I dream a lot. I know technically, we humans all dream when we’re asleep and it’s just a matter of whether you remember it or not. Still, I reinforce: I dream a lot.
Some of my dreams are bizarre in an inexplicable way, some are so vivid and immersive that I can’t stop replaying it in my head throughout the day. For such dreams that evoke an emotional response, I would like to share it with people and naively believe they’d be interested too, but I’ve failed every single time.
Sharing dreams are hard. Unlike real experiences, which we forge into a story form that consists of a proper setup, escalation, and twist in an intriguing way, dreams are literally up in the sky and out of our control.
Because dreams are non-logical, non-sequential, with lack of a kind-hearted narrator to fill us in, it’s hard for the teller to reconstruct, and also hard for the listener to capture the whole picture. It’s against how our brain pieces information together.
Simply put, dreams are unshareable.
Sure, we’ve got the powerful weapon when it comes to storytelling, “exaggeration.” We can choose to sprinkle some secret hot sauce to our dreams to increase its entertainment value. But I would know I’m cheating. Eventually, it’s me trying to share the experience, I may still cut some trivial clips, but I don’t want to decrease its legitimacy or lie.
Despite these natural flaws and how meaningless my dreams are to you, I’d still like to take on the challenge. Zero exaggerating guaranteed™, you have my word, but note that there will be no climax or closure or any forms of those things.
So here we go.
First one was an eerie happening. Two giant battleships suddenly appeared in the sky, as if they just blinked from other galaxies, some electronical particles were still left in its trail. Amazingly the battleships share 90% similarity to the Terran Battlecruiser of Starcraft (lucky me, I got the chance to see it “real.”)
People looked above fearfully, for a few seconds, the battleships just hung in there like the alien’s ship in the movie Arrival. All of a sudden, the ships started shooting the ground. I couldn’t believe it until I saw bridges, buildings, and people getting smashed by its laser beams. I could feel my heart pounding so hard, “OMG it’s really happening. Who are they?! Why are they doing this?!”
I tried to run, but got trapped by the laser beams, somehow it didn’t hit me but only around me, as if it wanted to keep me alive on purpose. I thought I was done.
The end.
The second one, unfortunately, involved one of my innocent female coworker/friend. As bizarre as it can be, I saw her in my dream half naked (and thank god, she was blurry). She didn’t say anything, she was just standing there, half naked.
Naturally, as you can imagine, I raised my hands (but hold on your imagination there), and flashed her my wedding ring and said in an emotionless tone: “sorry I’m a married man”, as if I were to speak the secret code to bypass a speech recognition system and unlock a door or something. It all happened within 3 seconds.
The end.
(Okay this is the last one, hope you are still there.)
It was my least comfortable setting. I was like the little yellow man in Google Maps, got dragged around involuntarily by an evil-minded kid, and just to screw with me, he dropped me to a random place on Earth. Then I opened my eyes. I was in the middle of a busy crowd, which was rushing towards the buildings ahead.
“Where are we going?” I grabbed one guy nearby and asked.
“To the exam, yo!” He shouted as if it was too obvious.
“What.. what? What exam? Where am I?” I panicked.
Then I realized, I was carrying a shoulder bag, and somehow I knew I would find a paper clue that would tell me which classroom to go take the exam, for which I knew nothing about! Why on Earth did I end up like this? What was I doing the whole semester? Where did the time go? It didn’t add up, how could I possibly remember nothing?!
I entered the classroom while scratching my head with all kinds of questions, then I realized: I didn’t even have a pen to take the test.
The end.