Carpets of Grass

I used to have this dream where I’m on a bus with a bunch of dead Korean high school students. These students’ eyes are open and blinking, their hair parts with the wind passing through the windows, and their ties follow the movements of their breathing patterns. A stale, cigarette smell overtakes the bus’s interior. The sky outside is gray and somber, yet cloudless, and carries a pulse with it—more like a ripple as if it were a small pond in a gutter with a child mechanically dropping pebbles into it. The students make no sound aside from the shuffling of their legs.

It was always the same thing. I get on the bus, look for an open seat, end up standing somewhere, awkwardly, and realize that they’re all dead. Even though they’re moving and their eyes are open, and sometimes their lips part and a sliver of saliva may get stuck in the space between, I know they’re dead. They know it too. And they look at me in this depressed, annoyed, get-over-yourself kind of way. Like I shouldn’t be surprised.

I absentmindedly stand there and shuffle through my phone, feigning normality. This goes on for some time, and then it gets cold, and I can see the wind blow through and this kind of animation takes form of the wind that gives it this old, Disney Christmas Carol-looking feel. The wind swirls around in circles throughout the bus, passing the students’ faces. They look cold and miserable and ice starts to cling onto their lips and eyebrows, but I never sense fear. How could they be afraid when they’re already dead? I didn’t think this in my dream.

Eventually I get off the bus and take a seat on the nearest bench, at which point I’m met by an old woman with her back bent like a boomerang. She offers me some rice-cake and when I refuse she shoves it into my mouth and it slides down to my belly. She walks away and I think that’s the end of it, but then the rice-cake starts talking to me. It starts telling me that I just watched those kids suffering and did nothing about it. I try to answer but I can’t talk. The cake swells up and I get a feeling of what should be pain inflating into my stomach. I eventually wake up out of panic, feeling like an awful teacher, and get into the shower to start my day.

I was nearly late to work the first time I had the dream. My co-worker agreed that it all sounded pretty strange. She’s good at this dream thing—thinks they’re mad-important— and watches the moon patterns and all that stuff. I once asked her about new ideas for our kindergarten’s event day. She told me to “take a walk some place.”

“Somewhere quiet and inspiring. Or try meditating to open your second chakra point.”

“My second what?”
“Your second chakra point.” She then proceeded to point to her vagina. “It might not work entirely, but it should help get your creative juices flowing.”

She went on to talk about how these different chakra points, seven or eight total, govern the range of our physical, emotional, and spiritual capabilities. Any given chakra point, she said, is like a spinning vortex that allows energy—white light—to run through it. White light is a universal force, she said, like God. If the chakra point is blocked, then no white light gets in, and our potential becomes thwarted. Whenever she’s feeling unimaginative she gets naked, sparks some candles, spreads this oil over herself, and meditates for as long as she needs—all the while focusing all her energy on the center of the second chakra point (a.k.a. her vagina).

So when I told her about this dream, she had plenty to talk about. It’s about a change in beliefs or new ideas, a sudden shift in life. A new adventure, a new crush, a getting over something, a forgetting, a remembering, a learning to remember, a manifestation, an entry into something unexpected, something different. I sat back and nodded my head as she got weirdly into it, her eyes growing wider and body language becoming more and more animated… as if she were talking about a delicious meal or a vacation or a [insert hedonistic indulgence].

But none of what she said really made sense, at least not in any immediate kind of way. The more I tried to mold her response to match my feelings, the more I realized how little the exchange was going to help.

I brushed off the conversation as best I could and went upstairs, into the madness. Kids were building cities with blocks, rolling their cars in the grass-looking carpet, jumping on, and hanging on and torturing stuffed animals, and were generally doing whatever they wanted with little regard to the effects and consequences of their actions.

Some of them read or aimlessly walked around with their tongues sticking out of their mouths. Some clung on to the hands of teachers they trusted. The ones who they latched onto that very first day, when mom and dad left them at the door.

There are kids who manage as if they were meant, all along, to be in school. They get along with their peers, organize games, are enthusiastic about pleasing the teacher, and generally act like they run the place. It’s almost intimidating.

And then there are the criers—the ones who’d never be in class and took naps when they wanted. It had been like that for at least two weeks—their first two weeks in what would become a long, sometimes treacherous road that is education.

There are the criers who are naturally criers. They cried as they came out of the womb, they cried on the way home from the hospital, they cried in the crib, the park, the movie theater, the restaurant, on grandpa’s lap, at the grocery store and, at that time, in the kindergarten. Among this group of criers, however, there is a very small sub-set of criers. The ones who do well in school and social settings and are somewhat independent… but have somehow internalized the transition in a more acute fashion.

There was this kid. He was really young, maybe three years old, and I hadn’t seen him in my class at all since the beginning of the new semester. Reason being that, if he wasn’t asleep or crying, he was calmly sitting at his “spot.” His spot was this green couch that he’d established as his second home.

When I walked up to him, he gave me a short glance before looking away. He’d focus in on this wall beside him as if there were something holy about it. Regardless of how many times I said his name or jingled toys in his face, he wouldn’t turn my way. He sat there, red and glossy-eyed, cheeks glaring, lips quivering, his face twisted like thin ice ready to crack, and kept his eyes to the wall.

When I saw him sitting there it reminded me of a stool near a sandbox that my dad left me on years ago. I remembered the feeling. The rage, confusion, hatred, sadness and contempt for the world. The stool, for whatever reason, did me justice. It was something that I had a say in, a way to exercise my will. Something tangible I could hold onto when everything around me was crumbling. As if the only thing we can do to remember our autonomy, when most powerless, is crystallized into an act of defiance.

When I saw this kid, sitting there, alone, confused, potentially hurt (albeit naturally), I wanted to think of it as a moment of development. One of his first transitions into the world, a growing pain. But all I could see, if I’m being honest, was his graduation, and the hours he was going to put into the after school programs, and the tests, and the lack of sleep, until he was old enough to take the bus, and sit there in his coat and tie, glazing at his phone, zombie-eyed, at 10 p.m., knowing he has to go home, study, wake up in six hours (if he’s lucky) and do it all over again.

I felt some kids come up to me and jump on my back. They reminded me that there were other students aside from this quiet, intuitive little man. I played with them, and they laughed, and I laughed, and they’re just kids, like the kids back home. I got a hint of the truth that we’re all the same deep down. Just before I gaffed and used an improper conjugation with my director. Before I buggered off and stood in front of a whiteboard for a few hours, and eventually got on a bus where no one was dead but were, on the contrary, all quite alive. Some were even happy, laughing, holding hands with their affectionate other. Tired, sure, but surviving. I finally got home and tried to hone my inner white-light before realizing that I was sitting alone, naked, concentrating all my energy on my genitals, and with a sigh rolled into bed, switched off the lights and fell asleep.

If I was lucky enough, I didn’t remember my dreams. But when I did, I wouldn’t know how to validate them or brush them off as some signifying-nothing-metaphor, or an over-exaggeration, but would, nonetheless, keep wondering.

I’d keep wondering, every day, what it all meant.