Dreams

(*artwork: Nocturnal by Incé Husain)

Thursday, November 27th, 2025

I dreamt of Pakistan. I was in our house, breathing the air, in the sun, on the streets, writing it all down, feeling it with an ache in my heart that I would break down from missing it all these years, break down from disbelief. I planned already what I would write and how I would write it, that I would write “I made it home”, I would call the entry “I’ve returned”, I would lie flat on the sun-scorched lawn and listen to the trilling shrieks of the black kites, and I would seize a fistful of dirt to carry on a chain on my neck. I felt ecstatic, unbelievably whole and like myself, that a deep fracture in my circuitry had healed, that I was plagued by nothing and would never be again, that I had reached heaven and I would remember it. I greeted all the lizards and all the snakes and the massive sloping flower-filled trees. My memory - in sight, in scent - was immaculate. I was so self-aware in the dream that I thought: “let me write this immediately before my thoughts vanish”, “let me ask D what I can bring back for them”. And waking up, I know that I feel the country in my bones. I wake up desperately wanting dirt from my lawn to carry around my neck, I panic from its loss, but my own blood is Pakistani, my own beating heart remembers its air and its sun and trees. I am already its own. What do I need dirt for?

***

Saturday, November 29th, 2025

Finally, at 5am, I slept. In the cold windowless basement made of wood I wrote the last word of my literature review on the inferior olive brain region and, sedated from the screen and the silence, drifted upstairs to the room made of glass and collapsed into my three-blanket mound of a bed. When I wake up in this nest my head is submerged and slightly aching. My dreams were bizarre, intergenerational, lucid, relevant, unresolved, meticulously vivid with details I don’t forget within the minutes of waking. They stay burned in me, symbolic and precise like prophecy, leave me watching for signs. I think I’m going to get a text, that my phone’s going to ring, that there will be a knock on my door. This intuition, that is closer to certainty as if it’s already happened, is a dull chill in my chest. I’m not worried, I’m just curious, and I think it’s a little bit funny how I try to squeeze the dream into the logistics of the real world, how I refuse the severance of waking.

The sunlight is white with winter, ebbing into my room. With great slowness I scramble an egg, toast bread, lay slices of leathery brie onto the toasted bread, put the egg on the bread and let its heat melt the cheese, pour mounds of pepper, boil water on the stove till the kettle screams, make very sugary chai in this silent house. Last night - day one of the third annual “From Turtle Island to Palestine” film festival - keeps lunging back into my head. I try to remember the sequence of the film Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance without looking at my notes. I hear Mohawk activist Ellen Gabriel’s voice on repeat: It’s our obligation to do that, to protect our land, to protect our mother. And I can remember looking at the faces of the SWAT team and they were all scared, they were like young babies who had never met something so strong, who had never met a spirit. We were fighting something without a spirit, there was no thought to it, they were like robots.

My “schooling” didn’t teach me about Indigenous resistance so strong that it made international headlines, didn't teach me that “Canada” sent more soldiers to “Québec” than to the first Gulf War in Kuwait to crush the resistance and maintain and expand a land grab beneath the eyes of the world. I remember Indigenous journalist Dan David’s summary: Even if people knew nothing about the protesters, even if they knew nothing about the deep historical roots of this land dispute, they understood that the mayor of Oka was going to bulldoze the graves of their ancestors. 

I push it all away, for now. I’ll return when my mind is clearer and I can write.

I listen to a Persian poem by Rumi (روز حسرت) about being existentially lost. It’s soft, hypnotic, winding. I’ve listened to it so much now that I can sing it. X translated it for me, and I noted my favourite verses immediately -

Why am I heedless of the state of my own heart?

From where have I come—what was my coming for?… 

I am a bird of the Heavenly Kingdom’s garden, not of the realm of dust— For a few days they have made a cage of this body.

I drift in its tune, listening for the hour while I have my breakfast, cherishing the solitary haze of the slow morning. I call Y and Z, tell them about my dream and its maybe-omens. Z starts making some jokes, not mocking it but subduing it with mystical banter. It surprises me when Y doesn’t play along.

