I Dream’d In A Dream

I dream’d in a dream is a short Chinese movie (or is it a tv show) that I stumbled upon by chance as I was boring my way through the internet.

Seriously though, this time if the year is just so quiet! I looked through the fresh season anime list and I came away with zero expectancy. In other words, no anime to pass the time on until next year. I guess this is a good thing…for my mother, because I may get higher grades in college for a change.

But really, this year started off with a bang and is still out there in overall output but the later months are kind of dead, aren’t they? Times like these are when I go back and appreciate all those gems I already have through re-watch. But after all, one just needs a new flavor from now and then and so I was raiding the internet for at least a yuri MV. This dropped me into yamibo where I haven’t been for like, years and wasn’t disappointed.

I came across a couple of MV and it was while I watched those that this recommendation came up.

“I dream’d in a dream’ is very light on the yuri and the new-comer may dismiss it at first as just another college student contribution to the woos of youthful life. Yes indeed it spends most of the time on the five friends doing what college students do best, partying, arguing and all that!

Of course to me, who had to get my goggles sewn directly to my skin, I was in ecstatic glee all half the hour the movie runs for.

I love movies that make my heart go all ‘kyun’ which thankfully happens to be most of the yuri movies, thanks to the BAD ENDs, disappointing ends and all the other not so great endings we have come to accept in our yuri movies.

Sometimes the ending doesn’t have to be a BAD END to ignite heart-twists. Sometimes it’s the ‘TOO LATE’ card that gets us and it is so in this case. Throughout the time they are together, the two are quite physical and one looking on from the outside can easily question their relationship. But did they themselves acknowledge the other’s feelings or even attempt to confess theirs? The answer is a big NO.

Of course this is the typical route that most of us in real life take either from fear of rejection, fear of the outside view of us or simply just…fear. And thinking that this short movie wanted us to know the hard-ships of youth, they stuck to the realistic and so the two don’t realize each other’s feelings until it’s too late.

Well, it wasn’t that late actually. It wasn’t like a decade passed or that one of them kicked the bucket. No, it was only a year later and both were still alive and kicking but probably just graduated and gone their separate ways. This means that if they were such great friends, surely they kept in touch or had each other’s contact details, at least an address, so if it’s only a year later they could surely get back in touch…surely.

But of course we never get this, or they never thought of it but we all know how stories sacrifice things for plot bunny.

The movie is in Chinese since I stumbled upon it on youko, and of course the subs were Chinese as well (>_>’) So I didn’t fully get what was going on but I have watched enough to read in context and from what I understood;

These five friends (three girls and two boys) one day exchange notes/letters on one of their nights of binge drinking and they might have decided to not read these notes until after a year has passed or something because that’s what happens. And so a year later, we start hearing each of the friend’s confessions and in there we learn the truth.

Again I apologize (damn, maybe I should take Chinese language classes) for not understanding Chinese so I didn’t get the names but though one of the girls was so obvious in her feelings (The tomboy one, of course) we never really know for sure about the other one. She came off as the typical friendly girl that their friends fall for but never truly is interested. But get this, when we get to her note, which fatefully went to the other girl (the tomboy) and it had only three sentences on it;

I love you (Wo Ai ni)

I love you

I love you

Those three lines made me feel all kinds of funny on the inside. It was like they were written to me personally and in fact they are the ones that made me write about this in the first place.

I don’t really know why. I was just so hit hard by this revelation. There was something about it that…I just can’t explain it. I mean after all the screwing around of the previous minutes, this scene at almost the end just got to me. I couldn’t stop thinking about it even when I went to bed. I just…I don’t know.

Do watch it if you can and maybe you can enlighten me dear Readers…

PS: Sorry for the bad quality.

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