would you like a retroposon to go with that?

did my first stint in the bookstore on saturday from 3-9pm (said bookstore shall remain anonymous, for its own sake :P) haha. bookstore assisting is really fun and educative. For one who has had limited experience in servitude (tends to strike out in rebellion and petulence when ordered to serve in an obsequious manner) and sales (the only thing i'm selling is my rotten cranial remains, at half of its factory price :) good as a substitute for manure), it's a really eyeopening experience. i'm intrigued by the amount of work the tongue can do - sweet talking gets books sold, if nothing else. Simply by gushing over several copies of sparsely illustrated children's literature by some really obscure writer, i managed to convince a guileless mother to purchase 3 of the series of (apparently useless and mindbendingly simplistic) books.

hehe jj says i ought to start asking for commission! :P the only ire is the necessity of attending to customers who are apparently either visually handicapped or outright illiterate (in that case i have absolutely no idea what they're doing in the bookstore in the first place) and saunter/wander/drift/swarm into the bookstore AFTER closing hours. thus making the poor darth-vader-dubber NANA rasp rapturously about more obscure writers for an additional half an hour @_@ i threw in the towel and called it quits after i made an additional 18 bucks of sales after 9pm... by the time i shut the system down it was already 9.37pm and 2 more blur souls came in expecting me to miraculously restart the machine just to collect like 2 bucks from them.

NANA: sorry, man. tough luck... i'm bloody hoarse :P

anyhow. i simply HAVE TO tell you guys about this really bizarre dream i had this morning/last night. i was reading a book titled Near Death Experiences in Children blahblah and a book about 101 philosophy questions (there was one about terrorist shooting and the ethics of voting or minimal sacrifice vs maximum death). And right that night, i dreamt that i had an argument with my mum, and i committed suicide by leaping out of the window (i didn't note whether it's the bedroom one, or the kitchen one. more likely the kitchen one...) and fell to the ground floor. i vaguely register gasping on the ground floor before this funny cartoon with 4 origami-instructions-like pictures popped up and showed what sort of haemorrhage occurs for what degree of rib-puncture of the lungs... apparently the 4th picture (with both sides of the "folded paper" shaded green representing equivocal haemorrhage) (ok i know this is weird. don't even ask me what it means. it just popped out and i have never seen the term equivocal haemorrhage before) was circled, showing 2 ribs broken off and puncturing both lungs. so that was my injury. then i was suddenly transported to the A&E or something, and i was up on the ceiling looking down (yes, in comes the proverbial out of body/near death experience part) and i saw myself on a bed with all sorts of tubes and all. i guess at this point i was sucked back into my body cos i suddenly, viscerally felt myself gasping for breath, and i could (weirdly) see myself sitting bolt upright in the hospital bed and gasping like an incipiently dying fish. but just as abruptly as i was drawn into the body i was repelled out again, to the ceiling, my body flopped lifelessly back onto the bed, and the doctor came in and yelled "tell the family to prepare to collect the body"!

and this is the really weird part: the voice of the doctor was surprisingly real, and just as he was yelling i could PHYSICALLY feel my heart not beating, myself not breathing, and i felt very, very DEAD. really. i don't know how to describe this, but i did feel like i DID die. the weirder part is, after i KNEW i was dead, i heard the alarms of the machines start ringing and all.

then i was magically transported to some other place where jj was being executed by gunshot (aka the philosophy book situation) and i met up with his floating soul and we started chattering about how we both died. haha. totally surreal.

moral of the story: DON'T read too much non-fiction in a day. it does funny stuff to ur subconscious. lol.

am still trying to figure out if i really DID die last night? hmmm. so far the closest theory i've got to explaining the physical experience of the dream (i've never FELT in a dream before) could be that i happened to have contorted myself into a facedown position and thus managed to enact a semi-auto-asphyxiation situation which coincided with the timing of my death in the dream. but such coincidences are really rare, if they DO happen at all.

ah well! philosophers must have all gone mad due to the subconscious manifestations of their voluntary thoughts :D