Afternoon and I am walking down the cement path among overgrown wildgrass twice my height and brilliant green. I am dressed in my nightgown and the heat is pressing on my neck and I haven't an ounce of shame in my body. I am going to my friend's concert at the downtown arts theatre. I am overshadowed by train tracks, the ones that used to snake about the old home. I reach the bus stop after a long while and a bus runs by, to which I realize this isn't the bus stop where I can catch the bus I need to get downtown, and I feel all sick and confused because I have walked this path a million other times before. 
I turn around and I am in a dark air conditioned lobby lit by orange hotel fluorescenpts and the level I am on exists as a rectangular corridor with a he in the centre. I look down the hole and I see a multitude of lower levels that run down into an abyss. I turn away and see a library counter, vanilla white, covered by a sheet of curtain. I knock on the glass that is there.
Something happens that I forgot what, but there is a woman in pink blouse and heels that runs out and starts crying over the railing into the abyss, so I rub circles in her back. She thanks me. Suddenly my vice-principal appears behind the counter shoving the curtain up by just a peek and praising me for my compassion. I am pulled into the library room that materializes behind the curtain, same dimly-lit atmosphere with itchy carpet in brown tones. There is a class of five-year olds in bucket hats and bottles slung on their waists and they are all wearing surgical masks too big for their face they are sitting on the carpet. The vice-principal and the pink blouse woman interrogate me and I tell them I have to catch a train downtown. They are shocked that I have lost my way. 
Suddenly something happens that warrants the library to be put in lockdown and I am sitting hunched next to the class of kids until one of them asks me for water. I unscrew my quarter-filled bottle and pour a stingy amount into his bottle. Then I do it for the rest of the kids.
I stand up having realized something and walk inside the library, further towards what I seem to believe is the train station. The walls are tattooed with graffiti in systemic manners and there is a row of litter arranged nearly on the floor. I realize I will be very, very very late. I wake up.

 6 October 2024

i am walking alongside this wall that is very scuffed but beautiful

because there are these great Apes that walk beside me.

and they are looking

and when i ask them what are you looking at?

they say, we are looking at You

and it becomes very uncomfortably clear that i am
the natural history these paintings are observing.

what happens to us, they say, when we grow into the finest form the gods have ever wanted us to become. and 
i am scared . never

has the open curiosity of a child been this welcoming .
the kind of lovesick terror you get . from remembering . from knowing.

they know — scuffed fingers moving — they know i,

cracked mirror, is what they will be 

repulsed to become.

an eye meets an eye meets an eye and they seem to understand, rabid
beast, teeth wild and delicate . what lies
ahead, they are scared. 
nonetheless, i will need to leave . nonetheless,
i will need to live .
when their lips seal closed, i go on without them.

I am part of a volunteer group that’s chaperoning a class of kindergarteners’ trip to the zoo. The zoo is suspiciously water-focused, in that all the walkways are narrow bamboo bridges, and there are only a few floating pavilions and trees around us. Everything else is green, murky water. Somehow I know it is a zoo. Anyway each of the volunteers are partnered with one child and we are assigned one two-seater bicycle each. I sit at the front and my assigned kid takes the back. Suddenly I am having an out-of-body experience, I am seeing myself and the kid on the bike cycling away. We’re cycling over a bridge that is very incredibly semicircular, very cartoony, when for some god dang reason I turn the bike and we plunge off the bridge into the river. The bridge had no railing.
I wake up in the dream in my house, and suddenly I am at the dinner table telling my mother and my father and my sister about that crazy dream, good lord, can you imagine I drove a bike in there? With a kid? My sister says “it’s not that impressive”. I feel very, very put out, more disappointed that she cannot grasp the sheer bizarreness of whatever that was “just now” more than frustration.
Suddenly I am back in that same zoo, inside the toilets with a lot of cubicles, and I can’t actually see the zoo to confirm from its scenery that I am in the same place, but I know subconsciously I am in THE zoo. I go inside one of the empty cubicles, the one with a shower head and a drain and nothing else, close the door, start soaping myself with nonexistent soap, and begin showering. After a while, when there is still soap on my body, someone knocks on the cubicle door and I open it to find the zookeeper. He is a bald old man in a polo shirt. He looks like a basic tourist but somehow I know he is THE zookeeper. Behind him is an old woman who somehow I know complained to the zookeeper about me. Snitch. The zookeeper tells me I can’t shower here. I look down and see the soap suds from my cubicle leaking out the toilet. Suddenly I am aware I am naked, covered in soap, and facing this middle-aged man like an American dude might open the door to face the police. Somehow I am not the least embarrassed, and just say, that doesn’t make sense. There’s literally a shower head in here. The zookeeper says, “step out of the cubicle.” I close the door in his face and continue showering. He knocks on my door again and when this time I don’t open the door, he calls out that he will leave me alone for a mere twenty dollars. I open the door again, naked body and everything, and give him twenty bucks from an invisible pocket I didn’t know I had. Skin pocket? Twenty dollars, all in coins. I wake up.

