Dream: I lose my left cornea

In this dream I'm taking handover from someone and suddenly I get a phone call from one of the bosses. He asks me to go and intubate the patient in the corner room because she has been increasingly drowsy all day and he's worried she'll get too drowsy during the night.

I go into the room and the lady appears to be deeply unconscious. So unconscious, in fact, that I estimate I won't need any drugs to intubate her.

There's a laryngoscope and a size 7 tube on the bench just next to her, so I just grab it and put the tube in. Once it's in I realise that the bag is not attached to the wall, and that there appears to be a huge side hole near the connection with the tube (which doesn't exist in real life). When I try to squeeze the bag even with room air, it just all escapes out the side hole and nothing goes into the patient. The patient is still breathing though and her colour is ok, so I decide that there's no imminent reason to panic. In fact I feel remarkably calm given how wrong the situation is.

Soon I realise I'm stranded in the side room and no-one appears to be walking past. I give up and press the nurse call button, and I can hear a distant "ding-dong!" at the nurses station. A nurse whose name I cannot remember comes in and says, "hi I'm Camilla, what can I do for you?" (but her name is not really Camilla)

Just then the patient starts to choke and sputter. She's coughing quite hard and her face turns all red. I ask the nurse if she has any sedation ready at hand, and she says "all I have is these 2mL left of morphine".

I take the syringe from her and start injecting it, but the connection isn't quite right between the syringe and the bung, and it squirts out and hits my left eye.

It stings so sharply in my dream that I momentarily feel as if I'm blinded.

"Let me help you with that, you'd better go look at your eye." Camilla says, taking the syringe from my hand.

I go to the nearest mirror with tears streaming down my face. When I look into the mirror, there are fragments of yellowish stuff floating in my eye, as well as my contact lens which has been shattered into several pieces. I grab some saline and rinse out my eye.

Little bits and pieces wash away easily, but the last part to wash free is a small intact disc of yellow. I intuitively know it's my cornea, and inspect it carefully in my palm. I'd better hold onto this, it'll be pretty hard to get another one. I think to myself.

I look up and a sizeable segment of my eye is missing. The clear fluid from within my eye appears to be seeping out freely and I can see blood vessels at the back of the eye reflected in the glass.

Then I wake up.

Two brief dreams

Regal has a PE:

In this dream I am at a stranger's house. There's a metal fence out the front framing a grassy front yard. I walk up the few steps leading to the front door, press the doorbell and wait. A lady comes to the door, and Regal comes rushing past her and out onto the porch. He dashes around madly, just like he usually does when he is very excited. But he doesn't seem to recognise me or respond to me.

"This is your dog?" The lady asks me.
 "Yes, but he's not usually like this." I try to round him up and hold onto his collar but he manages to escape again.
"He's totally mad and he just bit me!" She shows me some welts that don't look like dog bites, but nevertheless she seems very angry.

I finally catch Regal and see that his gaze is altered. His eyes are flickering left and right as if he has some sort of seizure disorder.

"We need to take him to the council and get him put down". The lady drones in an annoying American-ish voice.
"He clearly has an organic cause for his behaviour, he's delirious not psychotic!"
"All right, I guess we can take him to the vet before the pound." She reluctantly agrees.

The next scene I'm within a doggy ICU where there are lots of dogs lying limply attached to towers of monitoring and infusion pumps. I walk up to Regal and look at the monitor.

He has a Swan-Ganz catheter and I can see he has low cardiac output with extremely high PA pressures (like 80/50) and low systemic pressures. He is completely motionless as I stroke his head.

Poor Regal, I think in my dream, how does having a PE cause agitated delirium? He must have been so hypoxic, the poor little thing...

Then I wake up.


=========
The train from Christophorus cake shop:

 I am at a train station which I do not recognise. I stand in front of a whole row of ticket machines and I am with another person I do not know. We are not sure what tickets we need to be buying, so we go to the window and ask the man where "the performance" is.

He gives us two tickets which are different. One goes to Croydon, and the other one goes to Ryde. The originating station is the same though, Christophorus cake shop.

We go down many sets of escalators before we reach the platforms. There are many platforms as if we were in Shinjuku, but the whole place is old and decrepit, as if it was some sort of war-time bomb bunker.

We get on a train and as it pulls out I realise that the station we were at was Central. Soon we get to Redfern, and the surroundings appear familiar again. When we get to Ashfield I realise we have to get out there, but the train keeps going till we are in Burwood.

