Dream is a weird thing: the person appearing in your dream shows up in daytime

Dream is a weird thing. Last night a fellow Taiji practitioner appeared in my dream and she asked me to give her a back massage as she suffered back pain. I was astonished by the request but I knew she had liked me for a long time, and had some curiosity for me even while her husband was a few paces away from her practising Taiji. 

I remember in May 2020 she asked me where I was from and what I did for a profession and the like. In June she complained of the heavy expenditures she had made supporting her elder son, and the huge rent she paid for her when he began his college life in Tokyo, Japan.

It was a rainy day and I kneaded her back and shoulders. She wore a pink T-shirt.

How strange that the next morning when I arrived at the Zhabei Park to find her and her husband stretching out in preparation for Taiji. She appeared after nearly two months of absence, those two months witnessing temperatures often reaching 39 or 40 degrees Celsius in Shanghai. Her husband, a lanky man running a tea business, was absent from Taiji practicing for more than a month.

I didn't yearn to see her or meet her, to be honest, and I cannot recall I have ever thought of her during the past month or too, seriously. I might be thinking of her when I saw her husband and thought of asking him "Where is the Chairman (meaning her) now that you the CEO are here?", but I refrained asking him this question as he has usually been rather serious looking.

In June she struck up a conversation with me, talking about all the troubles and expenditures she had made for her two sons, when her husband, a few paces right of me, snapped her in a joking way, "Hey, you've revealed all our secrets to him", and she stopped immediately.

Her health was not very good, as she suffered from low blood pressure, feeling dizzy and tired easily, and perspiring profusely even when doing the slow-moving Taiji. Indeed she halted after finishing two-thirds of the whole 30-minute routine, and started to stick her hand into the back of her white T-shirt to swipe off sprinkles of sweat from her back to the ground.

"That's not graceful," I said to myself. Compared with me and many other fellow practitioners, she and her husband were obscenely rich, hiring some 50 employers for their tea business.

But one can be rich materially, yet still is unable to develop some proper manners and habits, I sighed to myself.

She told me that she had spent RMB 30K for Tofel lessons for her younger son, but she was afraid that she was not getting much out of the lessons. "He might be only able to get 24 in score after the lessons," and asked me what levels of English I had.

I said I didn't have any certificates in English, saying that in my time of learning English the certificates were not yet appearing, but I attend meetings with foreigners.

I offered to spend an hour with her son to see how he was doing in English, and then her husband asked her to leave the Taiji practicing and went in the direction of the Tea Market, just across the road at the west gate of the park.

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