The Nightmares

Last night, I dreamed of attending my cousin’s funeral in Vietnam. I was not sure what exactly the cause of his death. He had family members surrounded him and prayed for him. After the monks chanted for him, they cremated him right in front of us while he was taking his last breath. It was barbaric and disturbing.

Then it was my uncle who had terminal cancer. We went through the same ritual, but I protested the cremation process while he was still breathing. Then he turned into some kind of a lighting bug straight out of James Cameron’s Avatar. His wife and kids blamed me for not letting him reincarnated into a human being. I told them I can zap the damn bug so he could be reincarnated.

The dream was so fucked up that I woke up with a chill. How did I have this dream? I didn’t take any psychedelic drugs. All I had was a can of Grapefruit Smash, which contained one-and-a-half shot of vodka and seltzer water. Fortunately, I only get these kind of dreams once in a while. If I keep getting dreams like these regularly, I might as well not sleeping at all.

When I was about five or six, I had another weird dream that stays with me until this day. I was in a playroom full of kids. There were kids sliding down the slides. There were kids crawling around the floor. There were kids on the walkers. We are all just having a great time then the adults came in chopping off the kids’ heads. One particular kid on the walker had a neck like rubber. The adult tried to chop his head, but the ax just bounced right off. I still can’t get that image out of my head even today.

In retrospect, I wonder if it has a long-lasting effect on me. Whenever I see a surgery I would get blacked out. When a doctor cut my wife’s stomach opened to take out Vương, I got blacked out and hit my head on the ground. They had to take me to the ER room to had my head checked out.