Lia Ling

This was a dream within a dream.

Interior/first dream: I am at home, but home is slightly different from now. The windows are open. A dining table and chairs sits in the middle of a living room. Something begins coming through the open window and out of fear I hide under the table. It’s a burgundy machine, and from my place watching I can’t tell what it is until the very end. It’s very loud. Whatever it is, some type of crane, retreats and leaves a child in a walker in its place. She’s just of walking age and looks East Asian. I’m immediately thrilled at panicked at the same time. She’s a foster child that we’re testing out for adoption, and it turns out her arrival is very early and in conflict with the life I had planned. Nick’s grandparents come to visit and celebrate the baby. Her name is Lia Ling. We have her for a year and thought everything was on track legally for us to keep her, we become a family, but then an adoption agent comes to take her back. I am a wreck.

I wake up, except I only think I’m awake. I’m in another dream but aware of the last dream, to the point of thinking of it as a dream and even describing it to others. My grandmother is in the dream living in Texas, except that she’s in Darla Shaw’s body. My grandmother is taking me to a wedding and I have no clothes. She takes me to storage space and once we walk inside it expands like a Hobbit home. It’s like a giant warehouse inside, filled with clothes. My grandmother tells me to pick whatever I want and we can come back when I need to. I think to myself about how rare it is for her to actually come through. I tell her about my dream with Lia Ling and how me and Nick had to adopt because he had Klinefelter’s. Later the dream fast-forwards. There’s someone who works a security guard in the complex where we live in this dream, and I don’t think much of him. I always thought he was a blithering fool with no real depth. He’s short with dusty hair. Nick’s grandparents have just arrived for a visit in this dream. Me and this man are outside after running into each other in the parking lot. I start telling him my previous dream from start to finish and get to the part about Nick’s grandparents visiting and start crying hysterically. I realize that part of the dream came true, that I dreamed of his grandparents the night before they arrived, and that it means other parts are true. I realize that he really does have Klinefelter’s, and we won’t be able to have children, and that adopting for whatever reason will be harder for us than others. I am distraught, crying to the point of screaming in the parking lot. The man tries to console me and says things that really leave him and his past exposed, but I can’t remember what they are. I realize I was wrong about him and then start walking away, still crying.

I woke up from this so sad that I went back to sleep just because I knew I had to write it down and couldn’t fathom the thought of sitting with it yet.