To sleep, perchance to...eh?

Nine days already? Really?

I'd intended to at least attempt to write something once a week. But the days are just packed, to quote Bill Watterson. No, no reason, besides that he loved his work enough to flip off money. Leh. Along with the people giving it to him.

That's a personal goal. To be successful enough doing something I enjoy to flip off money. It will be tough. Jacking off doesn't pay very well.

But yes, dreams. What are those all about, eh? It's interesting how it's a subject with which a change of tense can be the difference between blah and epic.

"I had a dream."

"I have a dream."

I could go places with this. Or you could, with Google. But we'll just look at three facets of sleep and dreaming. With corresponding levels of Epic.

1. Flying
Probably the second-most common dream, next to sex with German twins. No, I don't think I'm special, but I've never had dreams of flying. The closest I got made enough of an impression on me, that I remember it nigh twenty years on. Twenty years leh. Le...ok, sorry.

I was a kid. And for some reason, I thought it was a good idea to jump out of the window of the flat, which was on the fourth storey. I probably had some vague idea I was dreaming, and wanted to test it because I'm empirical like that. There, but for the grace of actually being correct for once, goes the non-existence of tehgoat.blogspot.com and the very messy existence of one piakked kid.

So I jumped. And I went high, and slow. Gravity was like a forty-five dollar cocktail at a posh bar: there, but less than half-strength. I slowly landed, and it was fun. And I jumped again and again, because when you're six years old, you have no idea that what you really should be doing is visualising hot German twins. So whee, jump. Land. Jump somemore.

Like frog.

Yes, other people get to fly. I got to play frog. Albeit the special frying kind with the extra webbing between limbs so they can glide from tree to tree. No, really got such frog.

The ramifications of that probably explain why I am the way I am, today.


2. Sleep Paralysis
It hasn't happened lately, but it's not fun. Skim the Wiki and make your own call, but let me describe it.

You're awake, but unable to move. Everything is black, because you can't open your eyes. Breathing is laboured. Yes, you panic. Straining the edges of sanity, you find you can move a finger, ever so slightly. Yes, you know you're awake. You can feel your bed, your pillow, your bolster. Hear the fan and the faint drone of the TV in the living room.

But you can't move. You want to scream for help, for someone to slap you out of it or something. But you can't. Black. Sight is so close. You know it is. Your eyelids are stapled shut, though. You can feel your heartbeat speed to ridiculous levels, and you think you might die from it. You think maybe that would be a good thing, that blessed unconsciousness would be better than this dark, sightless limbo.

That's how it's like the first time, anyway. If any of you two people reading this have experienced sleep paralysis, it's unpleasant, but breakable. Calm yourself in the face of utter despair. And then there's no way I can describe the following action, but to gather your sense of self into a corner. Ball yourself up into a tight ball, if you will. And lunge outwards.

It takes a few tries, sometimes. But you'll eventually break out of yourself, gasping for air and cursing like a sailor who discovers he has crabs, and not the sort you eat.

But me being me, I've done that. And woken up, gasping and all. And went about the daily doldrum, getting ready for work. All very normal. Then I leave the house and a pig flies past. "Hello, you," I say. And then SMLJ reaction kicks in.

And then I wake up. Again.


3. The Cling
I haven't actually heard anything about this. It's generic enough to be all over the place but unGooglable, I suppose. Like trying to find a childhood friend whose name you forgot by entering, "Chinese boy, about yay tall in 1990."

The cling starts when you have a happy dream. Silly-happy sort of thing. Like when you're a kid and swimming in a sea of candy. Replace candy with money or something, as you grow up. Or virgins. Anything you can grab a handful of and be pretty happy about, really.

But everything's normal when you're dreaming. For a while, at least. And then you feel yourself wake up. Dream-reality ripples, and begins to fade. Running on sheer animal instinct, you grab handfuls of whatever it is around you, because you want so desperately to keep it.

And then you wake up. And even though you know it's retarded, you slowly look down and open your tightly clenched fists. Empty. Not that you were really expecting a fistful of candy, money or rather grotesquely, dismembered breast. But you're still disappointed, and go bleah at no one in particular.


