An empty shell

Had quite an unnerving dream last week. I was walking out to the bus stop after attending a course one afternoon. I was rather relieved that I did not have to return to the office, as I was beginning to feel quite claustrophobic at the very idea of it. I waited at the traffic junction, waiting for the pedestrian sign to switch to green. As the cars whizzed by I suddenly felt everything that was "me" exit from my physical body like a puff of smoke. Just a moment ago I was staring blankly at the traffic indicator, and the next moment I was no longer inhabiting my physical self. I was in the puff of smoke hovering above the person who was waiting to cross the road. I looked down at my physical self, horrified. Even if I wanted to capture the very essence of me back into that physical body, I didn't know how to. Soon the "me" that realized all this was back in that empty shell, and my real self was evaporating into the air as the puff of smoke diffused. All that was left in the "me" that was waiting at the pedestrian crossing was an empty shell, someone who walked and talked and breathed but did not have a self. I cannot put into words how debilitating it was to have lost all sense of who I was.

When I woke up my room was dark but faintly illuminated by the street lights. The dream was so damn real it felt like my life was a dream. Everything was still and quiet, as if I had gone traversing to another world and returned and yet everything remained unchanged.

For the past two or three weeks I've been getting more and more frustrated with my work, but my physical self probably can't deal with being in this prolonged state of upheaval and by last week all I felt was this sense of being kinda detached from what I was doing. This probably explained the unnerving dream. I remember thinking in my dream as I was transiting between that puff of smoke into that empty shell, that if I didn't quit my job, this was what I was going to be for the remaining years of my life - this empty shell.

Maybe I really need to quit my job soon. Or maybe I've been reading too many of Haruki Murakami's books.

Writing about it now, I remember how I would have similar dreams as a young child. I would be standing on the grass at the park outside my house on a sunny afternoon, and before I knew it it was as if someone had released some stopper in me and the air was escaping from my body and I was getting lighter and lighter. I would drift upwards, past the first and second storeys of aunties in HDB flats going about their daily routines, higher and higher, past the rooftops of HDB flats with their spinning aircon ventilators, till I was heading towards the clouds. I would try to hold myself downwards, but it didn't do anything. There wasn't anything in my will or physical strength that could bring me back down.

Maybe my dreams just got more complicated as the years went by.