Once we get out of the train my silent companion suddenly says "Hurry, we have to get to the performance soon or we will be late."

We start running down the street and eventually we get to the theatre. We rush in and it is totally packed, so we go to the back and sit somewhere very high up. The actors are just about to enter the stage and I can see the first two people - a voluptuous lady in a red silk dress, and one of the nurses from RPA (a balding Chinese man with a wispy goatee). I thought they made an interesting combination and wonder what the play will be about.

Then suddenly I see Hsiang sitting in the front row and all of a sudden I'm really interested to see who he might be watching the play with. I crane my neck to see who is sitting with him and just at that moment, the lights switch off and I can see nothing.
 

Dream: stranded on a Japanese island

The dream starts in dense forest. The foliage makes it difficult to tell what time of the day it is, but it is still relatively light. There is a fresh smell of green-ness, interspersed with the sweet smell of rotting undergrowth. Everything appears to be quite damp, as if we were in tropical forest, but the trees around us seem to be trees from a temperate climate - tall and sturdy.

I am with a girl and a boy, and though we are walking in a group we are quite separated. The girl is far up ahead, and I can barely see glimpses of her clothes through the trees. The boy is lagging behind somewhere and I cannot see him at all. 

Suddenly it starts to rain, and the raindrops fall so fast that it becomes hard to see the path. It's like wearing a visor of water through which the world gets blurry. Everything gets so muddy and slippery that it's exhausting to keep walking though I'm not carrying much on my back.

I emerge out of the forest into a small village of about ten huts in a circle. As sudden as the rain came, it stops. The boy comes out of the forest and stands next to me, looking at the cute little thatched huts with smoke streaming languidly out of them. We are adopted by a family and given a plastic sheet to sit on and some warm food to eat.

We sit on the ground and gaze into the forest, waiting for the other girl to show up. The light fades gradually around us until we are sitting in the completely still dark. Somewhere, someone lights a fire, smelling of damp wood. We join the gathering around the fire, but are unable to understand anything that is said. Everyone appears cheerful in their conversation, slapping each other on the back and telling jokes. I feel excessively tired and go to sleep curled up in the corner of a hut.

The next morning we say wordless goodbyes to the people of the village and head off into the forest, which is as dense as the one from the previous day. This time the boy walks closer to me, and I realise that we have not said anything to each other and I have no idea what his voice sounds like (or what language he speaks).

The track becomes harder and harder to see, in some places just a slicker of mud with a few unidentified prints. Soon we are totally lost in the forest, and the boy gestures for me to take out the map. Only when I see the map do I realise that we are in Japan, and that we are walking through a large area of forest in order to get to the sea. He traces with his finger the various paths through the forest and indicates to me where he thinks we are.

We take a different path which leads uphill. It starts raining again, and this time we huddle under a black umbrella he pulls out of his backpack. After a while I realise that we cannot stop walking or we would become stranded in the forest, so we trudge along in the rain.

At the top of a hill we are struck by the glimpse of deep blue sea in the distance. "We made it!" I shout and start running towards the sea. It doesn't seem to get any closer as we move towards it, but we come across another village where we decide to stay for a night.

We find a secluded spot to sit and watch the sea. Everything seems so very tranquil, looking out over the forest at the still sea. There is a ship very far away, just a dot on the horizon, but I feel like that ship is meant for us.

"Let's stay here in the village and not go to the ship." The boy says finally. He has an awkward Japanese accent and the words sound clipped.

I don't know what to say, and at that point suddenly realise that I have a whole head of long hair. I run my hand through it and a strand comes away. It is bright green, like algae. I pick up the end of my hair and confirm that my entire head is full of green hair. I am so alarmed by this, but the boy says "it's a sign, you cannot leave."

And then I wake up.


There is a strong sense of deja vu in this dream - it is clearly related to my travels in Sikkim where I met a Taiwanese girl called Julia, who was planning to do a 3 day walk from Pelling to Yuksom via Khecheopalri lake. She had a 1 day head start, I took the jeep to Yuksom and waited for 3 days there - but she never arrived. I was worried about her but didn't know who to contact. I never ran into her again on the road, so I never found out what happened to her.

 A Christmas flower in Yuksom

Food Dec - Jan

I am bad at studying, to the point where I'm procrastinating by looking at food photos on my phone and wishing I was elsewhere. Here's a snapshot of what I ate over the last couple of months:

These never fail to make me smile - piggy buns from Chef's Gallery with a sweet black sesame filling. The hard part is - how do you bite into that adorable face?

