China / Prior Life

Last night I dreamt I went to China. It was a very polluted, crowded, industrial area where I went. The air was thick with coal smoke. There was soot everywhere. It was rather like a trip I had to take to Columbus Ohio in the 1980's in that sense.

Houses were crowded together and they had small rooms that were very full. A group of young men wished me to assemble a radio transmitter kit they had obtained from Korea. Given my background in pirate radio in the states this was something I couldn't resist though I did worry a small bit about being put to death or jailed for ever for subversion.

It was a semi-lucid dream. As I was assembling the transmitter, my mind was not clear. I had a hard time reading the instructions (which were in English from poorly translated Korean), the print was small, my eyes were blurry and my mind wasn't clear.

I became aware that the reason I wasn't clear was that I was dreaming, and I had just woken up in the dream world. Just as waking up in the non-dream world is not always smooth, so too it seemed natural for that to be the case in the dream world. As time passed, I did find myself thinking more clearly and was able to put the unit together.

It was a relatively low-powered, maybe a watt, AM transmitter, solid state. It also contained a small receiver as part of the package. It wasn't clear what the intended use of the unit was but these young men did not seem politically active, just having fun like I was back when I ran a pirate station.

The instruction sheets included an advertisement for a tube power amplifier that could be used with the unit that would boost the power to maybe 40 watts.

I also spent some time just touring. The people I stayed with spoke marginal broken English, I speak some marginal broken Chinese. Between our two marginal language skills and a lot of pointing and gesturing we managed functional communications for the most part.

The soot from the smoke-stacks had an odd quality; they would go up into the air and join a cloud and they'd make the edges of the clouds black.

An odd aspect of the dream is that in the dream, I was aware of a previous life, I could remember it clearly, but after waking up, I had no memory of it at all, only a memory of having had a memory in the dream.

Image is by onekell, licensed under a Creative Commons 2.0 Generic license.