Dream about Lao Ye and Gu Nainai

April 14 2022 - 

Soph here.

Woke up in tears because I had a dream about my family.

It started with my mom talking to Gu Nainai, Lao Ye’s older sister, in a version of our house in Guangzhou. Gu Nainai said “Now that my younger brother has gone to join my older brother, I know I’m the last one left, and I know it might be my time to go soon.” It’s hard to remember what she said because the dream replicated her Henanese accent very well, but hearing what she said felt really alarming.

My mom laughed nervously and said “Aunt, don’t say that, how do you know your younger brother has gone?”

Gu Nainai insisted, “I keep dreaming about him! He keeps visiting me. The children (Sophia’s aunts and uncles, Gu Nainai’s kids) are weeping and trying to hide it from me. I can tell.”

They talked a little more as I sat down at the breakfast table. Mom sat beside me, Grandma sat diagonally across from me. I had a clear view of the front door. The lighting in this dream was a pale, fresh green, like it was spring. Even the drapes were a pale green fluttering in the wind.

Lao Ye came through the front door, cheerfully bobbing his head. He loudly announced, “You guys decorated the door so well, I found my way home!” and came to sit down at the table in front of me. I stared at him and could tell Mom was looking at me funny; I was the only person who could see him. He looked approximately a few years younger, like before the cancer treatment in 2018.

The dream is slipping from me now. He said a bunch of things and I answered and mom just kept looking at me weird. But the one thing I remember him distinctly saying:

“丫丫，谁说你不幸福?” (Yaya, who says you’re not fortunate/happy?)  

And he reached over to stroke my shoulder.

I started to cry in the dream. I told him it’s not that I don’t think I’m misfortunate, it’s not that I’m really unhappy. I just miss him. I feel like he got stolen from me. I felt he had more years to go, and I want him at my wedding, and now he can’t come.  

Woke up crying, ended up sobbing in bed for a bit because the dream felt so real.

Yeye at the mall

April 7 2022

Last night I had a dream about yeye.  I was just wandering a mall and happened upon him shopping with a friend I don’t recognize, also an old grandpa.  I beelined for Yeye and gave him a hug; I was smaller, maybe 8 years old again, and he snuggled me under his chin.

Lao Ye in the village

Mar 28 2022

I dreamed about Lao Ye last night, just woke up at 7:46

Dreamed I got dropped off some port town in old China. Felt like the 1940s. I wasn't me. There were two little boys maybe four years old playing outside and the man escorting me, some sort of shopkeep, picked one up, called him Shi Wudu, and took him home. 

I went inside of the small Chinese doorway and it was a domicile. To my right was a bedroom and further in was a kitchen, it all looked like that area in Meizhou I can still distantly recollect from 2000. Night fell. There was violence and unrest brewing. We had to run because I knew the conflict was going to arrive, it felt like nationalists VS communist revolution in China but details unclear. 

I met my aunts at the door. It was Yan and Zhilan from Guangzhou, both of them my Lao Ye's nieces-in-law. Yan was by the outside door fretting about what to do with Lao Ye who was in poor health. We all had to run today and none of us knew what to do. Zhilan came with me into his bedroom and found him asleep under the covers. We were deciding on euthanizing him somehow, but we fretted over what to do. When we got to his side, he woke up and Zhilan collapsed in tears by the side of the bed. I sat by the bed and stroked his stubbly cheek and he woke up. 

"Yaya, what's happening?" he asked me in Mandarin. 丫丫，怎么了？

"I'm sorry, Lao Ye," I whispered in a language that felt odd, like the words were not quite Chinese but the meaning was clear in my head in English. "They're coming to burn this house down and we don't know how to take you with us. We didn't mean to wake you. I don't know what to do, I want to ask you how you'd like to die."

Lao ye got up and I noticed then that he had neither arms nor legs in this dream, just smooth stumps. I wasn't even shocked, it seemed to make sense in the logic of the dream and also a part of me thinks it's because we just cremated him. I'm not taking to the idea of cremation well, so I'm thinking of him in bits and pieces. He climbed off the bed, about as tall as my torso, talking all the while. "I see. Don't worry. Follow me and I'll show you what to do." 是吗？别担心，跟着我来

On his stumps he walked to the closet to the left and put on a hat. He then walked confidently to the front door, seeing people in the streets running en masse in carts and on feet. He then shut the metal door, repeating, 可以可以，不用想了，（it's okay don't think about it) and I went to the kitchen understanding he intended to stay here and see it through. 

I hear him and Zhilan arguing in the bedroom before she leaves, unable to convince him. I am in the kitchen and there is a bed there too for some reason. I decide to stay. 

Lao Ye and I spent time together in quiet. He had to sleep a lot. He slept on the bed and I was curled up under his armpit, back nestled against his torso. I heard knocking on the metal door, but instead of danger, the same man who escorted me arrived with his wife, two children, and what looked like an impressive cart with horses outside. He came in intending to rescue my Lao ye and me. Lao ye got up, greeted the man loudly with laughs, while I tried to get tea and watermelon together to serve our guests. 

The dream ends when the wife of the man, who felt vaguely like yet another aunt of mine, scolded Lao ye for hanging a watermelon sliced up as decoration. He protested that it was going bad but it looked nice on the wall, and the aunt shot back that it would attract flies! And she dumped the mushy thing into a metal bin as my Lao ye sheepishly shrugged.