Dream Journal
Jiaxin Jiang
→MFA ILL 2027
Everyone has a life lived in dreams. I like to record my dreams in the notes app on my phone. Fearing I might forget the contents of my dreams, most of the records were written in one go, in a hurry, in Chinese. I never fully made sense of them. Never knew what they meant. This is my first time illustrating my dreams, and I hope that by publishing the text and drawings, I might wrap my head around my second life lived in dreams. I encourage you, dear reader, to contemplate your alternative, surreal dream life as well. This is a single dream log from 2020, translated, illustrated, and brought into our conscious world.
⎢ 10:11 AM, April 11, 2020
My girlfriend and I were looking
at something.
She felt like a foreigner.
At the corner of an ordinary house, there was a pit covered with a lid. My friend Yue Hui was also there, and I told my girlfriend that my stuff was inside. I’ve known Yue Hui since the fourth grade of primary school, but we lost contact completely after an incident happened between us in the middle of 2019. He was here the last time I saw him, and he’s still here now.
I told my girlfriend that I had a magazine inside and asked if she wanted to take a look. She said yes. When I lifted the lid, I saw something that looked like my book or magazine, surrounded by feces. I was confused, and my friend felt disgusted. I wondered if someone had defiled my little space after I left last time. I didn’t know why this pit was like this when I opened the lid.
Just as we were talking about whether to look closer at the magazine, suddenly, a stem grew out of the soil on the left side of the pit. It started to grow, rapidly and fervently, reaching towards us. The tip of it was sharp. Seeing the situation escalate, we started running towards the exit. The faster we ran, the faster it grew, as if it were chasing us. We ran like crazy. At first, I tried to carry my girlfriend under my left arm while running, but we were running too slowly. I let her run on her own. She ran ahead of me, and I kept running too.
While running, I shouted to the children playing outside nearby, “Hurry up and get out of here! There’s a plant chasing us! Hurry up and leave!”
It seemed like most of them didn’t quite understand what was going on, but ran anyway. A small number of the more curious children moved in the plant’s direction.
The plant grew even bigger, with one branch splitting into two, then multiple branches, flying towards us in the sky.
Then, in an open space, it seemed to stop chasing us. It began to rise into the air and turned into a building, a closed space like a circular arch theater, in a creamy yellow color. It took shape quickly and then calmed down.
I entered the building quickly, as did the people around me. Inside the spacious, bright, creamy-yellow building, we saw a dinosaur, which seemed to have transformed from the last part of the stem. The dinosaur was small, reminding me of an egg-shaped dinosaur toy I had when I was a child. Then the dinosaur walked away from us and towards a distant entrance.
Just as we were feeling surprised and delighted, my friend asked me where this place was, as if I knew. Because this place seemed to be related to me, and this time, we were inside, I tried to figure out this place, full of familiar secrets. We wandered. In that moment, we found several dark gray statues. I got a strange feeling and wanted to try talking to them. I asked: “Where is this place?” and “Hello?” The statues replied with “hello” too, but only in English.
Just as my girlfriend and I were surprised, a
mirror appeared and led us into a room that looked like an indoor luggage storage area. There, I saw three children and one woman. I also saw a window, and it seemed to be extending from an apartment. Looking out of the window from the apartment at night, there were lights on the opposite building.
I greeted the children, but they weren’t surprised to see us. I asked them, “Where is this place?” and they replied, “Thomas.” I asked again, “Is it Thomas Schumacher, the race car driver?” They said, “Yes!”
I said, “No wonder I’ve been feeling a connection with
Schumacher these past few days.”
Just as we all fell silent, my dad woke me up and said, “Son, it’s ten o’clock. Get up!” I knew it wasn’t
actually ten o’clock, but I got up anyway. I had a slight headache, which had started the night before.
The magazine hidden in the pit earlier had appeared in my previous dream. It was an old magazine I found somewhere in my Uncle Da Kui’s company. I couldn’t remember what was on it. I do remember hiding it. I hid it because the magazine seemed to have stories about old China, including Tiananmen Square and other things.
In the halfway state between asleep and awake, I was still completely immersed in the dream. I remembered a course I took in college when I was in the United States, called Space, Time, Memory. It suddenly dawned on me that I couldn’t live without memory, yet I feel as if I’m forcing myself to discard it. What’s wrong with me?
I shouldn’t discard it, and it can never discard me either.
I got up and opened my eyes. Still in a daze, I picked up my phone and wrote down this story. For a long time, I prevented memories from surfacing in my mind, as if I wanted to bravely look forward. Sometimes, the things in front of me are not bright, blocking the way I see ahead. However, I seem to have escaped into my dreams to spend some time in those memories.
Enough said, I’m getting up now.
It seems that’s all for this dream.
Nathan Petree wrote his artist statement (manifesto).