about these little baby pygmy hippos which felt like button mushrooms in my dream.

"Okay, baby. Go back to sleep and continue taking pictures. Bye!"

It's so good to have a girlfriend who understand my needs. How many times have I said this already? I just can't say it enough.

In another instance about a day or two before that, I dreamt that Phoebe is pregnant and her Mom confronted me about it. It's somewhat a nightmare really on more than one level. I can't recall much detail about it but I do remember that in it, Phoeb's Mom was turning my room upside down and clicking through all the folders in my computer LOOKING FOR MY PORN STASH OF ALL BLESSED THINGS. You'd think that it's way too late for that, wouldn't you?

My third dream, which I had yesterday night was a variation of my 'Girl of My Dreams' dreams. It's strange how we can describe just how perfect the 'Girls and Boys of Our Dreams' really are but when we try to look deeper past the one-dimensional descriptions we heaped upon them like Christmas baubles, we can't see anything. We have no inkling of how they look like, what they do outside the times we see them in our dreams and what their thoughts are. They aren't real people. They are cardboard cutouts of what we wish to have and can only have when we are asleep because quite simply; they can't exist. It's only when we fell in love in real life that the faceless, substance-less mannequins of our subconscious wish fulfillments meld flawlessly into our lovers, as if that's how they have always been. It's kind of like pouring something into a beautiful, empty wine glass. Maybe that's why the ones we fell in love with always seem so perfect to us. It's because we first dream of a perfect person in our lives, and later, we fit our girlfriends and boyfriends into that vacancy. We are the ones who clothe our lovers in perfection.

So for awhile now, the Girl of My Dreams looks and talks like Phoebe but at the same time, isn't entirely Phoebe. Yesterday was different. For some reason, she turned back into that faceless, substance-less one-dimensional person I always knew ever since I started dreaming of her. She's the sweet, beautiful, cute, popular, rich, intelligent, talented, amazing person I remember who, at the same time, is just an empty wine glass; a character written just to play a role. My dream this time is voyeuristic - I was either a ghost or an invisible person following her around, watching her every move, her most private moments without her knowing. Somehow, these sort of dreams never gets erotic or kinky when I dream them - absolutely no scenes of me following her into showers or standing by while she's changing. Sex don't figure that largely in my subconsciousness, I suppose. I'm always preoccupied with stuff like reading her diary as she writes, watching her cry into her pillow after a really bad day and listening to her talking to God by her bedside before she goes to sleep. It's a frustrating sort of dream really. I kept wanting to be corporeal so I can meet her but that didn't or couldn't happen. I wanted to nurture. I wanted to protect. I wanted to care.

When I woke up this morning, I couldn't remember at all how she looks like again. I couldn't recall what she wrote in her diary, what nasty things happened to her that made her cry or what her prayers were. It's like what I said; all descriptions and no essence. Dreams, I suppose, is never about the things we see in them. The scenes and the sceneries, the stage and the props are what we made up to - I don't know - entertain ourselves? Or are they just random imageries that pops into existence incongruously without meaning or order because of the random neuronal firings during REM sleep?

I, for one, like to think that my dreams teaches me about more about myself - yes, even the one about cute baby pygmy hipposhrooms. They put me in situations that would not happen in reality. They challenge my judgments and test my sanity like some sort of systemic mental diagnostic. Maybe the reason I dream so frequently is that there's just so much more about myself I need to know. Or want to know.

Gosh, empiricism is hard work. I need some rest now.



Dreaming,
k0k s3n w4i