to sleep & perchance to dream of unsketchy plans for the future oh yes, yes, baby, yeeesss.

i was trying to tell my friend earlier tonight that i had a déjà vu of a dream. like with many conversations, we were swept along on one of a dozen tangents and i got home tonight, too restless to sleep & with the tale of it still on my mind to tell.

this is how it went.

i suddenly remembered, through a perchance similar flick of a wrist that my brother used, just as a perchance body lumbered into my peripheral vision, which was just like a scene in that dream.

eerily familiar, like being haunted with a time & mind.

stay with me, folks, that's just one of the ridiculously contrived-feeling parts, just one!

so.
that happenstance jolted my memory, & flung out a misshaped drawer, in a squat chest of drawers, in a haphazard room, in the helter-skelter corner of my mind. as if i were reliving the dream, i remembered it. & it's a silly little dream not hardly worth mentioning, apart from it being so unintentionally (ridiculously) contrived-feeling. and me actually remembering it.

and so. my old classmates, the ones i'm was never close to, from ye ol' secondary school & i were in the dream. and in this dream, we were collecting donations in the tin cans with coins clanging around in them; only they weren't clanging, and to us it felt impertinent that they must clang.
appeals for donations were being ignored, whether we tried to clown around for attention, pleaded with heartfelt cries, slicked our humidity-mussed hair into near-resemblance of matured adults, or cajoled with good-natured prods.

we were as good as invisible & so the problem, it was decided, was that our tin cans did not clang with previous generosities. if passerbys had passed earlier impervious to charity, so could these fresh strollers yet pass us by, just because they know from the non-clanging that they will be no worse than their peers. that they are no better, of course, bothered them not. it hardly ever bothers anyone, yes?

so that was the plot; encourage through subtle peer pressure; by rattling in their faces noisily the new standards by which these stone-hearted folks will be judged.

but we were reluctant. we were donating efforts in kind already & asking each other to throw in cash too when we've spent hours in this heat & humidity so solid you almost leaned on them with every gasp seemed a bit much to ask.

so we tossed in a tiny little bit of spare change.

it worked a little; a couple of older men stopped, kindly popped in dollars, refused the sticky badge of honor we offered & left, whistling.

then nothing for another 20 minutes. frustrated, we dropped in more change; the response was warmer. encouraged, we sought out a convenience store to break a note; the makchik in there saw us plonking them as she handed them to us, and pulled out a ten from her own pocket. bemused she was, when we confided in her our noisome intent, & emptied a fresh roll of change from the cashier into our tins with a hearty wink. our luck was as awesome as lottery after that.

one of my friends, a guy i had barely exchanged two real conversations with in real life, & i were charting a rough graph of peer-pressure kindness from our afternoon's inprompto findings & we were talking excitedly about making it our thesis for university, thrashing out what would construe the differentiation between honest kindness & obliged kindness & i forget from there on what transpired. but it's the only dream that's mostly realistic that i remember, so i decided that i must tell it to you, silent reader.

i don't know why i must belabour the point that these classmates & i had not ever been close, but it feels as impertinent as our eventual real need to have some meaty donations. huh, right.

the one other dream i remember? it's got very disturbing themes according to dream interpreters leh, don't ask lah i shy.