People in the village say the river that runs through the village is cursed too.

"It's all because of the man who has no dreams." The old woman took her broom and tried to drive the chickens into the yard, but she failed. "Ay, I'm talking about Yi." The old woman watched the chickens run further and further away and spat at the dust that was raised. "The most he has ever said is: it's a curse! He's such a weirdo, isn't he?"

Yi was a man without dreams, a man deprived of them, to be precise. He has been going to bed at 1am and waking up at 3.30am every day for almost forty years. His sleep was like a pre-programmed routine.

 

Yi would stare out of the window straight after waking up every day until he heard the first loud cockcrow. He hated the cock and even feared it a little. Associated, he began to hate the sunrise. He loved to look outside the window in the early hours of the morning, he had seen the moon in different forms, houses without oil lamps or candles to shine on them, branches snapped in the gale, and the small pools of water that glowed ambiguously under the moon after the rain.

 

He said his sparse sleep was part of the curse, but he didn't think it is a bad thing. He didn't care about the length of sleep or not. To Yi's despair he loses his dreams at the same time, "It's the curse!" Once he remembered the lack of dreams, he began to go mad, "The god is punishing me, it must be her!" In his mind, a person who cannot dream is no different from in vegetative state.

 

As the people in the village drifted off to sleep the village, Yi will feel like a monster that doesn't belong to this world. The minds of sleeping people burst out into disorganized little worlds that floated around in another spatial web. Some people's little worlds will be social and collision. Some little world will sneak out through the gaps in the net, and the person, the owner of the little world that has slipped out, will wake up in his sleep.

 

Yi once said that he had committed a sin in his childhood at the temple. He did not say exactly what he had done, and no one dared to ask him about it, for fear that the curse would implicate them.

The crumbling temple has always been a topic that people avoid talking about, it seems to carry a curse and no one wants to come there, it seems to be isolated from the world. The old woman often said to the villagers, "There is also a gamble between gods, and an idol that no one worships like this is has huge power of despair."

 

Yi returned to the broken temple, wanted to go to the idol atonement in exchange for the right to regain the dream, returned to the taboo place for all the people in the village. He looked at the place where the idol had been put, but now it was empty. He was in agony, he felt perpetually lost, he stumbled and couldn't find his way, not only couldn't he find a way, but there was no way at all. He even felt that it was all a long nightmare that he was having, a nightmare that would stay with him until he died.

 

Yi fell asleep in the temple. He saw the idol standing beside the river that ran through the village. Yi knelt down at the feet of the idol, confesses, and cries. He tried to speak, but when the words came out to his mouth, they turned into baby babbles. Receiving no response, Yi looked up and saw his floating body on the river, and he seemed to realize that he had come to a place where the power of the idol ceases and that he was just a plaything of the gods.

 

He was destined to die in that river, as if by resting there he would be freed from his curse and become one of the blessed dead. Yi woke up with a start. He realized that he did not have to endure the ordeal of losing his dream. He felt that the dream was God's forgiveness for his sins in the past, and God gave him guidance.

 

God had shown him a way, a way he had always been looking for. He was no longer lost, he was grateful for the brief dream of being lost and found, he had finally found the missing part of himself. Thinking so, unconsciously he had taken off his clothes, naked into the river. The water he drank swirled inside himself, he was transparent as a water bottle.

 

People in the village avoided talking Yi's death, just as they did the broken temple and the idol inside. Almost everyone had the idea that it was the curse that he had always talked about that had fallen on him, some atheists stubbornly thought that he had gone mad and fell into the river, but people are tacit understanding to stay away from the river. Even in the morning of Yi's death, everyone passing by the river would only take a quick glance at the pile of eye-catching clothes belonging to Yi and then hurried away.

 

The river, isolated and neglected by everyone, the shadow of one wave floating above the other. What they saw, what they thought, what they did not say, in the depths, where transparency and translucency could not reach, he reached.