I cannot remember much of the dream before this. It was mostly a collection of uninteresting details. I only remember discovering that the world was not perfect, and that inexplicable anomalies appeared from time to time.
We were in a classroom.
Two walls were made almost entirely of large glass windows. The view outside was beautiful. It was late afternoon, during the break between classes. The room was noisy but not loud. Light slanted in through the windows, drawing a golden rim around the edges of desks, chairs, and people’s shoulders.
I looked casually toward the other side of the room.
There was one person who looked like me. No—two, three, four people who looked exactly like me.
More precisely, they seemed to be versions of me from different periods of my life, as if they had stepped out of an old photo album and into reality.
I instinctively picked up my phone and wanted to take a picture of them. But as I raised the camera, I felt that taking a picture of them alone would not be enough. Since this was such a rare event, why not take a group photo and include myself?
So I handed my phone to my classmate and called out to those versions of me:
“Can we take a group photo?”
They agreed almost immediately.
“Sure.”
I walked over and stood among them. We lined up in front of the entire wall of glass. Behind us was a spread of evening clouds, the sky stretched into a long layer of orange and red mixed with the blue that was about to sink below the horizon. It was so beautiful that it felt slightly unreal.
My friend held up the phone and tried several angles.
Then I noticed that something was wrong. A huge figure stood between us and the phone, as if deliberately trying to steal the shot. I could not see his face. I could only make out a massive, clumsy outline, with no intention of moving aside.
We tried talking to him, but nothing came of it. We had to move to the other side of the windows.
I stood in line again with the other versions of myself. My friend tried a few more angles and was still not satisfied. Finally, he ran to the windows and began pushing them open one by one, seriously rearranging our position for the perfect shot.
I told him it was good enough.
But when the break ended, he handed the phone back to me. I looked at it and found that not a single picture had been taken.
“How did you not take one?”
He looked embarrassed. I told him that compared with certain moments, the phone’s storage was worth nothing. It did not matter if the picture was bad. We could always delete it.
“Do you know why I wanted this group photo so badly?” I asked. “Don’t you think the four of us look remarkably alike?”
He looked up at me and said, “No, not really.”
For a moment, I did not know how to explain it.
“It would be nice to have a picture,” I said. “At least then I could hold on to it and examine it carefully.”
“You know, I suspect that this world sometimes develops a brief anomaly. People from different moments in time appear in the same place at the same time. But soon everything returns to normal. Before long, they—or I—will leave because of a transfer, an absence, or some other reason, and I will never see them again.”
