Summer of 1978: I’d just completed my ‘A’ level exams in London in preparation for applying for university.
The IRA were active at the time, and there were fairly common bomb scares. My family would’ve heard or read about them in the news.
The aunt with the interesting dreams told the family one day that she’d had a dream about me.
She and I were walking towards each other, going in opposite directions.
I was carrying a ladder on my head, which was odd behaviour, so she asked me where I was going with it. I told her that I was going to heaven (上天 shàng tiān / “ascend-to sky” / go up to the sky).
(天 tiān in the Chinese context is “sky”, the space above earth, or in a bigger way, “heaven” the governing authority over us humans, not necessarily “heaven” in the Christian perspective [i.e., vs hell or purgatory]).
The family’s analysis was that “ascending-to sky” meant dying, as only dead people go up there [from earth]. One of the many Chinese euphemisms for dying is 歸天 / 归天 / guī tiān / “return-to sky”.
With the frequent IRA bomb scares in London, they felt that my aunt’s dream was me using it to let the family know I’d died. The Chinese term for it is 托夢 / 托梦 / tuō mèng / “entrust dream”: entrust the dreamer with a message for somebody; the dreamer could be the medium, or the recipient of the message.
I later heard this in a letter from one of my sisters: the family went into a panic, and started to try and find out what might’ve happened to me.
They went to a number of fortune tellers — no joy, nothing specific confirming I had indeed died.
They went to various Buddhist temples to seek an answer from the deities. (This is a process called 求籤 / 求签 / qiú qiān / “seek oracle-stick”, a form of divination. See blog Asking the deities for more details: https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2025/01/asking-deities-qiu-qian-drawing-oracle.html) Inconclusive as well.
They then suddenly remembered the telephone.
So why didn’t they just pick up the telephone? Yes, there is a time difference of 7–8 hours. Yes, back in 1978, long distance calls were payable by distance, and by the minute — even going just one second over into the next minute would be being counted as the new 60 seconds. But, given the suspense of not knowing for sure if I was still alive or not, surely paying for the phone call, however expensive, would’ve saved them the worry over days and days, never mind running around Singapore consulting fortune tellers (whom they would’ve had to pay) and deities in Buddhist temples (a donation would be the right etiquette). It only needed a few seconds of exchange, “Ah, you’ve picked up the phone, so you’re still alive. Bye.”
It was towards the end of this frantic consultation of the fortunes and the deities that a letter arrived from London, telling them I’d passed my ‘A’ level exams with two distinctions.
Back to the drawing board for analysing the dream: the ladder and going up to the sky = promotion, climbing higher, which was what my ‘A’ level exam results meant, i.e., I was going to get into university, up one step from ‘A’ levels, hence the ladder, hence 上天 shàng tiān / “ascend-to sky”.
Like I’d said to the family over the years since my teenagehood, many times and about many things: “I just don’t understand the way your brains work.”
(London / Singapore, 1978)
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