Oriental Dreams

The old clocktower struck midnight a while back but my ears were still ringing too loud to hear then. Hour's getting late but the night's just getting started in Club Shalom where my vodka's waiting. Guests in all their glam and pearls are starting to glide in to the smoky little nightclub just down the way and I find myself heading there myself - with my pistol still warm and my scraped knuckles hastily bandaged with a dead man's shirt.


Bang. You're dead.
Dreams are funny, aren't they? When the legendary Sandman decides to pay a visit, there is no absolute certainty of what can happen since anything within the realms of possibility - and impossibility - can happen in dreams.

Eventhough I didn't have such a frenetic work pace last night, I still found myself needing at least an hour or two of downtime to recharge. Being dead tired usually, I probably fall straight into non REM sleep which precludes dreaming of any sort ( possibly missing several REM cycles :P ) Never can understand how some guys can recall with perfect clarity every minute detail of their passing dreams when I find myself groggily wondering how exactly I've fallen off the bed - or fallen into someone else's bed.

Yet this afternoon I actually found myself in the oddest dreamtime. Not only was I dressed in a sleek Mafia-like all-black suit - looking surprisingly dishy - my ISO was dressed in the exact same manner, and we'd both just returned from gleefully strangling one of our competitors in a darkened alley.

Who knows what exactly our purported triad was peddling, perhaps pirated DVDs? Perhaps opium? But whatever it was, the competitor had definitely pissed us off and it was our sworn duty to toss his barely breathing body into the cold unforgiving arms of the Huangpu. Not only did we strangle the guy quite without qualms ( after beating him to a bleeding pulp with slow-mo martial arts sequences worthy of a John Woo blockbuster ), the only passing concern I had was getting his bloodstains on my white cuffs.

Such a bother. Seriously.

Then in the Club Shalom I mentioned, we arranged a clandestine meeting with Shameless Shalom who had her brimming assets squeezed into a slinky red cheongsam while she blew tendrils of smoke lazily out of a cigarette. Showing us to a darkened booth in a secluded corner that somehow still managed to secure a commanding view of the small stage and the front foor ( in case we had a crazy shootout ), Shalom tried to interest us in some of her more nubile submissive girls but we both pleaded a headache ( obviously still vaguely homo even in my dreams ).


A nubile girl!??!
Shalom was undeterred however and remained by our side even as her entertainers took the stage for the night. For some obscure reason, she seemed to be a breathless femme fatale club owner by night and a schoolmarm teacher by day since she started talking oddly enough about Secondary School History. The salient facts and historical dates that tumbled out of her heavily rouged lips were amazingly accurate - which actually made me wonder briefly why my hot-tempered ISO who was no fan of history didn't take out his revolver and blow her brains out. Obviously the possibly narcotic-laden smoke she was blowing into his handsome face was causing a hypnotic effect together with the copious amounts of alcohol he was imbibing.

Not being the discriminatory sort, obviously my other friends were in on the Shanghai Bund fantasy too. In the periphery I could even recall Handsome Hui flirting with the customers and Preity Posh fluffing her ravishing furcoat as she sauntered lazily into the club.

And then Charming Calvin came out on the small stage with the spotlight focused on him and started belting out a tune with the help of the small orchestra. Anyone expecting some golden oldie from Shanghai's celebrated heyday would be disappointed since what came out instead was Christina Aguilera's Aint's No Other Man. Fortunately he didn't have blond pageboy curls on his head nor was he wearing some slinky barely-there flapper dress.

Which is when I woke up.

Obviously taking dim sum before sleep conjures up outlandish oriental dreams of Shanghai in the Roaring Twenties.