Wasabi Dreams

The first rule of writing: no dreams. It’s pretty creepy, first of all, to read about an 80-year-old ghost sporting a lavender flamenco dress to your mother’s second wedding. I mean, we like imagination, but there’s such a thing as someone’s imagination making you cock your head “hunh” before trying to steer the conversation to a scene of a cracked blue bowl on the table and what that symbolizes for their (get it, flawed) marriage. What I’m saying is that dreams are heavy-handed. They’re too easy to wield, and it generally comes across as a little too convenient, in writing, that the narrator dreams about a herd of horses roaming free across the plains and then the next day they inherit a ranch from an uncle who was trampled by a stallion. Or, OR they fall into the pit of sticky metaphorical writing that tangles around your head like octopus tentacles and wrenches your gaze HERE and HERE and THERE so you spend two single-spaced pages reading about someone who spent eight years cutting asparagus tips into rosettes or a pregnant woman’s musings that she’ll end up like the rabbit, her 4th grade class pet, who eats its young.

Speaking of rabbits. I’ve assigned the first chapter of Alice in Wonderland (Alice in a Strange Land in Japanese) as a reading assignment for the Natural English class. In the first few paragraphs–the ones I pantomimed in class–a rabbit in a waistcoat scampers up the bank, brushes past Alice’s skirt, and she just calmly peeps over her sister’s shoulder at a boring book and contemplates weaving a daisy chain. Then, the rabbit takes watch out of his pocket and suddenly Alice is thinking, “hey wait a second…” and I must have lapsed into a narcoleptic sleep because my memory here fades to black and we wake up to a scene of a white hamster running across dark oak floorboards. I know I must catch the little critter–he has escaped from The Rabbit Slayer’s cage, I am sure–and just as I cup my hands over his blindingly white body he suddenly disappears from my grasp, and I’m left standing like a confused magician with nothing up my sleeve.

My dreams lately have been thinly disguised re-runs of my daily life. A few years ago I was being chased through the streets of a foreign land, Godzilla-style, by an angry gorilla. Or I was hiding in a birdcage, hoping a T-Rex dinosaur wouldn’t sniff me out. And now I’M the one doing the chasing, chasing a delicate-boned creature I could strangle with my bare hands, just like Alice from the story. I wish I could report there was more blue smoke and gilded mirrors to the dream, but it was just so plain and boring. Me chasing a mouse. If this was The Rabbit Slayer’s dream it surely would involve an arrow caked in red blood, a jar on hand for pickling the rabbit’s heart, but his boring sister has taken a page out of the famous Steinbeck and just wants a pretty, pretty mouse to pet.

Apparently, I am also responsible for the well-being of the students. Which one would think is a great responsibility given their daily routines of no sleep and coffee and the thought of homework creasing their delicate foreheads like elephant’s skin. And yet it’s as simple as this: Ryosuke, the debate master, and I are hanging out after school one day when I realize he’s looking both clammy and he’s speaking complete gibberish (which connects nicely with the Alice in a Strange Land dream). I put my palm on his forehead and he’s burning hot to the touch so I say, “let’s to go the nurse.” And we do. My job, my cerebral cortex is telling me, is to sniff out illness like a bloodhound, and present my findings to the nurse who once let me put a thermometer meant for armpits in my mouth.

I live on an island, and a few nights ago I dreamed I fell in love with a lifeguard who saved people with superpowers from drowning. He pulled a crazy woman out of the water who screamed I was standing on her neck even though I was three feet away from her legs. My father, in the dream, insisted I write a book about these crazy times we live in, and suggested I give myself superpowers. Naturally I chose to fly, and then in thinking about the other power I decided it would be best to take away people’s powers, such as this woman’s crazy mind. So I squeezed my eyes shut, pointed my palms at her and yelled, “WASABI!!!”

May the power of the green Japanese radish be with you also, Amen.