My grandparents, grand aunt and great-grandma —A-Tai— took care of me when I was young. I was six when A-Tai died. After she was buried, I had a recurring dream that I was with mother and grand-aunt, selecting A-Tai ’s coffin. The dream jumps and jumps until it arrives at my kindergarten life. Everyday at noon after lunch we took an afternoon nap. We would pull our beds down from the walls, and take our bedding from a horizontal wooden cabinet. My classmates were all asleep. Suddenly, the cabinet door slid open like the lid of a coffin. A-Tai was inside. She said, Jiajia, A-Tai is so bored, do you want accompany me down here? I was traumatised.
In Taiwan we say children are pure and innocent; if they encounter anything unsound or unclean, they are easily terrorised. At the soonest, we would have to visit the temple to 收惊 — remove the fright and get cleansed. Temple workers would take a look, pass incense around you, bless and protect you so the bad energy would leave.
For a while, this dream would occur every morning at dawn, causing me to wake suddenly in terror, grip my blanket and run to my parents' room to sleep. At that time I was too small and unable to share my dream, partly because in being brought up by my grandparents in rural Miaoli county, my Hakka was better than my Mandarin. I was not scared of A-Tai but of the dream. I think it was a bad spirit impersonating her.
Around the same time, A-Tai visited mother’s dream and said she was very cold. Mother told grandma about it, and it turned out they had somehow removed warm clothing from the set of paper gifts before the ritual. So they burnt it for her, and everything was okay.
Marie/Jiajia, Taiwan
[loved one / impersonation]