The golden corn

Last week, I went to a facial treatment center in one of the biggest shopping mall in Jakarta. The therapist said that the treatment would last about 2.5 hours at the maximum but I ended up spending about 3.5 hours in the small treatment room with lots of gadgets to improve our appearance, and a huge photo of a senior Indonesian female singer whose youthful skin has become a legend – despite the fact that she is pushing 70s.

In the middle of the treatment I felt so sleepy but I could not fall into a deep sleep. A strange vision/illusion/impression, or whatever you like to call the visual impression, often appears when I am hanging between the conscious and the sleep state. It is like a lucid dream, yet I have control over what I do in the dream, to some extent. Below is the story that I got when I was drowsy, while the therapist was doing my face …

I was walking very fast in a huge cornfield into one direction and I did not know the end of the track at that time. I felt the wind blowing strong from my back and led the leaves to dance under the cloudy day. Suddenly I spotted something on the ground — a golden corn. I was not a greedy person by nature *ehm* but I heard myself told me to take the golden corn with me. The corn was solid so I could not peel off the skin. I continued my walk and arrived at the end of the field, and saw a huge city shrouded in mist on the further end. I had to go there.

Immediately the scene changed and I found myself waiting on something that resembled a riverside. I could not see my surrounding clearly because it was totally engulfed in thick white mist. A few seconds later I saw him approaching on a raft. He asked me to come aboard. I got on the raft believing that we were heading to the same direction. I asked him whether he had a compass to guide us because we could not see anything in front of us, only the heavily clouded space. He assured me he knew the way forward.

We sailed the river and suddenly I was aware that there was a waterfall in front of us. We had to turn back. But we could not. So we fell down to the abyss …  but a few meters down I said I knew the way up. I saw the stairs appearing from the point we were at that time and led to the other side of the waterfall. We held hands and climbed the stairs. Strangely enough, he could not see them that he had to depend on my guidance this time. We arrived at the other end, safe and sound. We didn’t even get wet from the water! I remembered seeing the golden corn falling with the raft, and my mind was suddenly filled with lots of questions as to its role throughout the dream. Anyway, I could not get a direct answer at that time.

We saw this huge city on the mountain slope in front of us, the city that I saw before from the cornfield. It was a crowded city with houses in red roofs and rounded walls that bathed in the golden sunrays. It was quite far from where we stood but we immediately knew it was our destination. I told him that we needed to slow down this time and waited until the right time to go. So we sat there together, enjoying the passing moment until it’s our call to enter the city. We did not know when the time comes, we are still waiting for it.