Last night.
It was in the ’40s, in Vancouver.
There was a large Chinese community hall where gambling was going on but a young woman was going to be married there so the family cleared out all the gamblers and the gambling tables.
Now, in Dreamland, in the ’40s, in Vancouver, a young Chinese girl might be allowed to have three or four boyfriends at a time but once she’s engaged, she has to dump all of them but her intended.
So the young girl in question, who was never named in the dream, called her four boyfriends together in the hall after the gamblers were kicked out and told them she had to stop seeing them and why. They understood.
But a fifth one turns up and doesn’t want to let go - and neither does she. But the wedding’s today, there are obligations to her fiance’s family and things must be as they must be.
There’s a heartbreaking scene as they both decide she must do what’s best for the families and he leaves.
The bride’s mother comes in and starts putting up the Chinese Baroque decorations for the wedding. For some reason, she’s wearing her classical formal wedding get-up now.
I finally enter the scene as a character, rather than merely the observer.
I am a middle-aged Chinese woman, a priestess or wizardess of some sort, in full regalia, and as the bride’s mother finishes each of the decorations, I am wandering around with a small bowl of holy-water, splashing a bit on each object around the room by raising my hand just so with a practiced twist and a jerk to let just the right amount of water splash out.
Suddenly I move around a wide pillar up through which a dumb-waiter runs, to find that the side of it is a floor to ceiling mirror - I realize that this large room is also used for a Chinese dance school.
I shout out “Nobody told me there would be mirrors! I have to start all over again!”
The bride says “I have a mirror in my trunk.”
I say harshly “Everybody has a fucking mirror in their trunk!”
Everybody, the bride, her mother, the Chinese ladies helping her, all look at me in shock at my language. The observer part of me realizes that the priestess just shouldn’t be swearing, but she has reason to be upset at not knowing about the mirrors.
It turns out that there are other pillars with mirrors on them and even some on the walls behind wedding hangings and banners.
I tell the mother to send out kids and bridesmaids to check the whole building, the bathrooms, the offices, even the drug store and let me know where all the mirrors are.
I’m not happy at having to start all over again.
Now I usually have great dreams, usually science-fiction or fantasy epics, sometimes involving flying (at which point I almost always think ‘Thank god, I thought I could only do this when I was dreaming…’) but this is one of the most vivid and internally consistent I have had for a long time.
I had one a few months ago that was quite startling too.
There was an extraordinary ancient city in the mountainous deserts of Cental Asia, with domes of both the Muslim and Russian style, with high walls and broad streets.
I knew that the walls were made of porcelain and the domes were made of paper, because long ago, God had granted the city the blessing that it would never be conquered, why I never learned.
The ruler was called the Soltano, and he was looking for something called the Soltano’s Lyrica, about which he asked all travellers and merchants, including me, but about which I knew nothing, including what it was.
That’s all I remembered, but I loved the imagery.
I’m going to do something writing-wise with both dreams but I don’t know what yet…
