Twelve

I’ve started dreaming again. Or rather, I’ve started remembering my dreams again.

For the past week or so I’ve awakened every morning aware that I’d had a dream, and she was in it; but I remembered nothing more.

It wasn’t that in these dreams I thought she was alive. I always know in my dreams that I’m dreaming. It’s when I’m awake that I sometimes forget she’s dead and find myself expecting the door to open and her to enter.

But this morning I remembered something more of last night’s dream.

It was a combination of the Tower of Babel, the Vanity Fair and the back-in-school dreams.

I usually have the back-in-school dream when I’m learning something. What I learned in this dream is that I'm lost, and no one can or will help me find my way.

I’m wearing a leather jacket and boots, as I did when I was in college. I stood out from the crowd, as I intended to.

The words ‘but Japanese aren’t supposed to stand out from the crowd’ enter my head.

Yesterday was Memorial Day. There was one television program after another celebrating WWII. I didn’t watch any of them, but I do remember an ad for one that piqued my curiosity. It was advertised as celebrating the contribution of Asian-Americans to the war effort. I wondered how it dealt with the wartime internment of Japanese-Americans.

I watched a Japanese film online yesterday. It was lovely as a haiku; and filmed, I noticed, the same year as the Nanking Massacre.

In the dream I am back in school, where I stand out from the crowd like a nonconformist in Japan, or an Asian-American in conformist America.
 
European languages are fairly easy for me to learn. I used to speak French, German and Spanish like a native (or so my business contacts told me), but not nonEuropean languages. So I’ve chosen Japanese as my language elective.

I go from classroom to classroom, trying to find the Japanese language class, but no one will tell me where it’s being held. I have the feeling they don’t want me to know, that good Americans shouldn’t want to know such things.