Yesterday, the same day I came back from my trip home, I dreamt I was back in the manor I grew up in.

It is an old bunglow with old walls thick enough to beat a canon. I am in my parents room, old white paint lathered on crumbling and thick walls, dusty windows covered with stickers I put up twenty years ago.  Water damage and cracks sneak along the corners but are never enough to bring anything down. The walls have been flaking and crumbling for years but the walls are deep enough to take a hundred more years of decay.

My parents aren’t in the room, because it’s a makeshift classroom. The are tables from my college and my English department too. I see a water-can in the corner filled with white pebbles and glittering deco. I reach it, examine it while I turn it over. A woman is talking about lost papers.

A professor, one who looks like a hippie met a gorilla with a personality that made him a few feet taller, is near by. Sitting on a bench close to the window with the thick iron bars. My grandmother is next to him reading the veins on his hands and praising the wisdom of the ancients.

I put the water-can back but I can’t get it back to the way it was. After I’ve examined it, it’s shaky and to my surprise twice as small. My grandmother is done devining disease and fortune from veins. She hands me a green paper box to place over the water can. The paper is a beautiful aged emerald green, with golden threads running under its thin and discolored spots.

It’s edges have sleeves, and when I examine it I find four smaller wood coloured papers tucked delicately on one side. It cannot be placed back, it doesn’t make sense that it was ever there in the first place. The 4 papers have fifteenth century Japanese art on it, painted with golden ink ingrained in the paper.

It’s not the kind of art you’d expect, fifteen century Japanese art was very close to Chinese styles, the more familiar variety comes after the Edo period. It shows the Buddha and his deciples being promised Buddhahood and Indian mythology probably the Ramayana. That was where the dream ended or where my memory fails me.