Dream Logic in Daisuke Shen’s Vague Predictions and Prophecies

To accompany our fall 2025 issue (22.2), we have curated a craft folio on horror, the uncanny, and/or the strange, after noticing that several pieces in the print issue include that theme. Here is Ginger Ko’s piece.

Vague Predictions and Prophecies. Daisuke Shen. Clash Books, 2024. 248 pp. $18.95 (paper)

“Duckling,” a short story from Daisuke Shen’s collection Vague Predictions and Prophecies, is simple in premise: A woman notices that her partner is no longer reaching out to her with affection. Min, the distant girlfriend, still visits the narrator’s apartment for sex, falling into a routine of letting herself into the apartment directly after work and heading to the kitchen to heat up food from the fridge, but no longer bothering with talking or touching outside of fucking, and no longer giving the narrator her particular, thoughtful little gifts—small vials of fragrance distilled from wild tomato plants, yuzu blossoms foraged from strangers’ yards, orange peels salvaged from compost. The story establishes the vibrancy of specifics and credible characterization, and then it gleams its speculative blade when the narrator uses her secret powers of transformation, turning herself into Min’s fantasies and desires over a succession of nights. The speaker becomes cloud-woman, piano-woman, sea-woman, book-woman, honey-and-fruit-woman, each time providing Min with an irresistible heightened sensual fantasy created from Min’s personal history and desires. As flower-woman, the narrator gives Min a fragrant and unfurling experience: “She squeezed my buds until they blossomed, burst, my pollen everywhere, all over her face, the bed, our bodies.” As each iteration, she is created exactly for Min.

With each tailored sexual episode, the narrator is more connected with Min afterward: “Whatever she wanted, I became. I was learning so much about her I had never known before. It didn’t matter if I disappeared.” Each transformation is as much of an unveiling to the narrator as it is to Min, so the story implies that Min’s desires (“What did you do?” “What you wanted me to do”), not the narrator’s insights initiate the narrator’s transformations. When Min professes to miss the “original” narrator, the self who formed the beginning of their relationship, the narrator must explain that there’s no turning back, that she had missed her chance: “The rule was that each time I changed, I would have to have someone remind me of myself in order to morph back. . . . Why didn’t you tell me? Min asked. Why didn’t you say anything beforehand?” The implication, of course, being that it’s not Min’s true desire for the narrator to return to her old self. Instead, the narrator becomes Mei Xiang, Min’s first love, a relationship cut short by Mei Xiang’s untimely death at twenty years old. After the loss of her original self, the narrator has no regrets. “I was beautiful. I was perfect. I was what she wanted,” the narrator says.

In “Duckling,” as in Shen’s other stories in Vague Predictions and Prophecies, the surrealism comes not from the characters’ logic, which is always unassailably established through rational memories and emotional responses, but the logic of the situation, which subverts meaning and possibilities. Even Min recognizes that something is wrong since she cannot summon the original narrator with her desire, though she professes it. When she discovers that the narrator’s original form is likely lost, permanently replaced, she is distraught: “She couldn’t believe it. Her body kept twisting as she screamed with despair, rocking back and forth as she held herself like a temperamental child.” The implications of this discovery are not that fantasies are wrong to have, or to fulfill for others, but that these desires can be dangerous, especially subconscious desires. It’s a common temptation to give ourselves over to another’s attention, to allow another’s proclivities and experiences to take over our own, to mold us into the perfect object. Though the narrator is a willing participant, Min’s perspective is the one that readers might inhabit, the perspective of the horrified participant, the one who has come to understand the costs; the fantasy sequence becomes the waking nightmare, the inescapable horror.

Reading Shen’s work, I had certain jolts of recognition that happen only rarely in my reading life. The jolts happen about specific, hidden things—not a resemblance, or a resonance, or a relatedness, but an exactness that is confounded by uniqueness. Can I trust these jolts of recognition? I search my memories and sometimes I locate the connection to a notably bizarre moment in my waking life, and sometimes it is from a moment of unlogic from my dreaming life. Sometimes it is a memory of a dream or fantasy.

If my recognition of moments in Shen’s fiction comes from my dreaming life, and not my waking life, does it still count?

Blood flecked the collar of her coat. I wanted to scream but I knew in the back of my mind that I couldn’t or that something awful, just awful, would happen if I did.”

