Ghosts in Dreams | Wandering Ghosts

The house was abandoned, and the ghost was wandering around.

Ghost, to me, is a contextualized existence. In life, whether in fear or dreams, the existence (or concept) of ghosts has not appeared for a long time. Interestingly, I caught ghosts in my dreams during my nap today.

After I woke up from the dream, I kept thinking about the meaning of this "ghost" wandering in the house of my childhood that no longer existed.

Contextualizing this dream was my first reaction. In that "home" of my childhood, my spiritual world experienced a very important turning point. Ashamedly, I can no longer remember which year I moved from a rural area to a developing industrial town. Judging from the school age, it should be around 2003. What’s even more shameful is that I don’t know who to ask for confirmation when searching for this memory. That home, to be precise, was my second uncle’s two-story building on a large open space on the edge of a booming industrial town. On the grassy land in the "development zone", we are the only one who lives alone. Next to it is a half-built and abandoned building separated by a vacant lot. The closest one is the same building next to the road leading to the central area of ​​the town. Several families in a two-story building. My second uncle initially listened to the advice of his cousin who worked in the Bureau of Land and Resources to purchase land and build a house here. We moved in with the mentality of "this is the most potential development area in the town". In the end, the question of that "home" The story ended with the move to another place because "there is a real estate development here".

To this day, I still remember the moving truck and how I, sitting in the back of the truck, walked into the home that seemed to have a bright future with a sense of confusion about the future. When I first arrived at my new home, I made frequent mistakes. I broke the kettle while cleaning, burned my quilt when I was lighting mosquito coils at night, and cut my hand with a knife (so much so that I still have a fear of knives), etc. wait. At that time, I knew that I would not be able to adapt to the great changes in the new environment. I panicked and fumbled around everything around me. But no one cares about what changes happen to a child's heart. Everyone is busy with a new life. For a long time, I was immersed in a sadness that others could not understand: I was the only one who missed my old life in the village, and missed the winter when my family gathered around the stove to warm up. Those memories were like sparks jumping out of the stove in the cold winter. dancing in my confused mind.

We also went through some hard times in that home. An egg and a sausage were shared among the three siblings, and the rice was mixed with oil and salt. Later, we reclaimed the open space around our house into vegetable plots. We all hoped that our lives would improve, and all our energy was focused on this idea. Therefore, solving material difficulties has become a top priority, and no one has the time to sit down and eat and chat as a family like before. For a long time after that, I felt like I was the only one standing still. In terms of material life and spiritual life, everyone has already made a choice. In fact, what made me suddenly enlightened was not the improvement of my life, but the connection I had with the land in front of me in an instant. Suddenly one day, through the kitchen window, I saw a large piece of golden wild grass outside moving with the wind. On the golden waves, a white crane was flying on the withered grass. That scene is forever imprinted in my mind, everything is so vast. So later on, the memories that impressed me the most during that period of childhood were the golden field and the white crane, as well as the figure looking for wild berries on the grass, and the scene of running around in the open space covered with withered grass. . The memory of my hometown was activated in that free and vast land, and a new connection was created with it. My turbulent and confused spiritual world settled down at that moment. The rapidly developing industrial town has experienced vigorous development and rapid decline. Everything around it is changing at an immeasurable speed, but all of this seems to have nothing to do with me, and I am no longer lost and confused.

It is not a particularly easy task for me to reconstruct and narrate the "home" of my childhood, let alone the need to find the wandering "ghost" in such a bland coming-of-age story. In the dream, the ghost was crawling in the dark corner of the room. The wind poured in from the leaky window of my parents' room, and the thin indigo printed curtain that my mother had cut by myself was flying wantonly. I stood in front of the window, powerless to stop the constant blowing wind, and unable to spot the ghost hiding in the dark corner. The ghost also appeared in the vegetable patch next to the house, which was completely submerged in calf-high water. It was wandering in the depression at the bottom of the water. Which part of my childhood memory is that "ghost"? Are "ghosts" the embodiment of the dark side? However, there was never a dark side when I was growing up. When I searched for ghosts, after excluding the dark side, the only thing I could think of that related to "ghosts" was my growing alienation from my family that began in my childhood. This alienation and future break became the wandering "ghost".

That "ghost" that was forgotten on the ruins that no longer exists, it is entrenched in the past "home", hiding in dark corners, hiding in the water. I want to pull it out and ask it why it is wandering here. . But when I look back and see myself living in that “home,” I know I need to answer this question for myself. The "home" on that empty land witnessed my young nostalgia for the past rural life in a rapidly developing industrial town, and also witnessed how my family was absent from my spiritual world in the real material life.

That wandering "ghost" is a ghost created by the gap between the beautiful past and the lost reality. I can catch it without fear like in the dream, but it will always exist.

XR

Tianshui, Gansu 2024.1.12