we are in the central block of a school. i don’t really know how to explain how it looks like. it’s a big squarish parade square with no ceiling, and it’s surrounded by one block of classrooms, but you know you’re not on ground level. it gives the feeling that there are multiple levels of classrooms below you, like this parade square was supposed to be the “lid” for this block of classrooms but got placed one level shy. it’s like a minecraft creation or something. it’s drizzling lightly and the surface of the parade square looks water-y, with ripples appearing once in a while. There are students seated around the parade square on benches watching random people play music and improvise dances, one at a time. Every time a dancer finishes their act, the students cheer.
a school bell rings and the dancers leave, and the students either go back to the classrooms or disappear. i take out my phone and start voice-recording whatever i saw just now, as well as the idea that the place looks vaguely minecraft-like. a classmate approaches me and asks what i am doing. i explain to her that once i wake up, i will be able to remember this dream with the voice recording. (i do not explicitly state that I know this is a dream, but i think the idea may have been there.) we say hi to a passing teacher and i have to lower my voice because some students are passing by and it is embarrassing to be narrating what is happening into a phone around them, like i am some secret agent wannabe.
suddenly i am in a small food court. it is smaller than the parade square. i don’t know how i got here but i know this place is also at a very high area, sort of like those lofts that you can only access via a ladder. the place lights are a homely orange. i go to put my bag down at one of the plastic seats and my friend promises to watch over it. i go to one of the stalls and spend a ridiculously long amount of time looking over the menu, and i get increasingly distressed when i don’t know what to buy. i step aside to let an old woman behind me order first. i keep looking at the menu and i think i am going to cry when the chef calls me and gives me a plate of what i think is carrot cake. i remember, very clearly, it costing $9.90. The chef says it’s okay to not know what to buy. it’s only when i finish the cake and leave the food court that i remember i have not paid the chef back yet. i am now on a street walking “home”, and i start searching in my wallet for notes and coins to pay the exact value. i manage to find the correct cost. i wake up still believing i owe the chef $9.90.

I’m in front of a row of lockers - the long vertical ones that can fit an entire person like those from American shows - i’m in front of a row of lockers and i open one, and inside i think there is a corpse. It is all crumpled up and twisted like a wet tissue paper. there are blood stains on the inside walls of the lockers. Wendy comes over and says she can see the blood stains but there is no corpse. i look again and there is nothing there, but when i look away and back there is a corpse. Wendy gives me hand sanitiser and tells me to clean up.
then suddenly we are watching a documentary. it covers the entire screen. it’s about various people talking about their romantic relationships with various coloured sock puppets. there’s a man who plays a very short drum solo and then explains to the interviewer that what he played was a green song, because his sock puppet partner is green coloured, and she (?) is on vacation, and he misses her very much, so this song reminds him of her. The documentary starts flashing different low-quality images of green plants and tree leaves. i wake up.

the example answer sheet for one of our language papers is different from what I remember. it got more complicated and it’s not the answering format I’ve practiced all the while. suddenly it’s exam time and I am finishing an essay question in a geography paper and I watch the clock speed up till 30min has passed, and then when the teacher comes around to collect it i flip the page and realized i missed out doing a pair of questions worth 10 marks each. I think i almost tear the paper.
suddenly I am walking down the corridor and a teacher is asking me how my sister is. i remember that ‘ earlier ‘ another teacher had asked me how my friend was; i say she’s okay. we pass by a room full of transparent cube-rooms and suddenly I see my friend Quetzal in one of them. she’s waving her arms at us.
I go up and let her out. Quetzal says someone locked her in. the teacher is gone. suddenly we are at the canteen and I can see the outer walls of the school from where i’m seated; it’s completely covered in pink and yellow flowers; i take a picture of it when Quetzal says it’s not everyday there are so many flowers, the seasons change so fast. i wake up.

It is a stage, and it is a show. Blue Bird is improv singing, accompanied by some faceless man on the saxophone. I am backstage and only I know he is doing this because Red Bird was about to pull some stunt that would be deemed illegal and result in the murder of some criminal that would deserve it. Red Bird is trying to gather all his tools and props, and Blue Bird’s singing is halting and weird. They keep going, though. Blue Bird switches to singing in English after a while. Red Bird exits stage right. It’s only then that i realize there’s no audience, and the saxophone has stopped, and it’s only Blue Bird’s singing left. I wake up.

halfway through the dream i somehow am hungry. i get lunch (mixed vegetables in a styrofoam box) from a stall in the local mall and wander around a bit because i have no where to sit down and eat. i walk down a sloping corridor that gets larger and spacier and the stores all grow lesser and lesser, until it looks like a performing arts venue - i don’t know what it is, but it gives the vibe that it would be a performance venue for SYF, something like the Esplanade but airier and more skylight-ish. perhaps like the museum. i go down and there are a few beanbag-chairs. i sit on one and start to eat. there is a student choir performing on stage, and they sound like they are going through a sound test. Their conductor is my instrument teacher, with his hair gelled up very oddly. i finish eating when they finish their sound test, and they walk off-stage. i follow them. We end up in a white staircase area - everything is white - and the students all start to chatter as they descend the stairs. The walls eventually fall away so we can see the daylight outside. i pack away my empty styrofoam box and a girl stops me to ask what it is. i wake up.

we are on a train full of people. it feels like the kind of train that takes you through a zoo. there is someone on the speakers talking and talking and talking as we pass by different landmarks and people - every time we see something new it is in a different perspective; we pass by a training institution that we see from bird’s-eye view, but then when we pass by a town we are at the foot of it, like we just switched from elevated ground to level ground. The voice introduces a species of people, three of which from the town turns around and waves at us in unison as the train flies by. We go on and on and i am under the impression that the train is heading towards a school-slash-medical institute.
Suddenly we are in a dark lift lobby, the kind in apartment complexes, and it is lit only by the sunlight from the holes in the wall. there are plants everywhere. there is a child’s rocking-horse outside someone’s door. it is very comforting and when i turn around to see more i wake up.

Owl is standing opposite me. they hold out their hand and show me a white Polo mint they’re holding. suddenly it lights on fire. the fire is tall, and keeps getting taller, but the mint doesn’t melt. It floats out of Owl’s palm and hovers mid-air above us. We watch it float and we don’t say anything else. I wake up.