I woke up from a dream where the logic was, every time I would click on a YouTube link, my left neck would twitch. There was something fair and deserving about it, and so I just played along with it until the certain moment where my waking awareness caught on. I woke up and I remembered I thought about Papa before I went to sleep, and I remembered that when I was in high school, I felt that my grandpa’s hand was on my shoulder the whole week following my dream of him.
Stories are formed in our heads both in waking and in sleeping. I would love to choose my waking logic as the logic that makes sense, but what if one day I found the light switch in my waking life, and woke up in a sleeping life feeling grateful that I was saved from the waking nonsense? This is not a scary thought. Perhaps this is what dying would feel like. Afterlife is just another place for the mind, if it does exist.
I woke up to Facebook. Charles Esche’s status, 4 hours ago, has attracted 23 likes, and Anita Toutikian has consistently commented on it, discussing with Charles. I decided to switch my light on – I won’t be trying to sleep again, because that will only reiterate that I can’t sleep. I decided to start writing and to not believe that it is my premenstrual syndrome that has kept me from being creative. Certainly I could have just tried to sleep, while wondering why I couldn’t sleep and blaming my hormones for it. That is just another option.
My dream of my grandpa went like this: we were on a beach, sitting around a table with beach umbrella. He wasn’t looking directly at me, he wasn’t talking to me. But somehow I knew he knew that I was his granddaughter. When I woke up, I chose to believe what the dream meant, until at one point I chose to believe another meaning. It was an easy choice to make, as though I knew both all along. I feel I can believe both now, as much as I feel I can believe neither. The warm feeling that I felt on my shoulder the whole week after that dream was interesting, just like how my left neck twitched: perhaps it was Papa trying to wake me up?
I woke up to my waking sense. The twitch somehow felt like what it felt when the Chinese doctor that was really an electro-acupuncturist applied some pulsating electrical current to my bursitis-ridden knee a few weeks ago. Now that I have integrated my waking memory to make sense of the world, I suspect that that is what the twitch was: my body pulsating its own electrical current. To heal itself perhaps, to think of it positively.
I woke up to the memory of attempting to freeze our 6 kilograms of strawberries. I went to the freezer and checked on them. They’re well on their way to gelidity, frigidity, frozenness, whichever word can or cannot express it truly. I remembered that before I went to sleep I thought of Mama and my attempt to prepare myself to be an adult orphan. Sometimes Papa lives through her for me, like when she said that we did have a vacuuming device for freezing food: Papa bought it just in case (like he did buy many other things because it looked technologically cool to do at the convenience of your own home). What will happen when Mama dies? Somehow, my attempt to feel this made a part of myself believe that there is a logic to having kids. Something lives on. Stories live on.
Although all stories are really what we choose them to be.
I woke up to Skype. For a moment there was a remaining for Daniel’s online status, and I felt some kind of joy. A few seconds later, the software finally came to its waking sense and said that Daniel just went offline. My left neck has stopped twitching.