Yes, this is when you find out that it's about Her after all. Because you tend to dream of what weighs most heavily on your mind, you see. And rather embarrassingly, she's it.

I dreamed of her. Nothing exciting enough to remember. Possibly, she was gardening in a chicken suit, weeding out wild Bratwursts that were choking the flowering pizza plants. Then I woke and, finding myself in my room, go, "Ah. Dream. I wonder what she's doing right now."

Something was strange about my bolster. It was a funny shape. And it was heaving gently. I looked down, and it was her. Warm, sensuous and curled up against me, her head tucked into my chest.

And that's the story of the one time I brought my dream back with me. It was wonderful, in the original meaning of the word.

Crafty Boys.

Unless you were raised by a band of wild turkeys, you'd prolly have been asked, "What do you wanna be when you grow up?" at least once in your life.

I suppose it would be the same if you were raised by the turkeys, really. Except they'd ask you in Turkey. And there's just the one answer: "Bigger turkey."

But yes, for serious. The little answers don't tend to vary. Doctor. Astronaut. Pilot. Fireman. Policeman. When you're little, you're in a good place, with somewhere to sleep, food to eat, money given to you for candy and toys. And Uncle Bob only very occasionally touches you in your special places.

And then you get older, and people stop smiling when you tell them what you want to be. "Well ok, helping people is all very well, but what do you really want to do? Eh?"

A little hard to intrepret when you're little. "But...I've just told you." Nono. Doctor still ok. Lawyer, banker and engineer are the only other acceptable answers. Everything else is a cop-out.

Some of us never grow out of When I Grow Up. I haven't. I admire craft. Well, the more showy ones, shamefully. Plastering is a craft, but at least for me, it's hard to go, "The way you mix it so perfectly...and the deft strokes you use to smooth it over with the...thingy thing. Teach me, oh master."

The showy ones manifest my WIGU syndrome. But you sort of have to see the people. Hearing a song is fine, but watching a good singer perform makes me want to sing. Dancers make me want to take classes. Instrumentalists have me imagining myself playing their instrument, as if I could ever move beyond Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. Even watching cooks makes me think I could make unfunny jokes while speed-slicing a cucumber, and have it all turn out wonderful.

Humour and writing are sort of exceptions, yet not. Comedians do make me want to get out there on a stage and proceed to stare in terror at a few hundred people, having forgotten all my lines. Watching a writer would be...not very exciting, at best. But the writing is the actual performance, and reading good writing makes me wonder how I would write the same thing. Good comic writing is just the shit.

Craft. It's a nice word. Someone crafting a meal makes you want to eat it. Someone crafting a story has you enthralled. Use it on the right people, though. Not on the guy with a can-opener and a microwave. And for the latter, not on Catherine Lim.

Yes, WIGU never leaves some of us. Not all of us are as taken with craft, perhaps. Some of us WIGU about being managers, dreaming daily of ways to steal credit and disclaim blame. But life wears on and you wake up one day to realise, fuck, you're 38 and losing hair like the Singapore law enforcers have been losing prisoners. You have grown up.

That's when you go out and buy a Porsche. Or a six-pack, for most of us.

But try not to lose your WIGU. If you've always wanted to write, write. If you've always wanted to run a shady business importing Russian brides, start running a busi...you get the idea.

If nothing else, keep your WIGU just so you won't be a defective person. The ability to look at someone perform and go, "Wow, that's awesome. I wish I could do that someday," is important. Certain breeds of managers are such pricks because they've lost it. They go, "Well that's nice and everything but can you do what I do? And have I mentioned? Even my children play golf leh. Leh."

If you must know, I wanted to be a scientist when I grew up. Small the time, don't know about all the different branchy-branches what. It was all lab coat, clipboard, test tubes and voila! Win Nobel prize for paper on effects of banjos on cats. Mucho money. Retire. Spend rest of life shagging leftover cats.

Real life, not so easy. Banjos hard to come by. The earlier one realises that, the easier it is for him to deal with it. So the next time little Timmy comes to you and tells him he wants to be a fireman when he grows up so he can help people, do the right thing.

