Dream Lover

I am, in fact, a little afraid of sleep.

It is not entirely because of insomnia, nor because I dislike sleeping itself. Sleep carries a natural uncertainty for me: as consciousness fades, I temporarily lose control over myself. I do not know when I will fall asleep, whether I will dream, or what I might meet in a dream. A good dream is worth holding on to, but nightmares arrive uninvited too—and I cannot choose which one comes tonight.

I have heard that some people can have lucid dreams. They become aware inside the dream and then soar through the sky, change scenes, even shape the whole world to their will. I have never had that ability. Most of the time I have no idea I am dreaming at all. I can only accept whatever the dream gives me, like someone suddenly thrown into a strange world, living by rules improvised on the spot.

Yet it is precisely this lack of control that makes dreams so captivating.

Sometimes they let me experience things I have never known in waking life. Those things never truly happened, yet the feelings they leave behind are real enough to be confusing.

For instance, I once fell in love in a dream.

First Meeting

If I must give him a name, I suppose it can only be "dream lover."

The words sound a little sentimental, but I cannot find a better one.

The first time I dreamed of him was probably during a summer vacation in my first or second year of high school. I can no longer pin down the exact year. I remember the time only roughly because, after waking, I went to a supplementary chemistry class.

The class itself was not memorable at all. What stayed with me was sitting there and suddenly thinking of him again.

The dream began in a library.

I rarely went to libraries in real life back then, so I do not know where the dream library came from. It was probably assembled from literature, films, and scattered impressions: tall shelves, row after row of books, people looking small among them.

I walked deeper into the library, and then I met him.

Strangely, I never clearly saw his face. What I remember most is a back turned toward me. Yet in the dream I seemed to know instinctively that we were familiar—so familiar there was no need for introductions, no awkwardness of a first meeting.

At that time I had some interest in classical Chinese poetry. I was no scholar, nor did I have any real literary accomplishment; I simply found those lines concise and beautiful. High school life was rather serious, and reading a beautiful sentence now and then was a small pleasure.

So beneath the shelves in that library, I began exchanging lines of poetry with him.

I would say one line; he would complete the next.

I have long forgotten which poems we used. They could only have been ones I had memorized myself—after all, even the strangest dream probably cannot invent verses a person has never known. But I remember the feeling: whatever I said, he could catch it naturally.

One round, two rounds, several rounds—and we seemed to grow closer.

Looking back, it was probably a simple kind of being in sync. Two people did not need to prove anything; they simply spoke in the same rhythm. You tossed out a line, and the other caught it exactly when it landed. That was all.

Later I even asked him for his contact information.

That would have been unusual for me in waking life, because I am not a very forward person. But in the dream it felt inevitable, as though we had known each other long enough that exchanging contact details was only natural. I think I wanted his QQ number, but whether I actually got it, I can no longer remember.

I am inclined to think I did not.

If I had, the story would have turned cliché: wake up, type in the number, and discover that such a person really exists in the world—as if fate had arranged it all along.

Unfortunately there was no such melodrama.

Then my mother came to pick me up. The car moved along an evening road. I leaned against the window and looked out. The sky was not yet fully dark; the slanting sun was already low, and streetlights along the overpass stretched on without end. At that moment I felt only a little regret—as if I had just met someone wonderfully in tune with me, yet failed to keep any way to reach him.

Then I woke.

At first I felt nothing in particular.

The strange part came later.

That day I went to chemistry class as usual. During the lesson, for no reason I can explain, I thought of him again. In that instant a feeling I had never known before rose inside me.

My heart felt warm.

I could even say it surged.

That was the first time I truly understood the phrase.

Simply thinking of someone made me profoundly happy. It was as if a switch inside my body had been flipped and dopamine began pouring out without reason. I did not need to keep recalling what had happened in the dream. The mere existence of "him" was enough to wrap me in warmth.

The problem is, he did not exist.

At least, I do not know whether he exists.

He was not anyone I knew in waking life. I had not even seen his face clearly. I did not know his name, where he lived, or what kind of person he was.

Now I am more willing to believe he came from within myself.

Perhaps he was a projection of some ideal personality—or even, one might say, another ideal version of "me." Of course, saying I fell in love with myself in a dream sounds rather odd. Yet in the dream he was unmistakably separate. He had his own presence, and when I faced him, I was facing another person.

What he really was, I cannot explain.

I only know it was a feeling I had never had in waking life: that there could be someone in the world whose mere memory was enough to warm the heart.

Meeting Again

Later I dreamed of him two more times.

They were not consecutive dreams, nor anything like a complete serial. After some interval, on a night that gave no warning, he appeared again.

The second time, we walked along a night road.

That scene likely borrowed from a real memory from after I graduated high school.

After the college entrance exam, one day several classmates and I went back to school to collect our files. Afterward we spent the day together. By nearly eleven at night, two friends were staying at a hotel. After seeing them there, I walked home alone with an umbrella.

The hotel was only a little over a kilometer from my home. It was raining that night, and few people were on the road. Because I lived near the city center, the lighting was good, and I retained a vivid impression of that walk: layers of streetlights stretching outward, traffic lights, crosswalks, rain-covered pavement, drops falling into puddles again and again.

I held an umbrella and walked alone through all of it.

Later, the dream seemed to take those waking memories for itself.

In the dream, he walked that similar night road with me.

Whether we spoke, and what we said, I have forgotten entirely. The one thing I can still confirm is that when we parted, he kissed me.

