A few years later while in college, I spend the night at a friend’s apartment after a party.
Part II circa 1999 to 2000
I open the door to my apartment and I see this girl that I’ve seen in my previous dreams before– short brown hair, blue eyes.
She tells me her name but it was too fast for me to understand it. The girl holds out her right arm and reveals two tickets in her hand. I ask what they were for and she says that we won a cruise trip.
I am here in my pajamas and she takes my hand and walk outside. It’s the dead of night.
In front of us for some reason is a small yacht on a river.
“Come, come, we don’t want to miss our trip,” she tells me as she runs to the yacht.
I ask where we were going and she doesn’t reply back.
On the boat, I am standing next to her at the front of the ship talking about the most random things, even things I don’t even understand.
Night turns to into day and I see my two friends in real life pull up alongside the boat and scream at me to jump into an inflatable raft they’re in. I ask why, and again I get no response.
I turn to the girl and she pushes me off the boat onto the inflatable raft. I ask who she was and all I see is her mouth move up and down with no sound coming out of it.
She waves goodbye and the yacht suddenly disappears behind me as the raft gets pulled forward faster and faster. I ask my two friends what’s going on.
No reply.
A few minutes later, one of them says, “Get ready, we’re going white river rafting.”
I ask, “But, where are we?”
He replies, “We’re on the Yangtze River* in China. We’ll be in Beijing in a few hours.”
What? The Yangtze River isn’t this violent, and I can’t swim if I fall off. Somewhere, however, along the way, we enter the Yellow River* and it calms down. Night falls and we reach Beijing at the end of the river.
Our raft stops at the same exact dock I left earlier in a yacht with that girl. In front of me is a travel agency. My two friends just stand at the dock and wave goodbye. I enter the travel agency and enter my apartment.
Someone knocks on the door and it’s that girl again. This time her face is nearly unrecognizable except for her blue eyes and brown hair.
I wake up right when I ask her name again.
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Note: Neither the Yangtze or Yellow Rivers actually connect to or touch Beijing.)