I dream that I’m coming back home after school, on the stairs I meet two smiling Brazilian women carrying coffee. They give me a cup for free, it’s piping hot and I spill most of it, but it’s sweet and delicious.
At home I tell my mother there are two women opening a coffee shop on the second floor of our building, she’s very suspicious because she’s a coffee snob but I’m excited about living in such a cosmopolitan place where you can go shopping inside your own building, it’s very Hong Kong. I try to go to the coffee shop but end up in a nightclub on the third floor. The music is deafening and nobody is social distancing properly.
I steal a poisonous orange from my sister because I hate her and toss it in the park. I feel immediately bad because I’m afraid a dog will eat it.
And old lady with a handsome, intelligent face brings the orange back. She passes it to me over the fence and now it’s a piece of paper with a bird drawing on it. I put it back in my diary. She admires my art and tells me she likes birds so much she became an ornithologist. I tell her I also like birds very much. She gets angry and says,
I dream that I find live flies and crickets in my food, and I can’t eat anymore.
Then I dream that I drop my notebook, the one where I wrote down EVERY note for EVERY class of the year, from the stairs at school. I look down and see small children forming a queue in the hall, because apparently we’re sharing with them now. Stupid pandemic.
Then I dream that I’m out in town with my mother when I see a murder of black birds, thousands of them, looking spectral and scary, like they’re not of this world. As I film it they pick up a bird much bigger than them and eat it alive.
I dream that I’m going home with my body painted like a pink flamingo. Hunched forward, one arm behind my back and the other, the one that looks like a head and beak, held up above me.
I’m looked in the bathroom and I have a toddler and a baby with me, they’re brothers. The older one is two and his name is William, he has pooped on his brother’s face and his diaper has flown out the window, so I’m scrambling to get them both cleaned. I end up having to call my mother for help, she’s very surprised at how I seem to have acquired two children. We carry them to my bedroom and there are two birds trapped inside, flapping around madly, a pigeon and a seagull.
I need a bottle of frozen water, there is a vending machine on the street outside my house but it isn’t working. I go look for a freezer in my basement but I get lost, my cat is with me and we run when we see the landlord is chasing us. I hide in an apartment that looks like it’s been the set of a psychological thriller. Then I finally reach home and run inside my room, I put headphones on and hit play on a discman just as the landlord walks in. I’m now a teen boy with curly hair, the landlord takes me under his wing and becomes the father figure I never had.
There’s a tweet trending, it’s an old Russian farmer complaining about her land owner. She films a video where the land owner is seen on a tractor destroying her fields and cackling like a villain. I’m very confused because the video is stop motion and obviously fake, but nobody else on Twitter seems to notice.
I’m walking in the countryside with my dad, through stone roads and picturesque cottages. We can hear a bird trilling from a cage in someone’s yard, Dad remarks out loud about how annoying that is. The owner of the bird hears this and comes outside, angry at us: I wait for Dad to walk away, then take her hands in mine (they are small and stubby) and whisper an apology.
“I’m a good person, I’ve never beat anyone in my life!” the woman tells me, pouting.
“I wish I could say the same about my dad,” I reply, and walk away.
We leave the road and pass a wooden gate into a muddy path, and along the way I take cute pictures of pigeons. At the end of the path, in the middle of a clearing in the trees, there’s a small wooden house. A tiny old man greets us at the door, he looks vaguely familiar and Dad introduces him as a distant relative. He invites us inside.
The man’s wife shakes my hand: she is younger and portly, gives me an impression of energy and determination. I discover she is the leader of a political resistance and is trying to unionize a group of factory workers.
I’m now in the factory, I see the workers have received a secret message from their rebel leader. They gather in a room looking for something, they peep from a hole in the wall. Outside the room, their supervisor is growing suspicious: he’s a gaunt young man, he starts asking me too many questions. I’m standing next to a child, my little brother, and we both lie to him, tell him the secrete message was just someone calling a wrong number.
The workers emerge from the room, kidnap their supervisor and rape him with a rusty iron pole. I watch the whole thing, and while I believe the supervisor was enjoying himself, I still feel incredibly scared and guilty. I run back to the small wooden house and when my dad finds me, I lie and say I was there all day and never left.
I feel so guilty that, back home, I frantically try to erase my GPS history, I’m convinced I’m gonna be arrested. It’s hot outside, summer, my cousin G. wants to get me out of the house and have fun. She gives me an olive shirt and suggests I keep the buttons open with a small magnet, to show off my chest. Don’t I want to meet cute boys?! I say I don’t want to meet any boys and refuse to leave the house.
It’s New Year’s Eve. We all gather around the dinner table, a little bit dumbfounded. How can it be 2021 already, where did time go? I don’t have a journal for the new year, I don’t have any stickers, I don’t have a calendar. Then it downs on me: it’s still June, and we’ve been tricked. Is it the police? I check the online forums for traces I might have left behind. Then I wake up and I am very relieved to realize I’m not about to be arrested after all.
DECADE DREAM JOURNAL 