A farewell kiss.

Every time I recall this, a slightly absurd thought surfaces: if Jacky Cheung (Note: this is only a joke. "Kiss Goodbye" is performed by Jacky Cheung, but it was not his work alone: the lyrics are by Ho Kai-hung, with music and arrangement by Yin Wenqi. I mention Cheung here only because, for me, the song's most immediate memory is still tied to his performance.) had been born a few decades later, perhaps I could have written "Kiss Goodbye" before he did.

The third encounter is even more broken.

He took me to a very large manor. The buildings resembled the Twilight Manor I had once seen in a game, but without its horror—instead they felt classical and elegant. A ball seemed to be underway there, perhaps even a masked ball.

That, too, was strange.

In waking life I had never attended a ball, could not dance, and was not skilled at the social rituals of such occasions. Yet in the dream everything followed naturally. Once I entered that world, I seemed to know what to do. I even danced with someone else.

He was in that world too, showing me things I had never experienced.

What we said and did there, I can no longer remember.

That is what I regret a little. Sometimes I think how good it would have been to write each dream down immediately afterward. At least when looking back now, I would know what the forgotten parts had been.

But later I decided forgetting was not so bad either.

Dreams are fleeting by nature.

We rarely have a dream that fits together from start to finish, every detail retrievable. Dreams are always broken. Scenes appear for no reason; characters arrive without origin; plots unfold without cause. After waking, they vanish with startling speed. The harder you try to hold on, the more you find only a few images left in your hands.

So perhaps these gaps are part of the story.

The first time: a back in a library. The second: a farewell kiss in the rain. The third: a manor and a ball already blurred.

Then he never appeared again.

Beginning to Understand

After all these years, I am no longer very attached to explaining who he was.

More than finding an answer, I care about how those three dreams changed my understanding of certain words.

Take "dream lover."

Before that dream, of course I knew what the phrase meant. From childhood we encounter countless such words—we know their definitions, know the contexts in which to use them, and can even deploy them fluently in school essays.

But that kind of "knowing" was only recitation.

Only after truly meeting someone in a dream, and feeling happy again upon waking simply by thinking of him, did I first feel: so these four characters can be so concrete.

I even wonder whether the first person to coin "dream lover" might have gone through something similar.

Perhaps on some night he fell in love with someone who did not exist.

After waking, that person was gone. He did not know how to describe this absurd yet real feeling, and could only leave behind such a phrase.

Of course, this is only my imagination.

But it makes me feel that language is sometimes like a signal across time.

Without experience, we can still grasp the surface meaning yet miss the mystery inside. Once we have truly lived through something and look back at the word, we suddenly realize: long ago, someone else arrived at this same place.

"Heart surging" is the same.

Before, I probably used the phrase only because I knew it meant a strong, excited emotion. But that day, in chemistry class, I simply thought of someone from a dream—and my body really did fill with a happiness nearly impossible to suppress.

Only then did I feel that "heart surging" was perfectly apt.

Something truly seemed to surge inside the chest.

The words themselves had not changed. I had.

It was my experience that added a layer of meaning belonging only to me.

What is more remarkable is how hard that meaning is to pass on. No matter how many words I spend describing that moment, someone who has not lived it can probably still understand only in concept—as I once did: knowing, but never truly arriving.

Yet for that very reason, when I read those words again, I feel a strange comfort.

I am not alone after all.

Among countless strangers, in utterly different eras and utterly different lives, someone may have lived through an extraordinarily similar instant. We never met, never exchanged stories, yet completed a distant resonance through a single word.

After Waking

Even now, I am still a little afraid of dreaming.

Because dreams are uncontrollable.

When I close my eyes tonight, I do not know what awaits me. Perhaps nothing. Perhaps a nightmare. Perhaps only a baffling exhaustion after waking. Sleep means temporarily surrendering control of consciousness, and I do not always enjoy that feeling.

Yet if I were to reject dreams entirely because of that, it would feel like a loss.

Because I truly did receive there what waking life had not given me.

I once met someone in a library that did not exist, exchanging lines of poetry beneath tall shelves; once walked a rainy street beside him and received a farewell kiss; once was led into a classical manor and, at a ball I had never attended in waking life, naturally danced a dance I could not dance at all.

None of these things happened.

Yet I truly lived through them.

Even today I still do not know what the so-called "dream lover" means. Perhaps he was a character casually assembled by the subconscious, perhaps my imagination of an ideal partner, perhaps another ideal version of myself.

Of course I still harbor a little unrealistic hope.

Perhaps one day I really will meet someone in waking life. We might speak the same line of poetry beneath some shelf, or walk together through a night rain. Then I might suddenly feel that the scene before me is strangely familiar.

Such thoughts are a little fatalistic, even superstitious. I do not truly believe life will replay a dream from adolescence.

It is only that the more beautiful something is, the harder it is not to hope.

Especially when one has not yet met the person who truly fits in waking life, what was briefly possessed in a dream inevitably becomes a point of reference.

But he has not returned for many years.

If I had dreamed of him again later, I think I would remember at least something. In fact there has been nothing. After those three encounters, this inexplicable bond simply ended.

I cannot even recall his face—or perhaps from the beginning I never truly saw it.

What remains is a library, a rainy night, a ball, a few fragments growing ever fainter, and that sudden warmth in my chest many years ago, sitting in chemistry class, suddenly thinking of someone who did not exist at all.

At least because of him, I still have something to look forward to each night when I go to sleep.