Set him on fire.

Equine elevation.

Relax your neck, and slump your head forward. No, really let it go. Your chin should touch the middle of your chest. If you want to take it a little further, walk around a bit like that. If not, just imagine spending the rest of your days like this.

Quite a long time ago, I saw her while on my way to work. A tiny, emaciated thing of sixty-five, seventy, maybe more. Who knows. She was dressed simply. Plain, worn but not shabby. And she was walking towards me, from the direction of the train station, just like that, looking straight at the ground and a little to the left.

I wondered what had her so sad. Because she did look sad, in a rather permanent sort of way. Like she'd watched a kitten die painfully, and someone suddenly sprayed fixative on her face. She walked softly, tending to weave a little to the left like a rogue supermarket cart. She would correct her step frequently for that. Something was incongruous, though. I slowed slightly.

Then, using the hand that was not clutching a plastic bag, she pushed up on her chin to raise her head, so she could see where she was going. Having checked, and likely written the next ten metres into her mind, her arm dropped to her side. And her head flopped once again against her chest.

Who she was, where she was going and what happened to her, I don't know. I saw her a few more times, but haven't in the past...year? I'm not even sure if I should wish that she's doing alright.

Earthquakes, tsunamis, brutal governmental crackdowns. I could care less. Let the papers report it, and the internet lookatmes pour forth their grief for all to see. I'm quite happy to give my ten or twenty to a worthy cause, when asked. But my emotionz cannot go out to people I don't know, half a world away.

They did go out to her. I remember her soft, stoic shuffle still. "Well, what can I do about it? Gotta keep on truckin." it seemed to say. I'm mostly alone, but that's by choice. If she didn't want to be, I can but hope that she didn't have to be.

But yes, I've recently sat in the chair of someone who, having seen what I did, would probably say,

"It's her own damned fault, you know."

How so?

"Everyone knows about Osteoporosis, and how women need to look after their calcium intake when they get older. She has no excuse."

She might be illiterate, and one of the few remaining that came from China on a boat, looking for a better life. She might have spent her life raising children left behind by a gambling drug addict of a husband who left her for a woman with a pretty face and nice tits.

"Well, why wouldn't she drink milk anyway? It's great for calcium, not to mention all the other benefits that come with it. She was just asking for it."

She's lactose intolerant. She doesn't know that's what it's called, but on the rare times she did drink milk, she had explosive diarrhoea in the fields for a week. It doesn't even take cognitive thought to come to the conclusion that it's bad for her.

"Her fault for being lactose intolerant. She still could have taken calcium supplements and the like. Or gone to a doctor. You should always see a doctor when you're not feeling well. I always see a doctor when I'm not feeling well."

Her children left her, one by one. They can't call her because she doesn't have a phone. And they don't visit her at all. What little money she makes goes to her evening meal of vegetables and rice. Sometimes she feels extravagant and buys a bottle of fermented bean curd. It usually lasts her a month.

"With a diet like that, it's no wonder she's in such bad shape. Well, enough. I can't help it that no one takes my advice. I mean, look at my life. If everyone listened to me, the world would be so much better. I'm going home to my highschool sweetheart banker husband and two and a half children. Bye."

And people call me self-righteous leh. Leh.

Verse rehearse.

Terence, to all that were present
Had talent but practically patent
The bright side of things
And half-full glass things
Were just to him all quite apparent

"Good day!" he would say
To all on his way
"Isn't it all bright and cheerful?"
And because of such
It was hard to begrudge
His habits, though mildly distasteful

Terence, you see
Was grope-touch-feely
With all bar some elderly aunts
On the bus you'd find
With Terence behind
Hands going up skirts and down pants

It was strange, we thought
But no harm was wrought
By Terence's lewd non-sequiturs
Still, from that time on
We all called him TOM
Terence, the Optimistic Molestor


It's mongrel doggerel. But it's got far more happiness behind it than you might imagine. Than I would have imagined. And I've got a pretty good imagination.