I DON’T WANT TO BE // A PROLOGUE TO HISTORY

The weirdest dreams, I think, are the ones in which you wake up in your own bed. Waking up in one’s own bed is something one does in real life. It’s most unsettling to plan to wake up, and then wake up, but the not really. My alarm is usually set to wake me two or three times, but sometimes I sleep on after that. If I dream, it’s often a dream full of current events, as the alarm clock radio plays on (whichever local CBC morning show). But this one was just hella weird:

I woke up in my own bed, in my own room. I wake up with a boy. This is a boy of meshed identity including a boy I don’t think to wake up in bed with (awkward) and also fictional sexy MI5 agent Adam Carter (as portrayed by Rupert Penry-Jones). I’d been watching Spooks. There could have been cuddling but I think I was so weirded out to wake up beside this boy that I might have resisted this kind of display of affection. Eventually he gets out and I stretch out on the bed I have to myself and doze a little more, before finally getting out of bed and out of my room. When I wake up from lazy dozes to lazy mornings, I might expect to see my roommates or my roommate’s boyfriend in my apartment. Recently, this has included her grandmother who left just this Sunday. I see the boyfriend and greet him, Good morning. But instead of the grandmother I get my Chinese professor. And instead of the rest of my bright, naturally-lit living room, when I get past the kitchen I see the dimly-lit all purpose room often seen in film representations of a flat in a developing area or a cheap 1970s student apartment.

Strange is not to encounter my professor in basketball shorts and a beater (rather than his suit) because that’s how he was dressed much of the summer in Beijing, strange is to encounter the goat he’s won at the midway playing Whac-a-Mole. I could say WTF but he’s my professor, and that would be rude, so I go to make myself breakfast. Meanwhile, I find out he’s adopted to the apartment a Chinese girl (in the form of a girl who went to my high school and now goes to my uni, a year below me, somehow pixie and punk, and attached to alternative and digital art scenes, perhaps, or so she seems she might be). Her name is “moonflash” (in reality a raustralian fanboy from the internet). Okay, whatever, I try to eat my breakfast. But this frickin’ goat keep trying to eat my food! And so I leave.

The hallway is maybe the hallway of a run-down (in keeping with the old school) Imperial College dormitory. A door nearby is interesting and my friend from Chinese class stands outside. His Chinese friend has moved out without telling him (and his Chinese friend may have a meshed identity with this chick “moonflash,” but it isn’t the same girl). 不好。 We walk outside and it seems we are in China. It’s dark and smoggy, but not warm or cold. I only know it’s China because of all the Chinese people and the classmates (cute indie couple who dress to match but not on purpose-like, who are also technically Montréal classmates as well) we pass. Perhaps there are some red on grey signs in Chinese characters as well. We make small talk (how is your [China] roommate? I don’t actually know, I haven’t seen her since we last went for coffee, but I should bug her again) until we reach an open-ish square and he points at a sign which I turn to look at.

I turn back to look at him, but instead I find a dear giftie. She asks me to photograph the sign but I miss the chance because I can’t figure out how to wind up her (old school) disposable camera. Whatever, she kind of sighs and we move on and the segue takes us to a door that opens into a Chinese pharmacy (I don’t mean Chinese like herbal/naturopathic). Even though it’s dimly lit and grey, I’m sneezey and refrain from entering for fear of contaminating a “sterile” environment. But through the open door I see some other gifties who apparently have the flu (so much for contamination). But I hang around outside. A giftie boy I rarely have the chance to see (but I like to keep up with his blog, recently shut, hopefully temporarily) shows up. I resist the urge to hug, claiming illness, and he gives a cookie, so I point him to the door, towards the other gifties, where he goes. I realise that hanging outside of this so-called pharmacy, I’m in what looks like the basement of a more run-down Asian mini-mall in the Toronto suburbs. Fake plants and dimly lit environs carry on.

And then I woke up in my own bed, in my own room. And it was hella weird. And then I freaked out ’cause I had a presentation this morning for anthro and grabbed my glasses to see the time on the alarm clock radio which had ceased to play: 820.