The World Dream Bank: Whose Dream Was It?

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Whose Dream Was It?

Dreamed 2008/10/18 by Chris Wayan

Image from a dream by Wayan: A yin-yang symbol in which the two halves are the Rising Sun flag of the Japanese Empire, and the peace sign.

We journey so far, so long. My family's
almost forty years younger; I'm fifteen.
But it's '38, not '68, and we're Chinese
fleeing the Japanese Army. Refugees
from the Empire of the Sun. Hop trains
til we acquire (don't ask!) a Volkswagen van.
Crawls on and on. I flinch when planes
buzz by: will they strafe or bomb?
Though they only watch, so far.
We drive to California. Peach orchards sprawl.
At last, across the sky, a wide steel smile.
Not the Golden Gate; we're in the Delta still.
Gate to the southeast Bay--Fremont, Sunol.
Silver the next bridge--four towers, three spans.
But no groved islet, tunnel-pierced: a mere
prelude to the true Bay Bridge. Near, near,
but not yet home. A journey of ten thousand days
(so long; so far) ends in a single pace
(O please) to peace. We long.
I wake from the dream on a terrace bench.
Crowds and tables--a college's opening day.
Up walks my mom. I blurt, half adream,
"I had an endless nightmare--we were all
refugees from hordes of the Rising Sun."
She gasps "You really are psychic!
You know your father always swore
he never saw blood in that Pacific war,
but weeks now, he wakes from dreams of fire
yelling every dawn." So Dad's alive again!
Though a memory-haunted man. But when
are we? He lives; the twentieth century, then.
One silver decade back (unless the multi-span
meant two or three. Unsure.) But I agree
my nightmare journey clearly was
spillover from his dreams of war. That date
was all wrong for me, but back in '38
Dad really was fifteen. And then...
I wake for real. Again. This time I'm sure.
I'm home, in the City of Peace. So far.
Image from a dream by Wayan: Not-quite-right Bay Bridge and skyline of San Francisco from Yerba Buena Island; the sun is a peace sign.

"Whose Dream Was It?" is from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, in which Alice is unsure if her adventures are her own dream or the Red King's--a problem I share.
Fleeing the Imperial Japanese Army: I knew someone who was a kid in Shanghai when the Japanese invaded. No, not J.G. Ballard, my fellow painter Edith. China had plenty more kids. Trauma for all!
Flinch at planes: despite my peacetime childhood, I do. Where'd I learn? Or should I say when? See ancestral memories below.
Southern Delta: the news yesterday had maps of the southern Delta; how it is now versus a century ago.
San Francisco: for me, the city of world peace. And where I was born. I live there now... physically. But in my dreams I'm not quite there. What is this shadowy war still haunting me?
Wake up screaming from war memories: my mom says her father had lifelong screaming nightmares. A pacifist, he'd volunteered to drive an ambulance in World War One on the Italian front. But my dad was in the Pacific theater in World War Two... as a supply clerk who never saw combat. No one on either side of the family was a war refugee.
Spillover: The follow-up dream on the terrace suggest my current illness may be family spillover. My sister Miriel's been suffering weird inflammations too, my mom has a rare lung disease, and my dad's ghost could be trying to get me to change something--or if you dislike literal ghosts, maybe I'm haunted by guilt--I didn't visit my dad much when he was dying.
Am I channeling ancestral memories? Helen Wambach did a series of experiments in past-life regression. She found many American baby-boomers under hypnosis described being Chinese killed by the Japanese in the 1930s (though few of her subjects consciously knew much of this pre-phase of WW2--American schooling neglects the Chinese Holocaust). The after-dream hints I may be one such, reincarnating in San Francisco after the war that killed me. And that my odyssey is from refugee-fears to peace.
ACTION: Take heart! The hippie bus of peace is slow, but patiently crawls on.
This is Dreamverse #35. A dream-poem a week as I can't handle them daily. Too harrowing. Yet I crawl on...

LISTS AND LINKS: I'm Just Not Myself Today! - Age-bent dreams - Race-bent dreams - war - outcasts and refugees - false waking - my mom, Marcella - pseudo-psychic dreams - revenants - my dad Jerry - dreams about dreams - clocks and time-measures - time travel - reincarnation - San Francisco - poetry - Dreamverse series - the next Dreamverse time-travels too: The Chaparral of Time -

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