There are two weeks to go before I leave for Cambridge. After a few days of moping, at mid-morning on Friday, I decided to be cheerful. Then, at 5 PM, I realised that this was for real — I had to say goodbye to people I care about. It was harder than I expected.

I am about five hours of work away from finishing my dispute resolution essay. It will be a relief when it’s done. I think it will turn out all right too. I expected it to be sub-standard, given my rush, but I think it’ll be fine. I didn’t do any work on it Monday to Friday this week. I needed a break; the topic was saturating me. The break seems to have worked.

I’ve been having dreams that reflect my state of mind so accurately that if I was living a novel or a movie, I’d mock it for being contrived. A week ago, I dreamed that I was on a spaceship to Mars. I was leaving my family and friends behind to join the colony.

On Mars, we landed in a tall dome, the first in a series of them. The roof was blue like the sky, the buildings were rectangular and single blocks of bright colour. There was only one street and it stretched ahead of me. I fought my way through the crowd of colonisers and joined a queue to use one of four internet computer terminals. Come to think of it, it was a lot like the internet terminal at Singapore Airport.

I eventually got my turn at the computer. I had only 15 minutes. I tried to type an email to tell my family and friends that I missed them. For some reason, I had trouble typing — and someone kept moving my mouse. Like in the movies, just as the timer counted down the final seconds, I fought the invisible mouse-pusher to get the cursor onto the ‘send’ button.

I don’t know if I got to send the email.

I had another dream a few days later. I dreamed I was sitting at a desk. It looked like a desk in a pod like at work. I was working on something, then before I knew it, some people had come around and taken away my computer. Then I saw pinned to my pod wall my university timetable. I started panicking when I realised that I had already missed two classes today. I had forgotten that I was a student again.