Entry 83

Written at 8:43am, Saturday, 09 May 2020:

I’m sitting at a table with peregrinos from SK in last year’s camino. Z had some sort of tablet in front of him. I’m not sure if he’s watching something or taking notes. He tells me of his experiences of racism as an asian in Europe. I feel bad for him and try to tell him the following story. But he disappears and now D is a little girl called Betty. I tell her this story, with me simulating the main villain, a kid with a secret in his hand. He shows it to his friend to his left, then to his right. Then he calls Betty and was about to show her what’s in his hand, asking her, you wanna see? She nods yes. He’s about to show her but then shuts his hands closed, tells her no, she doesn’t get to see it because she’s Chinese and Asian. I remember deliberately saying , Chinese, deliberately making this mistake because I knew she’s not Chinese, because in my mind in the dream I was trying to teach her. Betty runs into a little play-house, hides. I try to tell ask her what “gift” the boy left her, but she doesn’t come. I fear she doesn’t understand the story. I wonder why I even did this simulation, now I traumatized her again because I thought she’s experienced this before. I reached out to her, asked her to come closer. She sits to my right. I still ask her what the kid left her, somehow expecting her to read between the lines, to see the subtext of the story, that even if the kid-character, me playing the villainous kid didn’t show her anything, I still left her with this painful memory of humiliation and unbelonging. When I woke up I thought, how stupid of me to this to a kid in a stupid round-about way, and I wasn’t even teaching her anything, just showing off the artifice of a story. . .

Next dream: Sitting in the passenger seat of our van with my mom driving. She’s getting the car out of the garage. There are towers of stacked up papers and boxes, and my mom maneuvers the van around these towers and out of the garage. . .

Then I’m in some supermarket buying a bottle of wine. A clerk tells me to buy the expensive one. I kind of chastise him and say I don’t need the expensive one.

Then I’m at some park snipping or at first trimming the beard off of my chin. I see my face as an old man, like a homeless man, all grey, shaggy. I snip the hair close to the skin and start to see the short hair looks all black again.