—from “A Mother’s Love” in Vague Predictions and Prophecies

There are hallmarks of surrealisms and futurisms (or pessimisms) and glitch philosophies in Shen’s work, as well as a global perspective that can only be accessed by someone who understands the escape from (and return to) family and heritage that diaspora entails. You might be living in another country entirely, but you still have deeply ingrained sense-memories of another country and culture. Everyone around you looks and speaks and behaves and is guided by an inner code that makes the reality of another place something out of an outlandish fairy story, something out of a surrealist narrative, something that feels alien, unbreachable. It’s true that this isn’t a constant feeling, this unreality or surreality that diaspora inspires, and that many can learn to incorporate or synthesize diasporic reality-switching seamlessly into their lives, but there are those like me, always adjusting, trying to catch up, trying to accept and understand—though I often don’t recognize what’s happening; since it makes perfect sense to everyone else, I am the outsider who is navigating these surprises, so I’d better just muddle along as best as I can. Like when I’ve been breathlessly chased down a stairwell by a fearsome monster in a bad dream—I don’t stop to think about why I’m in a stairwell, nor if the monster or the fear makes sense. I just keep dreaming about running running running until my heart explodes. Up until the point of dream-demise will I muddle along.

I have been continuously surprised by the powers of hegemony. I guess I’ve never fully surrendered to it because I react to it the way I react to dream logic—I note that it’s strange, I note that it’s arbitrary, and also note that it’s imaginative. I see that what is happening is happening because it’s possible in the world of the dream, though it may be impossible anywhere else.

A Hollywood adaptation of Ghost in the Shell should just be a regional homage to the Japanese classic, and faux multiculturalism rightly taken at (cheap) face value. To think that Hollywood (or any other highly visible, immensely powerful American, European, or—dare I say—Chinese institution) is anything but provincial, or that it is any real benchmark of cosmopolitanism—assumptions that continue to underlie debates on representation and identity—is delusional and unproductive.

—from “Asian Futurism and the Non-Other,” Xin Wang

There is the situation of the dream and its logic, and there is also the person who is in the dream, who operates with the dream’s logic, even if the self under the dream’s regime is violent, fantastical, motivated by bizarre and unrecognizable desires. The horror of a nightmare can sometimes be created by the actions that our dream-selves take. In “Vague Predictions & Prophecies,” the collection’s title story, the characters are angels from the Christian canon, and the setting is all universes known to angels and God. Lucy, the fallen angel, leads the story’s speaker, Zedkiel, to their eventual demise, as prophesied in the story by Raphael: “And the mother of hell shall appear in your midst, swaddling a babe, and the old angels will meet their end.” The mother of hell is Lucy, who assumes the form of a woman suckling a four-headed deer fetus left for dead by its surreal mother: “Outside of the window, another four-headed deer is digging something out of the ground. When it raises its head, I see a deer fetus hanging from its mouth, similarly deformed. The mother buries it, pushing the earth with her snout, digs it back up, buries it again. Over and over and over, as if hoping that something will change.”

In dreams it feels natural to make terrible decisions, evil decisions, careless decisions, or have no decisions to make at all. No matter what we do, or don’t do, the dream decides everything. Sometimes it’s unclear which bloomed first, the pain of heartache or the dream of heartache.

“Thank you, Josie. When are you coming to visit?” Suddenly the voice turned into her mom’s.

“Mom? Mommy? Is that you?”

“Yes, it is. Oh, and your ex is here too. I always loved having her around the house. She was such a help, you know?”

“Yeah, she was. She really was. Maybe she wasn’t such a horrible person after all, right?”

—from “The Chariot Awaits” in Vague Predictions and Prophecies

Every dream is a displacement, a projection, made real in the moment by our mind’s devotion to the dream to the exclusion of everything else. Yet even in displacement, our dream-selves still act out our essential human behaviors and activities around connecting with others. The parallels of dream-logic with human connection in the diasporic experience are highlighted in Shen’s stories. Not only is connection difficult to establish and maintain with others but there are often different dimensional registers at work. Sometimes, such as in “English Lessons,” a young girl named Ayumi is diligently learning about the world with an open heart, reviewing her lessons for her English test, working her part-time job at a convenience store with a pervy manager, and preparing herself for the world of adults: “The manager’s talking to a young woman, in her mid 20’s or so, waving his hands around. His gills flare as he speaks, and when he shakes his head, she sees the glint of silver scales. His head’s been like this for weeks now. For some reason, no one else has seemed to notice.”

The boy that Ayumi is in love with is Tao, a neighbor boy she’s been close to for years. But Tao is also Watatsumi, an ancient sea god who cannot feel things in the ways that humans do, and who cannot give Ayumi the human kind of relationship she desires. When Tao considers what he can do for Ayumi, he notes to himself that “nothing, not even that which presents itself as eternal, can last forever. There are always rules.”

