Osaka

[I'm on a little trip right now, trying against all good sense to make it from Tokyo down to Nagasaki and back only on local trains. First stop, Kobe and Osaka.]

My nightmares often seem to arise first as comedy.

Stepping off the JR train at Osaka station, I followed a thin stream of people out onto the platform between burgeoning crowds waiting to board. The middle-aged woman in front of me stumbled, and I instinctively glanced down on the ground for obstructions. Her foot was being snared by a white sneaker . . . connected to a 12 year old boy who was apparently determined to trip her. No words were spoken. She caught her balance, and pushed forward, glaring back at the child over and over. Nobody said anything. I’d never seen anything like it in Japan, and I wonder if it’s somehow related to a particularly Osaka-inflected sense of humor.
Nevertheless, this comedy brought home how fragile society would be if this sort of anti-social activity were more prevalent. As it is, people barely avoid each other (and certain tragedy) on the streets as they hurry along on bicycles and trucks. People gingerly negotiate their way among crowds on subway platforms, even as trains come storming into the station. All it takes is a minor error, a careless fraction of a second, and there would be a fatal impact; how much worse would it be if there were a deliberate intention to injure or maim.

The first nightmare I can recall having is similarly equal parts laughter and horror. In it, I’m back in the house of my birth, haunted by a ghost. Of course, it’s no ordinary ghost; it's more like a Peanuts gang Halloween special ghost, a standardized image of a white sheet thrown over a child, with oval eye holes snipped out. This ‘ghost’ was haunting my bedroom, or rather, was following me around. And yet there was one small difference, and one that separates nightmare from comedy: below the hem of the sheet were visible not human feet, but scaly chicken feet deftly stepping forward toward me.

This nightmare image suddenly came back to me vividly via another nightmare two weeks ago. That night I struggled awake at 4am, rising out of a dream full of screams to the silence of the suburbs. Before I opened my eyes, I was watching a muddy street from the top of a 20 story building, in a city full of sunlight and stained architecture. In the churning mud below were two large buses, much like New York City MTA buses, one determinedly slamming into the other. They seemed bovine, stubborn and dim, as they collided, and I couldn't help laughing. "'Moo' you idiots," I thought. But then I noticed the riders inside, through the windows, and started to hear their screams. There was after all no place to run, no refuge for those trapped inside. They were tossed about, cut by broken glass and sheared metal, as the other bus deliberately rammed it over and over. The lead bus struggled forward in the liquid mud, caught and lost traction, and skidded to the left, its wheels evidently trapped. The rear bus then scored a direct hit in its midside, and slowly, viciously, proceeded to tear it in half; and as the metal skin of the beached whale burst, the screams of the passengers rang out. Interminable, terrible, helpless. I woke with my hands over my ears . . . surrounded by the ringing 4am silence. And by some completely mysterious mechanism, it unlocked memories of my first nightmare.

Nightmares

The past few days I've been beset by nightmares. . . many of them seemingly reccurring ones from my childhood. I'll post up a little more tomorrow, but I'm trying to get to the bottom of where they're coming from, and why now.