By Shelly Bryant

A Dream Wants Waking
Lydia Kwa
Buckrider Books (2023) / 226 pages / SGD 29.55

Lydia Kwa's A Dream Wants Waking is a novel of ideas – big ideas. While the plot is engaging enough and the characters are endearing enough, ultimately, it is the ideas that draw the reader in and keep the pages turning. Or, even better, the ideas are often big enough to demand a pause in the page turning to give the reader a moment to reflect and internalise the experience. It is this trait that makes it the sort of novel one wants to return to for multiple readings.

The central thread on which many of these big ideas hang is the breaking of binaries and the embrace of hybridity. This theme is played out in many ways, both subtle and overt. One of the areas in which this theme is most clearly played out is in the rejection of all notions of gender binaries. In the world of the novel, gender is fluid rather than polar, and it is handled with a very low-key treatment of the issue – it's not an ordeal, because it is the norm, the way things are meant to be. The novel paves a clear path for a respectful understanding of the individual's right to assert their gender, coupled with a nuanced understanding of what it means to be gendered at all in a society in which gender fluidity is embraced.

A recurring metaphor is used at various intervals in the text to explore this non-binary reality, in which the non-linear time sequence of the novel reinforces the theme of rejecting dualities. This exchange (660 CE) between Qilan, a nun at Da Fa Temple (who is the previous incarnation of the book's protagonist, Yinhe, a half-human, half-fox spirit), and Ling, an orphaned girl she rescued from slavery, presents the metaphor most fully:

Ling approaches Qilan, tentative in her movements. "I've been thinking…" She lowers her gaze.

"Something weighing on your mind?"

"About the time when you showed me that magic. You know, when you changed the caterpillar to the butterfly and back."

"Yes?"

"You said that the cycle of life isn't always straightforward or predictable."

Qilan smiles warmly at Ling. "That's right. Humans have separated the world into dualities. Silence versus noise. Emptiness versus form. Death versus life. But reality is much more complex than mere dualities. Evolution of forms is infinitely occurring."

If this brings to mind The Book of Changes, that is clearly intentional (and not only because it was the inspiration for binary code in Leibniz's work). Oracle bones and transitions between forms are central to A Dream Wants Waking, functioning as key elements of both the parts of the story set in ancient China and those set in a near-future dystopian world, with key figures from Chinese mythology, history and literary tradition weaving in and out of the events in both settings. The chimeric beings who are so prominent in the narrative tie the traditional Chinese setting firmly to the undermining of gender and other binaries.

The chimeric persons also help to bring another of the novel's themes to the forefront – the relationship between body and being. It might be argued that the gender issues and the questions surrounding the body-being relationship are closely intertwined, which brings to mind Simone de Beauvoir's concept of situated embodiment. The consistent focus in Beauvoir's works on the notion that one's situation is expressed through one's body is teased out in various aspects of A Dream Wants Waking, which is fitting for a novel so deeply tied up with both feminism and AI, the two main fields in which the notion of situated embodiment has flourished and expanded. The theme is explored in many of the characters and relationships in the book, with perhaps the most beautiful being the relationship between Wen and No. 1, a Central Government scientist and an AI-driven chimeric brain respectively (Luoyang, 2219 CE).

Wen arrives at the lookout point at the edge of the park. When was the last time she sat here? A tremor passes through her. Oh yes, that boyfriend who'd intimated that she needed to lose weight. She grits her teeth, plops down, glances at her watch, and places her hands on her lap. The most she could do is fifteen, maybe seventeen minutes here. She takes a few deep breaths.

She tries to imagine what it might be like for No. 1. It seems to her that No. 1 isn't operating from a purely rational place – along with clairsentience, they seem to have developed emotionally and are quite affected by their wishes and aversions. She feels a degree of sympathy for No. 1 – their brain is their body. Ever since No. 1 reached out to her, they have essentially gone rogue, acting independently of CG, concealing their conversations with her, blocking surveillance of their interactions. They've been acting according to their whims and preferences.

Is it intimacy that No. 1 longs for? With all that archival data in their memory bank, are they falling in love with romance itself? Do they think that to have a body spells instant freedom? They have idealized having a body. She wants to shout at No. 1, No, it's not enough to have just a body, any kind of body! Look at me! I'm not desirable because I'm too big! See?

What Wen does not yet understand at this point (though the reader does) is that she misunderstands her own body – she is not as undesirable as she thinks her body makes her, because "The truth is inescapable, though – No. 1 thinks that Dr. Wen is beautiful." The choices that play out as this relationship continues to grow are both surprising and refreshing – even in the contemplation of suicide and loss, responses which too often are the result of such feelings towards one's own body and the alienation one can feel as a result of being imprisoned in a body. Wen's reflections on No. 1's obsession with having a body ultimately lead to greater self-realisation, which in turn opens her up to the sort of intimacy No. 1 has sought by hoping to find a body through which their mind may engage with the world.

There are many related issues that can be examined in a review of A Dream Wants Waking – it's a book that bears up under a great deal of discussion – and it is tempting to talk about the non-linear structure, the choice of present tense for the narrative, dreams, various characters from traditional Chinese fiction, and even the concept of translation as pilgrimage. But it seems more productive here to stay focused on the larger themes that all of these elements hold up. This is a novel profoundly committed to the idea of mind over body, viewing it as a defining feature of what it is to be human and what it is to love. Humans are not meant to be bound by bodies – especially if we rigidly define them according to the dualities that seem to have such a stranglehold on our biped-bound minds. We are instead meant to live and to love as beings who exist beyond the prisons of our bodies, even as we experience our world through them. Ultimately, freedom from this prison comes not from a battle between dualities, but instead through "an attunement between the two […] that will unlock a change." And the dreams of freedom are all there for one purpose – "awakening". The dreams lead us to change.

"Will this change result in the liberation of the chimeric slaves in Interstitium and Dream Zone?"

"It will end enslavement of all forms."

Throughout A Dream Wants Waking, whether in ancient times or a feared future, it is the breaking of binaries that gives liberation. It is a novel of living with/in the liminal. And it is a narrative that bears revisiting.

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