Kingfish ceviche from Cafe Lima in Marrickville. Fresh strips of fish marinated in chilli and lime juice, topped by a mound of red onion and crispy fried broad beans. Never had ceviche with sweet potato and corn on the cob, but it was delicious.

Sourdough toast with blue cheese, pear and purslane, drizzled with honey. Cornersmith is such a hip place to hang out, starting from the chalkboard where you write your name to the cosy nooks where you can watch life go by, to their own jams and preserves to take home. If only it was closer..

Despite eating a lot already (see above), we couldn't leave Marrickville without a bowl of beef pho from Pho PhD. The stock was rich but a little too sweet for my liking, though the just-cooked pieces of beef were melt-in-the-mouth perfect. 

The burger with the lot at Cafe Guilia made me wish it was my local lunch spot - the best parts of the burger are the perfectly soft bun and such a juicy beef patty topped with an oozy egg. My brain could eat ten of these but my stomach could barely hold one, so humongous it was that it almost causes jaw dislocation.

Korean fried chicken at Naru one (mix of original and sweet & spicy). The powers of google tell me that Korean fried chicken is so ridiculously delicious because it is double fried, which makes the skin is so crunchy it shatters while the flesh remains soft and yielding. The best part is that one doesn't feel like it's oil fest - in fact there's almost no oily residue on your fingers after eating a whole plate of this. The sweet & spicy was quite spicy, but the leftovers were perfect on rice the next day.

 I love a good eggplant, and this was a damn good one. Nasu dengaku at Sushi Masa was half an eggplant grilled to smooth creamy perfection, topped by a glaze balancing the salty miso flavour with the sweet mirin flavour.

The picture doesn't do it justice, but smoked mackerel on toast at Runcible Spoon made me oh-so-happy that I have such great eating places near my house. 

 Handmade chocolate pops at Christmas

I planned to wrap the fried rice (with fresh tomatoes from garden, kecap manis and chilli) in the omelette, but in the end I got lazy. Still delicious though!

 Cold ramen from Ryo's - my favouritest place for ramen, and it was finally hot enough on this day to order the cold selection (I always have no. 3 or 4 from the hot). This came with an soy-egg, boiled pork, bamboo shoots, spring onions and a sail of nori as usual, all dunked in a chilled soy-based dipping sauce. Perfect for a summer lunch.

Prosciutto-wrapped figs with blue cheese dressing from Blu water grill in Hornsby

 Heaven = Marrickville Pork Roll

 Pretty as a picture - chia seed porridge at Sadhana kitchen with mixed berries, banana and some type of vegan honey.

 Summer means fresh tomatoes from the garden at home. These are so juicy and flavoursome that one remembers again what real tomatoes are like. Every year after three months of continuous tomato eating, I vow to be sick of tomatoes for the rest of the year. Then I spend all of winter complaining that the shop tomatoes taste like nothing, and then it's tomato season again!

 Organic pancakes with banana, berries, ricotta and honey from Clipper cafe in Glebe. The strawberry flower with a mint leaf won my heart!

 Marrickville is coming up a lot in this post, but that's because it's such a cool place. This is bruschetta topped with salami, ricotta and honey from Beejay's - such awesome coffee and yet another "hip cafe" for Marrickville.

 Australia day lamingtons from Black Star Pastry
 

One of my many visits to Meetfresh

Awesome coffee at Purple Moose in Alexandria

 All canteens were not created equal - this was an awesome lunch from Kitchen by Mike. Garlic rosemary focaccia, red rice & snow pea salad, creamy cabbage and apple salad.

 Teriyaki salmon set from Nazimi
 

Salmon lovers set (sashimi, roe, pickled, sushi, aburi ) from Niji sushi bar in Kingsford

Dream: Federer and the slushie parlour

This dream starts on a tennis court which I don't recognise. It appears to be inside a dark hall, where visibility is quite poor. I am standing behind a stack of chairs and other random equipment. I can hear lots of conversation and laughter reverberating in the hall, but cannot see well until I manage to move around all the junk. I see a whole bunch of people standing on the court chatting and drinking champagne, everyone seems to be quite excessively happy.

Suddenly the hall is flooded with light and someone announces that the game will start in 5 minutes. People scatter everywhere until Roger Federer is the only person left standing on the court, champagne glass still in hand.

"What are you waiting for?" He says, "you'd better start cleaning up or I won't be able to play!"

