A Mishmash Dream
In the dream, my sister had asked me to go to the cinema to get tickets for a movie. I asked her how many tickets, and she said two. When she said it, somehow in the dream, I knew who she was going with – there were images of her going to her office to ask someone there to go with her.
At the cinema, I book the tickets which my sister would pick up later. I remember wondering what name to book the tickets under as I hadn’t asked her – her husband’s or her own? Later, after waking and thinking back, it felt like I didn’t actually tell the person but the decision was to use my sister’s.
For some reason, at this point in the dream, I’m back at the house to pick up my wallet.
The whole atmosphere of the dream is a throwback to before 1990. The cinema is one near my father’s old shop, very popular in the old days, but closed down sometime after 1990 and made into two mini cinemas and later a mini-market (go figure). However, the wallet that I picked up to go and pay the tickets with in the dream is the exact wallet I’m using now (in real life). And what about the house from where I picked up the wallet? It was never clear in the dream – not as clear as the cinema – but I suspect, given the mood of the dream, that would be the shop that I was born and grew up in, the one in the seediest of neighbours, Chow Kit.
A mishmash dream, with past and present images. I’m still very much anchored in the past, which is both good and bad. Without the past, there’d be no present or future. But too much in the past and it has bogged me down, making me unable to give my best in the present and move on to the future.
It’s getting better, tho. I used to dream about the shop all the time. In my dreams, if home was featured, it was the Chow Kit shop, with all the details there, nothing mixed up with the present.
We’d moved out of the shop at the end of 1991, and for almost 10 years, it was what appeared in my dreams whenever I dreamt of home. Home for me, for many years, was that shop in Chow Kit. Not surprising, since that was where I was born – in one of the rooms on the first floor – and where I grew up and lived for many years. By the time I left for England in 1986, the Chow Kit shop was the only home I knew in all my 28 years. So is it surprising that far from home in England, and later the States, I would wake up and feel as if I’m home in my own bed and the layout of the room was of the one back home?
The Chow Kit shop no longer dominates my dreams. And if this dream is anything to go by, I’m finally moving on. A mishmash of past and present memories and images. I would not want to let go completely of my past, tho. It’s what shaped me today.
