The challenges of maintaining Singapore permanent resident status have meant that I’ve made more intercontinental flights than usual in the last year. Travelling from Singapore to Vancouver or back, you spend fourteen to sixteen hours on the one direct flight, and longer if you change planes in Taiwan, Hong Kong, or Japan. Adding the fifteen-hour time difference to this results in a strange anomaly. Fly from Vancouver to Singapore, and you lose a whole day out of your life. Fly back, and on a direct flight you arrive at approximately the same time that you left.

I don’t usually sleep well on planes, and when we do arrive home — whether “home” is our HDB flat in Bukit Gombak or our apartment in the heart of Vancouver’s West End — we try to force ourselves to stay awake until what would be a normal time to sleep. I generally find that I then fall into a very deep sleep from which I wake refreshed, sleeping as I did as a child rather than the lighter slumber of late middle age. I wake early the next morning, and marvel that jet lag seems to have passed. I’ll go out for a walk to the nearby park in Bukit Gombak, before it’s light, or book a session at the gym pod. In Vancouver, I’ll run in Stanley Park, or cycle on the seawall. In the summer, it will already be light. And then, over the next few days, it becomes clear that I haven’t yet fully recovered. I’ll feel sleepy after lunch, lie on the sofa for a nap and then wake three hours later, not refreshed but groggy. I’ll find myself waking in the night, get up to read for half an hour, and then return to bed again to try to sleep. After a week or so things settle down: my sleep is no longer interrupted, but it is also no longer deep.

Deep sleep also brings dreams with it. In the last few years, I’ve made a habit of getting up when I emerge from a dream, and writing it down, as I can best recollect it. I don’t have any strong desire to interpret my dreams – either in Freudian terms as a royal road to the unconscious, or in the taxonomy that emerges in Michel Foucault’s discussion of Artemidorus in The History of Sexuality. But I’m curious about how they somehow escape the logics of the world in which I live, the self-making of neo-liberalism and psychologized identities that you question, but cannot fully escape, in waking life. In a sense, then, they do the same work that art, and in particular the fiction that I try to write do, but they do it without any conscious labour on my own part, without those agonized and often fruitless sessions in front of the computer. In the last few months I’ve been revising stories for a new edition of my short story collection Heaven Has Eyes, to be published by Gaudy Boy in New York in early 2026, and I’ve noticed how many of them feature dreams, so much so that my editor initially found the stories overly predictable. There was a moment in some of my stories, she remarked, when she’d think of a character, “this is where he goes into a dream,” and a page later, the character would do just that! I’ve tried to work on varying structure to remove predictability, but also to still harness the power of dreams, reflecting on how they have been used in Malayan and later Singaporean Literature, all the way from Straits Chinese stories through Lee Kok Liang’s Cold Store story “It’s All in A Dream,” to Kuo Pao Kun’s Descendants of the Eunuch Admiral and onwards.

I don’t remember the dreams of the first night of my return, but on the second night my sleep was more fractious. I woke at 3.30 in the morning with depressed mood and read a little until I was ready to sleep again. In this new dream that came to me after my return to Vancouver I was staying with my parents, who have long passed way now, in a wooden house. It was not a house I recognized from life.  The interior was wood-paneled, and was all painted cream, with a high gloss surface, so that its rooms were full of light. My sister was somewhere upstairs, and I sat with my parents in what might have been a living room. We were at some kind of bar, on stools, with light streaming in from the window. My father was drinking wine and was relaxed and talkative in a way that I rarely saw in life. He told me that he had high blood pressure and I told him that I was sorry to hear this, and asked him what caused it. “What you’ve got a few inches in front of your face,” he said to me, and I look down at a glass of red wine in my hands. It was in a small, old-fashioned crystal wine glass of the type that my parents used to keep in the dresser in their dining room, not the big round-bottomed wine glasses now in common use.

Then my father told me that when I next came “up North,” to the North of England where I grew up, they would take me to Stanley, in County Durham, the village my mother’s family came from, to the house where my false grandfather lived. They gave the name of the street and a number, but it meant nothing to me. My false grandfather? I asked, perplexed by the phrase. They looked at each other. They said that they had never told me his story, but that they would tell me now. I got the sense that this wasn’t a burdensome secret, simply an amusing one. But when they began the story I found I could not make head or tale of what they were telling me. They referred to other family members or childhood friends I knew nothing about, and they hopped and skipped around in narrative, digressing, moving backwards in time, and then starting all over again. I tried very hard to follow, wondering if my ability to understand was related to my ageing brain, although of course my parents in the dream were their fifties, and so logically I must have been in my twenties. I struggled to follow them again and then I found myself rising up in the sensation that always comes when I’m waking from a dream, leaving the beautiful cream-painted house behind.

But when I did wake up, the low mood and the anxiety of the middle of the night had gone. The dream was part of my ongoing relationship with my parents after their deaths, and had somehow healed me, at least for the time being. It was early morning, still, but just after sunrise so that direct sunlight touched the tips of the 1960s apartments of the West End. I made myself coffee, and went out onto the balcony, where the air still had a touch of cold. Then I began to write down the dream, still at that liminal space between the life of sleep and a waking life. As you age, perhaps, you feel more disconnected from the logic of the world outside, more taken with the possibilities of dreaming on and on, even if you have no real idea what such dreams mean.