Angry red ants are angry

I just woke up from an awful dream. After driving back from Kuala Lumpur to Kechara Forest Retreat (KFR), I was feeling a bit sickly (which I blame on the ridiculously painful ingrown toe nail extraction this morning!) so I went to lie down and promptly fell asleep. I don’t know how long I was asleep before the dream began but let me tell you, I now wish I hadn’t fallen asleep >.< In my dream, the writers' block (Manjushri Hill) in KFR had been moved next to the kitchen in the KFR Ladrang. The floors had office carpeting and it was stone grey, the kind where you don't see the dirt / fallen objects very easily. The writers' corner was cosy with a timbered ceiling, and three walls were lined with office desks. I didn't know how I knew but I felt that we were on the first floor (see my amazing drawing on the left; click it for more details). [caption id="attachment_1993" align="alignright" width="300"] The ceiling was like this but a little lower, and without the mood lighting and windows at the end[/caption] Rinpoche had called everyone somewhere to watch a video. After the video showing, I came back to the writers’ corner to clean up because we had left the place in a hurry, and therefore in a mess. I was sitting alone in the writers’ corner under bright fluorescent lighting, between my desk and Su Ming’s when I first felt it.

It was a sharp pain between my big toe and index toe, like something had bitten me. I looked down and there it was – a great big red ant, glistening with anger (yes, red ants can glisten with anger. This is my dream, so hush because all if possible). Looking at me with its beady black eyes as if to say, “Yeah, you got a problem with that? Do ya? Do ya?” Being the committed Buddhist that I am (hehe), I moved to swat it away which is when I noticed he wasn’t alone.

No, no, no he was most definitely not alone. In fact, he had brought his extended family along to this party, all few thousands of them. They were everywhere, marching in straight lines to one spot just under my chair where a group of ants had congregated in a circle to feast on something in the carpet at that very spot. I hadn’t seen them at first, so well-camouflaged they were by our stone grey carpets.

I panicked. I started moving stuff out of the way to discover the source of this invasion, but they were coming from Everywhere. Big ants, small ants, daddy ants, baby ants. The more I disturbed them, the more they would scatter in my direction, crawling onto my arms and feet and biting me (goddamn those jabs were sharp). I suddenly had a thought, “Can’t people die from red ant bites? I think I’ve seen a documentary on this before.”

Now I don’t know the significance of this but in my dream, I kept going back to one thing – the three bottles of soft drinks on the floor between my table and SM’s. One was a Fanta Orange, another was an A&W rootbeer and the third was a bottle of 100 Plus. The ants were inside although the bottles were capped and I remember thinking, “How’d you sneaky f***ers get in there?”

My panic was now full-blown because I was still being bitten, but I suddenly had a fit of inspiration…I remembered I had a great big canister of OFF! in my drawers. Now if you guys don’t know what OFF! is, it is only the most amazing, most effective mosquito repellent ever. Bonus points also because it doesn’t smell like crap / citronella. It works like no other repellent has ever done for me before.

So I whipped out my OFF! and (remember, I’m a committed Buddhist ahem) started spraying the ants. I know mosquito repellent doesn’t work on ants but in my dream, I figured since it was an aerosol can, perhaps when the liquid fell onto the ants, it would immobilise them (remember, committed Buddhist speaking here. Sigh. I’m going to Avici.).

It worked! The ants were being frozen in their position so I went on a spraying spree, immobilising all of them…which is when I woke up.

Back to real life. I feel extremely exhausted now (must be all of the ant-fighting) and would like to go back to sleep, but I can’t because I have a tonne of things to get done today.

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