Panicking, I scrambled to dodge bullets in the middle of a student slaughter in a contemporary museum. It was Battle Royale on steroids. Men in army green combat uniforms were sweeping the floor with their rifles. Students in white uniforms were running like flies. In a matter of seconds, the white shirts turned maroon. The bodies piled on the ground, lifeless.
I don’t recall how I reached an elevator and escaped the bloodbath. The elevator went upward and reopened on the 12th floor, the administrative office. Another round of bullets could be waiting as the doors opened. The military could have infiltrated the whole building. Death awaited on the other side of the doors.
Ding.
The doors opened. Two ladies behind the front desk were simply staring at their screens, unaware of what I had just survived. Quiet. It was business as usual.
My vision flashed to the museum’s entrance. Tour groups were still marveling at the paintings on the second floor. Business as usual.
Just outside of the building, the troops encircled the museum and more of them were rushing in. There was no way out.
Help.
I screamed in desperate silence, and I woke up, drenched in sweat.
The dream haunted me for days after. It wasn’t my first nightmare of the week, and it wasn’t the last.
I don’t sleep well in New York. I could never feel energized whenever I came home for a brief stopover. Only this time around I was determined to stay longer, for better or worse. During the first month, dreams of plane crashes were the norm. It was just a flight anxiety hangover, I thought, a good excuse to stop flying for awhile. Then, the nightmares slowly evolved into a murder, a witch-hunt, a massacre.
But I never witnessed my own death — even after the plane had crashed into a skyscraper — even though death was the only certainty. I’ve only seen the physical objects fracturing into pieces, the moment shattering into fragments. What came after was a void, or my consciousness — let’s call it consciousness for the lack of vocabulary. In the end, I had awakened to what we call the real world.
Is it real? My nightmares almost shared the same force of reality, bolstered by the vividness of details and the extreme of emotions. In my dreams, I’ve died a thousand times, yet I don’t know any better about death than I know about life. These two subjects have both become, to me, as familiar as they’re perplexing.
I’m living between deaths, dreaming between lives.
Or,
less poetically,
I’m trapped in New York pursuing life and routine, but my mind still travels.
