24 Apr 2025
Dream
I was in my parents bedroom trying to figure out how to get to a Chinese language program. (Years ago, I’d wanted to go to this program called LTL but it was too expensive and I ultimately gave up becoming fluent in Chinese). I was FaceTiming a middle-aged woman in China who was my potential host mother. We spoke in Chinese and I spoke pretty well considering this was before the actual program and my Chinese wasn’t perfect. My dad was in the room at one point and I discussed details with him. Suddenly we heard two men yelling on the street, so I looked out the window but didn’t see anything. I brushed it off but we heard yelling again, including “I’m gonna kill you!” When I looked outside at the cross street, there were people setting up lawn chairs and getting ready to watch the street as if there was a parade. They were however watching and still listening to a fight.
Then suddenly I was in a big hall or cafeteria or Game Center. Half the people were Korean, and the other half were English-speaking Americans. People where in groups of 4-6 at metal tables playing cards. My sister Ruby was interpreting between her, myself, and 3-4 Koreans at the table (she doesn’t speak Korean in real life). She did well interpreting and playing cards, and my sister Marley came over at one point interrupting her for something. She wanted some cards or some kind of help at another table. She laughed and morphed into a different woman with darker skin and curlier hair as she walked away. I got annoyed at Ruby’s table because I felt like I should be able to do (in Chinese) what she was able to do in Korean, and also she had forgotten to give me cards for several rounds. I was sitting a bit outside the group and hadn’t been able to participate for several rounds until I reminded her. Then I was sitting at the table watching the beautiful golden sky darken with clouds. When I realized it was quickly darkening I felt resigned and determined to enjoy whatever but of sunlight I could. The last bit of light flared like lava and I thought about life itself being like that, this grand light that eventually closes up, and I felt ok about this, it was sad but real and I wanted to enjoy what I could. Then the light disappeared with a hard clap, and I realized the clouds were water. I asked “is that water?” And suddenly a huge wall of water was about to fall and flood us. Everybody scrambled to get out of the mall/big public space. In the card game something about a train had “saved my sister”, but then I saw a real train hit my sister but it was just a woman with black hair and a purple jacket lying on train tracks, a voiceover said “the thing that had enabled her to live killed her” referring to the train. The train tracks were disjointed on a cliff. The woman wasn’t really my sister but the voice referred to her that way. Then there was a lot of escaping, men in black and white butler outfits throwing people up big machines that looked like escalators or baggage claim machines. I was doing my best to get out and grabbing these men’s arms, and them throwing me onto machines. sometimes the machines sent people kind of backwards because they were being suddenly being repurposed during this emergency, and we had to run on the machines too. I couldn’t tell if above or below ground was safer, given it was a huge flood, but thought below ground might be marginally safer. I couldn’t stay back and check if my family was ok, I thought of my mom but kept going through the machines. There was also one point earlier in the dream way before the storm where my mom and sister Ruby were getting dressed and they looked like wait staff or butlers and I made a funny comment. I remember them tucking their shirts in and wearing turquoise jewelry.
