Week 28: Dreamscapes and nightmares.

a few nights ago, i had a sort-of nightmare. i call it a sort-of nightmare because it had none of the horrific and terrifying fantastic elements. there were no monsters, no running away, no nothing. it was just a normal dream where i dreamt i was doing normal average every day stuff - but when i woke up from it, it terrified me. immensely.

you see, i dreamt that i was back in school. i was wearing my bright blue school uniform and i was in class. it was English and we were all required to read out passages from a book. now, my bright blue uniform would indicate that my dream took place in secondary school, however, the English teacher sitting in front at the desk was none other than my standard 5 English teacher, Miss Lee. she always reminded me of Elizabeth I, for some odd reason. maybe it was her heavily powdered face, or extremely fair and white hands, or her incredibly curly (kerinting like maggi mee) shortish hair, OR THE FACT THAT SHE WAS SINGLE. she was very fierce, but somehow i was always in her good books. i remember her praising me for my fluency in English, and how i was adept in the language - and mind you, to an impressionable 11-year-old keen to please and impress, this was extremely high-praise. especially coming from someone who seemed like Elizabeth I.

back to the dream, we were sitting in class and reading out passages from a book - and suddenly she says, Melanie, i want you to read out the next 3 paragraphs (Ed: now that i'm writing this out, i remember one of the exercises she made us do during standard 5 English classes was to read out stories from a book - WHICH I LOVED). the person that had been reading before me handed me the book, but it fell out of my hand and i lost the page.

suddenly, it felt like i had an anxiety attack. i couldn't remember the page number yet i was too embarrassed to raise my hand to ask Miss Lee which page we had been on. and so, i started to fumble and flip pages over and over. all i could remember was the last sentence the person before me had read out - That Bastard Was Blue. i start flipping the pages over and over and scanning each page for those two words - Blue and Bastard, but i couldn't find them!

after what seemed like forever, Miss Lee raised her eyes and looked at me and said, Come on, read it out. and then i eventually muttered something like, i don't know what page we stopped at, teacher. i could feel the disapproval in her eyes and suddenly i felt like i had failed her. however, she quickly righted me back to where i was supposed to commence reading, and so i started.

and that was when tragedy struck.

to my horror, i could not read the paragraphs at all. the words seemed to blur into each other, some of them were half printed and most of them were just incomprehensible repetitive sounds. i faltered and started stuttering and stammering through the text, just trying to make out what each word was. there was no structure and no grammar to each sentence - they seemed like a mash of words hastily put together. and here i was, reading them out like a 2-year-old dyslexic learning to talk for the first time. to put it plainly, i was horrified. surely this stammering, stuttering and faltering incomprehensible fool could not be me!

all this while i was conscious of what was going on. my cheeks were burning red and the embarrassment was so acute that it actually felt real and not something occurring in dreamscapes!

as i finished reading out the last word, i woke up. and by god, was i terrified! there aren't many things constant in my life - everything is fluid and changes beyond my control. money comes and goes. happiness comes and goes. health comes and goes. friends come and go. situations. opportunities. experiences. even my parents, who are the most constant things in my life, will eventually go, therefore, i can't say that they're constant after all (paradox). but my grasp of english, along with my love pillows, is one of the constant things in my life. my ability to speak it, to understand it, to use it whenever and however i want to, to impress, to amaze, to make myself coherant, to convey ideas. in that dream, it felt like i've lost one of the very few things constant in my life.

and that to me, is the most terrifying thing of all. that very moment when i was stuttering my way through a simple 9-line paragraph was the most helpless i've ever felt myself to be.