The first day of November, I had a dream within a dream, when I was going through sleep paralysis:
As I was halfway through falling asleep, I began to hear a ghost voice, a generally calm, standard English male voice, like chanting, and I can’t even understand any words it’s saying. Sure enough, I couldn’t move. As I tried my best to move my fingers and finally grab my phone, I found that the mobile phone was completely transparent. I came to the doctor, but he can’t help me. As I left the room, I woke up from my dream, but was stuck with a real sleep paralysis.

Sleep paralysis is frequent symptomatic to panic disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, death anxiety, and social anxiety (Sharpless B. A, 2016). As a non-native English speaker this may because you’ve gone from a role where you were more than equal to the task in original environment, imagining you finally being able to speak yourself out in an advanced education and society, and then becoming a global citizen. But turns out I always couldn’t find the right word, it’s never accurate enough. Clumsy, sluggish.

As an Asian student what happens more often is “an occlusion of knowledge” and hence a “difficulty” to generate “a vocabulary that associates appropriate words and concepts with appropriate things (Ann Stoler, 2011)”. Even when I conducted a literature study on Chinese society, the authoritative article was written in English by a Chinese. The outer world and I became incomplete to each other. I’ve fallen in aphasia.