I realise that my job is to be the cleaner, and I start moving things as quickly as I can. First I collect and stack the chairs, then I scoop up food scraps and serving plates, putting them in a big pile by the side.

Finally there are just a few dozen champagne glasses left. I've run out of time so Roger starts the game, running around the court and trying to jump over the glasses. I dash in and out around him, trying to collect them without tripping him up or breaking any of the glasses. It becomes increasingly difficult as he seems to move faster and faster around the court until he is practically a blur.

I manage to get everything off the court, and breathe a heavy sigh of relief. I retreat to a corner of the hall and watch the rest of the match, which Federer wins.

Afterwards he says to me, "thanks so much for getting those glasses off the court, I could have hurt myself pretty badly." I'm not really sure what to say, so I just smile. Then he says "I know just the place, let's go for a cool drink."

We walk out of the hall and step straight into what looks like Darling Harbour. Across the way from the hall is a giant gleaming slushie parlour, complete with a dozen slushie dispensers.

The slushie parlour owner welcomes us and asks which flavours we would like. Roger takes out a ridiculously large golden key and says "I have the key, so we can have the magic slushie!"

He slots the key into place, presses a button and a technicolour slushie starts streaming out, flowing everywhere all around us and surrounding us in surreal colours.

Then I wake up.

Dream: when cows are extinct

(This was the first dream I had in 2013)

In this dream, cows have become extinct all over the world, and thus milk no longer exists. I am working for the Chinese CIA-equivalent secret service, and I receive a brief on my next mission to a certain unnamed Pacific island where there is allegedly a geriatric cow still living.

I fly to the island, a tropical paradise with white sandy beaches and gently swaying coconut trees. Somewhere in a village of scattered thatch roof huts, I find a wrinkly old cow, somewhat malnourished with folds of skin hanging low. I convince the owner to give me some of its milk, which I dutifully store in an empty 2L Dairy Farmers container.

I open the brief which tells me my next instructions. I have to drink a sachet of some effervescent drink, which cleans out my gut completely and gets rid of all the acid and bacteria. Then I drink the entire 2L of milk and it's supposed to sit in my stomach until I get back to China.

Next I am flying in a plane over the ocean, and land in a place called Clare with tin-roof buildings making up the airport. My brief tells me that this is where I will receive my next instructions.

While sitting in the tin shack, a girl my age comes up to me and says "我是奶牛 (I am Dairy Cow)". I take this to be my cue and stand to greet her. She tells me that I need to regurgitate the milk for her and she will take it away, but I suddenly become afraid that she is some type of enemy and refuse. She doesn't object and instead tells me she will take me to Hu Jintao.

We get back on the plane and she sits next to me in the emergency exit row. She whispers in my ear that when the plane is skimming down to very close to the ocean, that will be our cue to open the emergency exit and jump out. A ship will be waiting below for us. As the plane gets lower and lower, I think about the consequences for the rest of the plane's passengers once we have thrown out the emergency exit window. But there's no time and we jump out.

The next thing I know, I am back in my flat having already gotten rid of the milk. The phone rings and a man says on the other end that I am in danger because someone has found out about the milk mission. He asks me who I have told about it, and I say no-one. The only person that knows about it is Dairy Cow, and I feel disappointed that she has betrayed me because I thought she was a nice person.

I go to her house, and ask her if she has told anyone. She says that she is a loner with no friends, and definitely did not tell anyone else. I suddenly get the feeling that we are being watched, and we start scouring her apartment for any taps. After searching high and low we finally spot a little black disc inside a ceiling ventilation grille.

"We have to get out of here, now we are both in danger". I say to her and we get ready to leave. 

And that is when I wake up.

Ethiopian food

I've been asked so many times since I came back from Ethiopia what I actually did there, to which my usual reply is "ate lots of food and drank lots of coffee". True I could go on about all the historical sites, but what will really stick in my mind is the food.

Injera
Where better to start than injera, the national food. Made from a grain called tef, which is only found in Ethiopia, it is served at every meal and forms the staple of Ethiopian food. I find it really strange how it's not found anywhere else, and how there is actually no way to describe it because there is no "other food equivalent" to compare it to!

 Injera with lentil stew (Top view, Addis)

Resembling a large floppy flannel (or bathmat), it looks rubbery and unappealing. Mostly it takes on a light brown or grey colour, but occasionally we found lighter injera which is meant to be of higher quality. The batter is left to ferment for several days, which accounts for the sour taste as well as the bubbles on one side.

