A long sleep, a short few hour nap, perhaps even a less than 10 minute power nap can yield some of the most vivid dreams. My dreams are often vivid and very detailed. They even at times, simulate smell and other sensations that dreams normally cannot feel.
This late morning, I went for a nap. I did not set my alarm and just let the whims of my body take over. I don’t remember the dreams I had in the first hour and a bit, but the last dream I had in the last forty minutes was sentimentally memorable. It was short, but I remember every detail of it.
The location was a cross between the townhouse I lived at in Knightsbridge and at Francisco Village, leaning closer to Francisco Village due to the modernity. I was in a gloomy room, perhaps my bedroom and the lights were off. I noticed that it was getting late, and I wanted to get an evening ride in. So I quickly went downstairs and into the kitchen. As I walked down the stairs, the gloominess of my room gradually disappeared, as I noticed the light on the wall down the stairs transition from a grey tinge to an intense brown-tea stain, with the nearly-black shadow of the window’s grid pattern in the opposite wall cast upon it. The finger tips of my right hand caressed that wall, as I went down the stairs, feeling every small bump along the way.
When I reached the kitchen, I was already wearing my road cycling gear. It was primarily light blue and white, with some stripes of dark blue, as well as a few minor stripes of red. There were mesh-holes in some areas, and raised trims in white along the outside seams.
I grabbed the large black canister of protein shake, spinned the large lid opened, and readied a plastic shaker of milk or unsweetened soy milk. Using a metal soup spoon, I scooped some of the powder into the milk, and during my second scoop, I noticed I might have accidentally gotten the spoon with the powder wet. So I took a look at it and it was moist and melted. I proceeded to give it a lick, since it looked so enticing. It was a dark brown, looking almost like melted licorice, but tasted closer to slightly sweetened premium milk chocolate like what you might get at any Lindt store. There was still powder under the initial layer of melted chocolate powder, so I tried to give it a few more licks to help melt it further and eat it.
While that was happening, in the background, I could hear my mom and dad talk about something super mundane. The television was also on and at a vague glance, it was playing some news from Asia. The man was in a grey business suit with a white button shirt. He wore black framed glasses that was trapezium shaped with rounded corners. He also had a red handkerchief in his left pocket. To the right of him, was a on-screen side-bar (OTS) and it vaguely displayed a slightly blurry white box that was about to show something else relevant to whatever he was saying. However, he was muted to me if I tried to focus on what he was saying, even though I could hear him in the background as muffled voices. My mom was telling my dad about a tool that she was suggested by the family doctor to buy, that will take a bio-history of whatever she needed to record from her body. My dad made a disagreeable moan and told her that it’s a waste of money, since she could just write down what she ate, expelled, etc, and get that same or similar information that may not be as precise, but won’t continuously cost them money. That item was $10 and will require my mom to buy a box of them.
As they talked about that and other things like dinner they want to eat such as cha siu, my bike ride was on my mind, but more specifically, it was the feeling of getting positive attention for when I exit the gated townhouse, onto the street, and riding around the bend in the lit evening, when people are still walking around. The feeling of being seen and in some minor way, admired, made me try to rush my preparation as fast as I could. Cycling on its own was already a positive feeling on its own, but sometimes, to be seen really motivates it further. That was what I was pretty much feeling all together, as my mind drifted into the ride itself.
Then I woke up for no apparent reason.
As I sit here typing this out, the dream location and subsequent ride location is a frequented place from previous dreams. They may all slightly differ in theme and content, but is always pretty much the same place. It’s like a larger version of the real life version of some of my routes. The roads feel stretched out more, and the houses feel spread out more. The nostalgia is an odd one because when I exist in those dreams, my mind processes those experiences sporadically on their realism to me. In one instance, the experience of an incident would be somewhat vague and the scenario a little blurry, but in a different instance, the incident could be crystal clear, so clear that I could see and remember the super fine details of a garage door, the contents of the inside of an apartment diagonally across from me, the intricacies of the street down below.
The title of this blog post, coupled with “Cry” by Cigarettes After Sex is what is helping me post and finish this entry.
Sometimes, when I wake up from sleep or a nap, momentarily, I still think I am back at my Francisco Village townhouse, in my bedroom. The lighting, shadows, the overall feeling still lingers. Then of course, I realize I am here in central Richmond, and for a brief moment, my sadness slowly catches up to my awareness, and for a split moment, my heart breaks a little. I really miss that home sometimes, when I think about it. I lived there from August 1997 to July 2017.