Dream

Last night I had an odd dream. It was an elaborate corridor. I was with my friends from college. It seems that we were all back to the age of 18 or 19 years old again. My friend, who was a bit chubby and very jolly, was with me, seemingly playing hide-and-seek with another two girls. Suddenly they found us - we shrieked and my friend grabbed my arm and dragged me with her and ran like crazy through the corridors. The other two girls started chasing after us. One of them was very petite and was usually very quiet and sweet, but occasionally startled us with her rebellious sparks and vivacious individuality. Her friend who was running with her was a bigger girl who I did not know very well, but I remember that she was very cheerful and considerate. That was the whole dream - the four girls screaming, laughing and running through the corridors.

When I woke up, I still could not shake off the odd feelings from the dream. Since I recently watched the movie "A Dangerous Method", I could not help but wanted to analyze my own dream a little bit. Clearly, the obvious analysis is that I have tremendous nostalgia for the days when I was much younger and more innocent, and that I envy my own son Winston for running around the house and laughing his head off, as I just did the chasing with him yesterday. There was nothing much to the chase, but it was uninhibited and unadulterated happiness, as is in Winston's case every time he starts running around, seemingly drunk with happiness.

My chubby friend who was running with me in the dream now works and lives in England for a multi-national oil and gas service company in technical management. Back in our younger days, we all thought that she was going to be married with many kids running around her, with her cooking delicious feasts for them and her friends constantly - she was an excellent cook. Now, she bosses people around, gives orders, and moves from one continent to another for her work. If anything, she now represents the classic tough professional women!

My petite friend was a star student from early on. Despite her easy-going manners, she was always incredibly driven and fairly competitive. She got a PhD from Columbia and MBA from Cornell and is working for a multi-national media company in finance in New York. On top of that, she's married with 3 kids! Her parents have been helping her, which is great. But at the same time, she also has to help take care of her parents' occasional health problems in addition to the numerous viruses that her 3 boys bring home from school all the time. She loves her boys to death, and is thrilled to have them, but she probably could have achieved much more professionally without them. Maybe that surfaces in her mind once in a while, although I know that negative thoughts or wishful thinking generally do not occupy her mind - she simply has no time for it. It makes sense that both she and my chubby friend were in this dream together, since I got to be friends with them at the same time. We were watching MTV videos at my chubby friend's apartment in the afternoon. As the hours went by, and "Like a Virgin" was followed by "Careless Whispers", my chubby friend first drifted off to sleep on the couch. After a while, my petite friend apparently felt sleepy as well. However, being the organized and conscientious person she always was, she first got an ottoman, and put my friend's feet up there, so that she herself could have some room to sleep on the couch as well. I was the only one left staying awake to watch the videos, with Tiffany followed by Tears for Fears, and so on.

The girl who was running with my petite friend was a very nice girl, but I never knew her well. It is interesting that she was in the dream, as I have not been in touch with her for years. In a way, it makes sense that she was in the dream. In my youthful and arrogant days, perhaps I kept to myself mostly or just very few close friends. Now that I am older, I am regretting not getting to know many other girls in my class better, or not making friends with them. Interesting how my perspectives have shifted so much as I get older! In the old days, perhaps I wanted to be "cool", albeit in a nerdy way as opposed to the classic definition of "cool". That applied to how I made friends as well. Today, not only do I not care about being "cool", I no longer know what is "cool".

I am sure that my dream analysis would be dismissed by the Freudian psychologists. But I never care much for Freud anyways.