“No, I don’t think it’s that. There are people who can…sense…things. I can’t explain it with science but I think Incé has these kinds of senses,” he says.

I can’t help but cackle at the strangeness of the dreams, of what came before, and the way I navigate the strangeness in extremes. I don’t even know how to write about the dreams and their buildup without taking it at face value, and to take it at face value is a risk because there is no language for it, no resolution. I ricochet between being thick in the substance of the dreams, believing them with all my being, and feeling so completely out of touch with them and empty that it’s almost like I’ve wasted time. The crash of the real world and its rituals is always a bit jarring, a bit boring.

I make a second mug of chai, and the crash of the real world is journalism, floods of memory, research work like a rat gnawing at my skull, and the residues of the dream. They all snake around each other until I’m certain I won’t go to the second day of the film screenings. Not in the way I’d planned. Instead, I’m systematic: Antler River Media Co-op is sponsoring the festival, so I should make an appearance,  print out some pamphlets of coverage of Western’s encampments to accompany the film The Encampments that will be shown and lay the pamphlets over the info table for the crowds, arrange to get the recordings I need of the panel of speakers so I can do the journalism work. I’ll give B a hug, if I see them, and then I’ll leave. In and out, imperceptible, and the rest of the day will be mine.

I print and staple pamphlets like a machine. A few paper cuts later, the stapler at the library maybe destroyed, I walk to King’s. The wind is bitter cold, the sky is darkening. I am focused and remarkably at peace with feeling raw. The festival, when I enter through the doors, is a warm glow. There is joy and understanding here, a flood of it. The people I see are vibrant, their gazes sparkling, attentive, and sincere. We embrace easily, my tatreez Palestine flag earrings tangling in people’s hair and coats. I check everything off my list - the pamphlets are on the table, the recordings for journalism work are planned - and I linger. I buy a mug from Hebron twining with olive branches. I buy scented soap from Nablus, lavender and mint and a third scent that’s new to me. When I embrace C, we clutch each other tightly, hold hands while we talk. “I look forward to your article,” she says.

When I leave, the words for the article are already flaring in my mind’s eye, and I try to catch as many of them as I can in my notes app. I head to F and G’s apartment, defrost in the sudden warmth of their building. Their window that spans an entire wall gapes like a fresh start. I snuggle on the couch with my coat spread across me like a blanket, hug the white ragdoll cat to my chest as she purrs and flops in my arms, blinking crystalline blue eyes. F, G, and I get caught up on episodes of “Pluribus”, snack on chips and hummus, have Thai soup with cheese rolls. I show them my scented soaps from Nablus and ask them to pick out their favourite as a gift. Between episodes we go to a Christmas market a walk away, weave through its small tents of jewelry and toys and food and fire, the snow glowing blue around us. Live music, by a group called The Pairs, fills the air from a tent; the soft lyrics of Little Light are about cynicism, humanity, imagining a just world. F notes, immediately, the FREE PALESTINE stickers on the singers’ water bottles and guitar cases. We wander closer to the stage, where couples are holding each other and swaying, and I push back my hair so that my Palestine flag earrings are more visible. All the singers have silvery voices that harmonize like they’re one being. The gentle yearning in their song makes me remember my dream. Happily, my eyes fill with tears, warm me in the cold.

Behind us, there are massive, glowing green and red hoops hanging from beams: circular swings where people seat themselves, take photos, and play with kids. I curl myself along a red hoop, swing in the darkness and stare at the stars with my arms dangling in the cold air. I close my eyes and inhale the soft festive sounds around me. The dream, the festival, the research, and the journalism all lunge at me again like an interrogation. It doesn’t bother me. I smile easily, think about how the answer to my dream is the same answer I have for everything: I miss who I miss. I care for who I care for. I’ll stop criticizing my instincts and accept them like laws of nature. Things will fall into place as they’re meant to. I’ll just do what I do best: sit back and enjoy the show. Savour the life around me, strive, and document it. ♦