dream (10 hours) but it's raining inside

by Jennifer Nguyen

Despite living in unordinary times, you will continue to dream about ordinary things. Dream about missing things: flights, exams, appointments, him. Dreaming about failing. Falling. Dream about running and not being able to.

It is hard to write about something while you are in the middle of it. Your past has always presided over the present.

You check the same forum thread every day. Once before bed, and once more just after waking. Sometimes, while brushing teeth. Sometimes, while taking a shit. By the end of it you feel like shit so you mentally commit to checking less. If everything was difficult before then it is merely different–difficult now. Limbo has not been healthy for you. You feel sicker than ever. In the midst of an absent-mind, you write:

If I was a bee I’d get drunk every night on the honey my hive makes.

I’d invite the queen to my room. There is only one thing I want to ask her:

Whether the fact our abdominal tracts rupture when we sting someone

a karmic punishment? … If so: who, or what were we in our past lives?

And––to please stroke my head and whisper the unspeakable deed into my ear

as I drift into dreams.

… see what I mean?

Perhaps it is a side effect of always trimming your nails too close. Of always arriving too early. Or not arriving at all, even if your body may have already.

Who are you when you yourself are not looking?

Not all is lost. The edible flowers took over the garden. Now everything is edible.

Not all is lost. Work gets done still. In bed. Some in dreams. Others in death. Still.

Over the past few weeks you’ve come to realise that a spider builds between the dream and the dreamer. The silk thread so quiet and thin it is almost invisible, except when the light hits just right … yes … mmhm, just so. But any other time, it is barely visible, so you conclude:

There is little difference between the dream and the dreamer

as one easily becomes the other.

If I have a dream about existing in a town full of crows where the fog rolls in with the tolling of the morning bell what does that make me, the dreamer(?); if I were to say to you that the dream was not eerie, but somewhat of a comfort(?) Because we are used to it: that particular coldness. You would’ve been scared, except in the dream, your amygdala had been replaced with an almond. Mum always buys almonds raw. She bakes them in the oven until there is a burnt smell circulating in the air. Too busy to rescue anything. She uses a rolling pin to separate the charred skin from the amygdala inside. At times the cracking sound is nostalgic, like a wound reopening. Other times it is a balm. But it is never both at once.

During this time, you commit to the following sentiments:

I don’t need to be loved. I want to be known, if only by one person.
My fingers are unnaturally bent from all the wishes I’ve sent into the ether.
Nothing I write is very good, but at least, I meant what I said, when I said what I said.

During the height of the early chaos you don’t see your dentist. Too dangerous, several people who care about you say. Which results in you dreaming about him.

In the dream,

He says your teeth are near-perfect. (This is how you know it’s a dream and not real life.)
You meet for drinks.
Your teeth have been aching because you are perpetually clenching them.
With your shoulders touching cutely he’ll ask what you’re so worried about.
You gesture about vaguely, somewhat tipsy, dying cigarette in hand.
There are many things to feel worried about. None of which are important now.
You tell him about a revelation you came upon.
It came to you during a week where you ate nothing and drank nothing but camomile tea.
How the world is a game show. And all the options were correct.
A person could win big prize money but the only thing they could buy were more problems.
Like how our bodies don’t regenerate perfectly. Just replaced by scar tissue and more scar tissue.
Which is why, when the option to move your consciousness into a robotic body appeared, you signed up fast, the list already long. Brimming to the edge filled with people who also wanted a robotic body. One that’ll never age but would likely rust in the rain.
Putting your name down on a long list made you think of how everyone used to line up for the newest iPhone. Nowadays the newest iPhone is downloaded straight into our bodies. No lines needed.
These days we don’t wait for anything anymore.
Especially not death.
Somewhere there is a supercomputer making everything run.
Run forward.
Backwards.
Smoothly.
Not so smoothly.
The supercomputer becomes/is our collective mother.
Happy supercomputermother’s day!
Most days she is calling us down for dinner.
One day, she cooks our favourite dish. It may not be perfect but it is distinct. We know without having to be told it is made by her, for us. And no matter how heinous the crime either of us commits afterwards.
The dish alone remains sacred.

During this heightened time, your conscience will say to you:

Listen to me when I speak

Nobody cares about you

More than I do

At times the search bar remains empty. You think the blinking cursor is a curse. You do not know what you want. You do not know what you are searching for.

Some nights you wake up for no discernible reason at all. Sometimes in need of water. Sometimes too filled to the brim with water, like you had been submerged in your sleep. In a universe, somewhere, the following statement holds true for you: If I lose my head, then I can simply just find a new, better head.

Time is turning. The clouds are cheering for you. And sometimes, they weep.

You shuffle a deck until your fingers grow new fingers. Ask a question until you’ve forgotten the question. Both new and old routines teach you about yourself. I know: it’s frightening seeing yourself for who you really are. So … you read. At one point, you thought your life might be a movie for the divine. So unbelievable it could only be fiction. A movie theatre of sleeping angels all bored to death. Doesn’t matter. So long as the target audience is entertained.

You bide time by laughing. Deflect by leaving. At the supermarket, you impulse buy some lip-gloss that’s 40% off. That day you had a desire. A need for rebirth. You announced it to anyone who would listen while drinking morning coffee at the kitchen table. You said:

I want to be an indispensable cog in a helpful machine.

I want to be the mechanism that tells you it’s all just a bad dream.

You’ve been having eye troubles lately. You’ve been seeing life for what it really is. Or: what it isn’t. What it will never be. Everything is always black and white with you that’s how you get hurt easily. You buy expensive noise-cancelling headphones. Realise it doesn’t help when the noise comes from within.

You’ve noticed that you stand in a way where you are always bracing for impact. On the news, it said: a plane lands every one second, but not anymore. A plane lands every second but not anymore therefore everything is a construction: this piece of writing; that persona; ten years worth of recurring dreams; ten years worth of recurring conversations. All constructions conversations can be disassembled.

For instance: “Doesn’t womb sound a lot like wound?”

An important lesson you’ll learn during this time is that what some consider waste the garden will eat and flourish. One day the sky will be pink and orange. You’ll witness it and for once not be asleep. Maybe you’ll cry. Maybe you’ll disguise crying with having just showered but you fool no one. Your mother will say nothing is easy, but nothing has to be hard either and I think it is very obvious whenever you cry, so … just cry. ‘Numb’ is too high a compliment for what you are feeling right now, so in order to rectify that we will now ask you to return to your seat and I will take over from here.

Tonight, the tiles are ice

but it is better than those nights where I can’t feel the tiles at all.

Some games don’t explain the rules as soon as they begin.

I hate those games the most.

The postperson said I live in a strange place: no power lines in sight.

I said I never noticed.

The day plays more tricks on my mind than the night ever will

which is why I prefer night. But! I like seeing the moon during the day.

I get the same high as when I find a half-folded potato chip.

I ordered hundreds of dollars of stationery and felt like I knew

what the word ‘resuscitation’ might mean.

My mother says I feel too much, it becomes ingrained in me.

I only noticed it was autumn outside because it was autumn inside a game.

Absence made my heart duplicate itself, the second seasoned

in its recklessness as a stunt double.

For now, the drink of choice is vodka. Delicious.

Like squeezing the life out of a permanent marker.

Jennifer Nguyen is the author of the poetry collection When I die slingshot my ashes onto the surface of the moon (Subbed In, 2019). She has been published in Scum Mag, Sick Leave Journal, Meanjin blog, City of Literature Summer Series, among others, and has performed at Emerging Writers Festival, Melbourne Writers Festival and West Writers Forum. In 2019 Jennifer was awarded a Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellowship for poetry.