Beemouse Laboratories

I realized that even when the artists whose blogs I follow don’t write about their art, I still appreciate knowing what’s going on in their lives. So here:

I am heading into the last week of finals for this quarter’s Medical Assisting classes, and today was the first day in a while I got to sleep in as late as I want. I had the following dream (much, much edited… if I included all the details, it would bore the living daylights out of you, even as it fascinated me):

I dreamed I was stuck in a world much like our own, but it wasn’t the same, and I wanted to get back home. Occasionally random people would appear in this alternate world, like I had, disorientated and not knowing how they arrived. The people who lived in this alternate world had eventually accepted the appearances as ordinary, as they had been happening for a long time. After my arrival, I had begun to make friends, but I was still a strange outsider (I couldn’t stop talking about all the things I remembered from home, or all the things that surprised me in their world), and I was very lonely.

This world was governed by a distinguished couple, a beautiful man and woman in their 40s, maybe a King and a Queen. They were always accompanied by two albino twins, conjoined at the neck, also male and female. The twins were young, about 6 years old, and they always gazed on the King and Queen with these beatific, loving, innocent child smiles. Those little twins scared some of the residents. I found out that the twins had actually given birth to the man and the woman, but no one would tell me how. The twins never spoke.

In their world, they were under a sort of martial law, and I was drafted to help protect some assets. I was trying hard to keep up with everyone, running drills, lifting things, following orders, but I kept falling behind, and desperately wanted to be back in my own world where I belonged and I was good at something.

I talked to the King and the Queen, and they told me in secret that there actually was a way to get back home, but few people undertook the journey and succeeded. What I would have to do was follow a road, made of yellow brick, for a long, long time, until I reached…

At this point, I interrupted them excitedly. “Wait– I will travel on this yellow brick road for a long time, and eventually reach a big city, where a special man with great powers lives, who can tell me how to get back home?” They were stunned, and I told them that in the world where I came from, there was a legend about this man– and it turns out he is a fake. I told them the story of the Wizard of Oz, and all the dangers that the characters in the story experienced, and then when I reached the end of the story– the part where it turns out that the characters really did get the things they were looking for, I burst into tears. I realized that I might never get home, but I would still probably learn valuable things alone the journey.

There the real plot of the dream ended, with some bizarre arguments between real-life characters, overflowing toilets, and strange animals– the standard– and I woke up at 2pm with a migraine.

The feeling that stuck with me the most was the astonishment I felt when I realized that a fiction in my world was a complete, serious reality in theirs– And the sadness I felt when I realized I may never make it home, but still had to make good with the lessons I learned on the journey.

Embroidered butterflies, Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Chinese Garden, Vancouver, BC, 2006