If only in my dreams

[austin_dern]

More of my links to living in Singapore are passing: my zoo membership card expired at the end of July, so now if I do get back in town I'll have to pay my S$12 for admission like the common folk. I suppose I wasn't really using it the past half-year or so. And I almost never got to the Jurong Bird Park, which had just added an odd attraction where people in bird costumes do ... something. I don't know what; I saw a bit of a news segment about the costumed characters but not what they were there for, other than to induce heat stroke in their performers.

A less certain but no less trivial link is my electric toothbrush seems to have broken. I click it on and there's not the faintest response from the motor, not even the weak response of it on low charge. There had been a power failure at my parents' house yesterday and if the toothbrush had been plugged in I'd be glad to blame it on a power spike, but it wasn't, so now ... I'm giving it time to recharge, and if that doesn't work I suppose I'll have to get a toothbrush that works on this continent's power supply.

Probably knowing about the zoo membership expiring prompted an odd dream a little while ago: in it I had dreamed that I'd just spontaneously bought a plane ticket, flown around the world with nothing but the shirt on my back, and was wandering around a downtown mall (not one that actually exists, as far as I could make it out) realizing I didn't really have anything I wanted to do in the city, just that I wanted to smell the air and now that was done so I could head back; not even worth sticking around for a meal for, really. It horrified me that I had spent the money of a round-the-world plane ticket on such a trivial cause and I started to feel ashamed and hoping this rash action was a dream. But while I couldn't remember a moment of the day-and-a-half travel time or how I'd got from the airport to generic downtown, the `fact' of being there seemed irrefutable. And I didn't even have a way to update my Livejournal, and would already have missed a day! (Well, I assume I could have used an Internet cafe terminal, but I'd have had to scramble to find trivia sources, not to mention buy some books to read.)

I don't typically have `lucid' dreams; this is about as close as I get:I reasoned that while I may do foolish things, and I may utterly fail to notice three changes of airplanes over the course of thirty hours, and I may start wandering only to notice when I finally get somewhere, I knew that I would not spend the thousand-plus dollars for a round-the-world plane flight without serious and protracted hand-wringing and second-guessing on my part. With the dream's logic broken I could relax and wake up in bed as appropriate, secure in the knowledge that even my unconscious can't beat my understanding of how miserly and cheap and anti-spontaneous I am.

Trivia: The eighth month of the Babylonian calendar was Arahsamnu. Source: Mapping Time: The Calendar and its History, EG Richards.

Currently Reading: A Modern History of Japan, Andrew Gordon.

Comments

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

Mmm. My last lucid dream, as 8 of the past 10 have been, involved being a at work. I finally got the point where i went.. "Wait. If this is a dream, and I'm dreaming about work, this is shitty. I've been doing 6-day weeks, that's enough time." And then I managed to drag myself awake.

I at least hope that the air in Singapore smelled wonderful.

--Chiaroscuro

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I don't remember dreaming about being at work, though it's hard to not remember that joke abut the tenured professor in that context.

The air was great, though, and it may be the similarity in temperature and humidity around here to over there in the middle of summer that's got me particularly sentimental.

[xolo.livejournal.com]

A few years ago, I had this terribly sad and upsetting dream that I'd flown to San Francisco for the day, and was sitting in an open air cafe eating dinner, alone. That's all I got to do there, and in an hour or so I'd have to go back. It's not much of a dream, but it stayed with me.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

At least you got a meal while you were there. I didn't even get up to the second floor of the mall.