Injera is served with the dish of your choice, usually either a stew or something fried such as what seemed to be the national favourite, tibs (fried meat). There were generally few vegetarian options, except on fasting days when it was easy to find vegetarian food. My staples were shiro (pureed chickpeas), messir wat (lentil stew) and beyanetu (a mix of everything on fasting days).
 

  Tibs, the national dish of stir fried meat (bus pit-stop)

A non-veg Beyanetu for tourists (Habesha, Gonder)

  

 The best Beyanetu ever (Seven Olives, Lalibela)

 

 Spicy fish stew (Cafe Wude, Bahir Dar)

 Raw meat, a real delicacy (random roadside pub, Babille)

 I wasn't the biggest fan of injera to start with, but soon I got used to the taste. It seemed to accompany the spices of the dishes quite well, and after a while it felt strange to go a few meals without eating injera.


Breakfast
 
Breakfast is one of my favourite meals of the day. We were so lucky to stumble across No Name cafe in Aksum, where we had the best breakfasts in Ethiopia.

Fatar is an interesting breakfast - bread, probably from the day before, is fried with berbera (a type of red spice mix) and topped with fried eggs, a little tomato, red onion and chilli. Yoghurt is poured over the whole thing and then it's all tossed together. We discovered this breakfast by watching what others were eating at No Name, and it was probably my favourite breakfast in Ethiopia.

Another common breakfast food is foul, a garlicky chickpea mash eaten with bread. The one we had at No Name had plenty of chilli added, but in Harar the special foul wasn't very spicy at all, instead accompanied by a mix of eggs, tomatoes, lentils and broad beans.

 

Special foul (random place, Harar)

In Bahir Dar we had this dish of chechebsa, like thin fried pieces of dough mixed with spices and fried egg. It reminded me of mianpian, a noodle dish eaten in north-eastern China.

Chechebsa with egg (Cafe Wude, Bahir Dar)

In Harar there was a Muslim specialty of fatira, a crispy pancake served with egg or honey (or both)

Fatira with honey (Cafe Abyssinia, Harar)

Juice
Fresh juice is such a luxury, especially in a relatively fruit-deprived country. Most of the time we bought bananas and oranges to eat, but the fruit shake joints usually had avocado, papaya and guava juice.
 

Juice house, Harar

One can get a mixed juice, where the available juices are layered. Most juices are served with lime and sometimes with this strange red syrup which I never figured out.

Mixed juice (papaya/avocado/guava), Aksum

Coffee

Most days I would have 2-3 cups of coffee, sometimes more (especially in Addis when I could visit Tomoca!) There were many antique-looking espresso machines leftover from the Italian days, and the most memorable of these aside from the one in Tomoca was the one in a dark little bar opposite Africa Hotel in Aksum. This was a rusty red number, which gleamed a little in the dark and pumped out a damn smooth espresso.

Of course, there were many opportunities to drink coffee the traditional way, with coffee brewed in a terracotta pot over hot coals, then poured into tiny cups and taken black with copious amounts of sugar (up to 1/3 of the cup). 

The coffee ceremony involves collecting the right type of grass (to bring in a sense of nature), burning special incense and the ritual preparation of the coffee. Traditionally it is also served with popcorn, which is a combination I never got used to.

 

Ambo
Last but not least, I loved sparkling water from a place called Ambo, about 50km west of Addis. Apparently the spring water here naturally flowed out of the ground with so many bubbles that even if left out overnight, it would still be bubbly the next day! I really wanted to go to Ambo to have an Ambo bath, but was told that the tap water in Ambo was flat. Disappointed, I resorted to drinking more Ambo instead.

Vegetarian friendliness
Finally, a little note on the degree of difficulty in getting vegetarian food in Ethiopia. Though I wasn't strictly vegetarian, I mostly stayed away from meat as my encounters with meat were far from appetising. Think large carcasses hanging outside restaurants from which your meal is chopped, lots of flies, non-existent refridgeration.. It was easy enough to find something vegetarian to eat, but I found the variety to be lacking on non-fasting days. There was almost always pasta with tomato sauce, and failing that, there's always shiro.

It was frustrating to see lots of vegetables in the market that just don't make it onto the menu because there was a perception that people want to eat meat when they go out to eat. Vegetables like cabbage and pumpkin hardly ever made it into restaurants, because they were considered "home food" or "poor food". Others like spinach were ubiquitously cooked with meat, and it was hard for non-Amharic speaking people to explore different options.

All up it wasn't too bad for vegetarians though - at least two days of the week (Wed & Fri) one can eat well!