Sometimes my dreams talk to me
When I set my intentions for August, I did not manifest a neck brace or an MRI but here we are.
The MRI was surreal.
The nurse checks the doctor's note and asks me my age, my address, yada yada. Then she asks me if I have any metal in my body. *In* my body. I've never had to think about having metal in my body so I can't speak with certainty. They say that if I do, the sheer strength of the magnets will pull the metal out, through my flesh and skin. I say I don't think there's metal in me but I still can't speak with certainty. The entire room is beige. The radiographer tells me not to move during the scan. I say yes okay but I tell him I have random, hard to control allergies. What if I need to sneeze? Well don't, he says. If you sneeze we'll have to start all over again. My neck is stilled between soft blocks. He reminds me that moving will make us start all over and prolong my discomfort. I close my eyes and keep them shut. Suddenly I'm hit with an acute desire to open them. A light claustrophobia kicks in. I talk to myself. I try to keep calm. I tell myself it'll be over soon. Before I know it. The forced stillness makes me consider the movement in breathing. The heaving in breathing. My chest swells with motionless inhales. My breaths are calculated. You know when you start to think about your breathing so much it becomes mechanical and unnatural. Like it's suddenly harder to breathe if you can't stop thinking about breathing. The loud tapping noises make me feel like I'm in a sci-fi movie from the 80s. Ridley Scott. I'm heaving and twitching. My nose is itchy. I dissociate and return to my body a couple of times. Noiselessly. Three decades in this embodiment and I've learned to panic in quiet. I go to my happy place. I think about my partner and my friend's seven year old daughter who's also my friend and whose unworried energy makes me want to believe in better things. I'm forced back into my body. Contemplating my breathing again. I think about the pork buns I'll have for lunch if I make it out of here. I attempt to still the twitching. And suddenly I'm out. All good they say. You'll receive the report by email they say. I just traversed worlds and bodies in this machine and now I'm out, putting my clothes back on and signing my name on a form as if none of this just happened. It gets lonely in limbo.
It hasn't been all bad though. I'm up to date on all my TV shows (please watch Reservation Dogs and The Chair right this minute), burned through my TBR stack (Open Water, Burning Sugar, Hunger and Why I'm No Longer Talking To White People About Race are all stand out reads), ate my weight in falafel sammies (Coffee Nut Café is to blame) and spent afternoons resting my tired soul on the north shore. I also started my first audiobook ever (Akwaeke's Dear Senthuran) which I can't say I'm hating as a format. They've taught me so much this year already but if anything has stuck out to me from their memoir so far, it's how they manifest the life they want and put in the work. From chapter 5, I made note of the following quotes:
"I bribed myself with the future."
"Seeds are often tiny and it means nothing about what they will grow up to be. You plant them anyway."
"If you say yes with enough force, your chi will say yes too."
*
In astral news, I've been dreaming a lot about religious symbolism. In my waking hours, I think a lot about my identity, my relationship to my Brownness and what it means to be Brown and Canadian, Brown and not Hindu, Brown and not Indian. I'm thinking of ways to relate to the world in practical Brown terms. A friend of mine, who's also part of the larger Brown diaspora, tells me about Brown things that are areligious but yet distinctly Brown. Like a tub of ice cream containing leftover curry in the freezer. Like a hot mix of thyme and honey to cure a sore throat. Like land that gets passed on generation after generation. Like intergenerational trauma woven through the fabric of your skin. Like anxiety that's never called by its real name.
In my waking hours I contemplate my religious unorthodoxy (having been born to parents of different faiths and practices) but in the night it's another thing entirely. I dream of white robes, barren seashores and men with long dangly curls. In one dream even I am a man. I'm part of a cohort of men on what feels like a silent spiritual retreat. Silent but for the loud crashing of waves. As part of the ritual, we walk in a line along flat beach rocks in meditative stillness. We immerse our bodies in the ocean as someone holds our heads down one at a time to complete the cleansing. Saltwater has healing properties.
In another dream, I am at a temple. I am a woman this time. Still in white. My mother makes an appearance and asks what I'm doing here. I tell her I'm here for the ritual at 3. We enter a bright white room, clinical in its layout. We are made to enter what looks like cryogenic tanning beds and sit upright. An East Asian woman is helping facilitate the session. She asks me to lay flat on the bed and places a glistening dollop of coconut oil on my scalp. She gently massages it in. A glass hood closes in on me. Maybe it's memories of the MRI surfacing in my dreams. Enclosed in a box for my own good. My mind racing. Later on, I'm outside, still in my robe, skipping on flat rocks over a lake in the woods. There's some sort of lightness in my skips, like the ritual freed me of something heavy. It reminds me of how my awake self feels after a reiki healing. Airless.
I'm not sure yet what to make of these nocturnal sightings. Dear Senthuran is heavily shrouded in the sacral and listening to Akwaeke's voice as I slowly melt into sleep these past few days might explain a thing or two. And then there's the oceanfront mandir I've been catching glimpses of every time I'm in the bus back from the supermarket. I see it through the spaces between two walls, a sliver of the otherworldly, perched on a wave. Someone recently told me that me liking chole bhature the way I do is not at all surprising. It's sorta built into my genetic makeup. I like chole bhature and butter chicken because some of me has roots in Punjab. Maybe my visceral curiosity about the sea facing mandir and Hindu symbolism populating my dreamscape is some kind of built-in too. My DNA seething with Brown things I haven't picked for myself. My chi choosing things for me. My ancestors walking in my footsteps. More on this later.
Wishing you a speedy recovery my sweetu. :*