This reminds me of my diasporic melancholy, the feeling of alienation that, at low and sad moments, feels insurmountable, making it seem like connection is impossible, as impossible as a teenage girl living near Tokyo asking for a connection with an immortal, many-lived, many-bodied deity who operates under separate logics and constraints. I appreciate that Shen doesn’t make this desire outlandish, or pathetic. But the story reveals that it is even more difficult than it already seems. A total transformation is required, and even then, the girl’s desires are only partially granted, almost by a technicality—an internal dream, living inside of her figuratively (“I want the entire world to drown, she’d said”) made literal. At the end of the story, in the bowels of the sea, Ayumi cradles the emerald dragon’s head in her arms and feels empty.

“Are you Chinese?”

“Yes, are you?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s please don’t talk about our mothers making dumplings.”

We shake hands.

—from “Pleasantries” in Vague Predictions and Prophecies

The fear and dread in Shen’s book isn’t just about the disjointedness of life and individuals; it’s also about the things that drive us to hurt ourselves. In “The Rabbit God,” two young boys fall into a dynamic relationship that involves first love, sexual initiation, the cruelty of humankind and godkind, and the absolute terror that accompanies tender love for the small and weak and broken. The terror comes from the possibility of violence and murder, of oneself and of the object, who, in the story, gets beaten to death with a bat. A moment of haunting is described thus: “I felt his body depart from mine and felt an unbearable emptiness, so heavy somehow, carve itself into my stomach.” Then later, the rabbit god “taps the statue, amused. “Does he look like me?” he says. No one else is beside him in the early morning fog. His face falls. Suddenly, he wraps his arms around an empty space, as if trying to love the air that a boy once inhabited.”

Experiencing the horror and uncanniness in Shen’s work, such as in “Rabbit God,” makes me think of Sara Ahmed’s affect aliens—the feminist killjoy, the melancholic migrant, and the unhappy queer—all of whom make appearances in Vague Predictions and Prophecies to ominous and mysterious effect. All these figures are turned toward unhappiness, insisting on it, in fact, as a kind of ethic, an unwillingness to move on; Shen, like Ahmed, focuses on naming and charting and analyzing this phenomenon, rather than ascribing any solutions or imperatives.

(____) is falling behind her outside the window. Now she is no longer a (_____) memory, but a still from a portrait. She appears to him as beautiful as the day when he first met her, a short woman the size of a (_____), shivering outside of the train station in her (_____) dress.

—from “(_____)” in Vague Predictions and Prophecies

As utterly sad or disturbing that many of the scenarios and outcomes in Vague Predictions and Prophecies tend to be, I don’t want to imply that their effects are dependent on gore or nightmare. Shen’s writing is crystalline, each description and phrase contributing to the elegant latticework of language and story, nothing frivolous or unneeded but vivid, dense, ornamented machinery. That alone, of course, can provide readers with succor in these rather devastating stories that feel as real as any dream. The feelings are always realistic, though the contexts may be strange. But the recognition I feel is perhaps best explained in Ahmed’s writing on dystopic works and the freedom of spirit that they offer. In The Promise of Happiness (Duke University Press, 2010), she says:

The freedom to be unhappy is not about being wretched or sad, although it might involve freedom to express such feelings. The freedom to be unhappy would be the freedom to be affected by what is unhappy, and to live a life that might affect others unhappily. The freedom to be unhappy would be the freedom to live a life that deviates from the paths of happiness, wherever that deviation takes us. It would thus mean the freedom to cause unhappiness by acts of deviation.

The characters in Shen’s writing admit to alienation and dismal attitudes and complicated, self-defeating romances. Their struggles and unhappiness are a part of their emotional honesty rather than bleak characterization. In Shen’s “Damien and Melissa,” long-distance-relationship proxy robots are the vehicle for a story about the struggle for love and unity between two people. In what turns out to be an entertaining escapade with mind-control cyborgs and a dizzying conspiracy involving drug-dispensing bracelets, there are also essential truths that ground the most outrageous dream logic. The feelings in the stories of Vague Predictions and Prophecies are real, as real as they are in my waking life, as they are in any part of my life. This recognition makes me feel even more emotional, the experience of reading Shen’s writing lighting up my chest and brain and feet. “Read it and weep,” I’ve said to another, when recommending Shen’s book to them.

Perhaps this was a bad memory to keep with him, Damien thought to himself as he was carried out of the library by two large men, the figure who was supposed to be Melissa writhing on the floor as the other men pinned it to the ground. Perhaps he should try harder to think of a good one, one where he and Melissa had been happy.

—from “Damien and Melissa” in Vague Predictions and Prophecies

Read more from Issue 22.2.