This is a Japanese city.

I blink and look around, still unable to remember how I got here. I recognise the occasional word on the signs, but the writing is interspersed with their people's scripts. It's all vertical, of course, like our pre-communist writing. I half-expect it to be some old, dry text about the nature of The Road, but it quite clearly says that this is a train station.

Not that I couldn't have known that just from looking at it. My clothes are... plain, but nicer than anything I've worn before. And the feeling of indefinable strangeness is apparently attributable to the fact that I am a teenager again, or so I'm guessing from the proportions of my body relative to the pay-phone.

I look through the things in my pockets, the bag on the street beside me. I find a mirror somewhere.

A Japanese teenager.

I stifle an un-manly giggle like one of the ones I used to take flak for in middle school.

Weirdest. Dream. Ever.

I don't feel particularly short, but I was never the tallest of guys anyway. As I stand there like an idiot, wondering what the hell to do with myself, my subconscious puts on a little spectacle to entertain me.

Mothra or something out of one of those badly-made Japanese monster films - or that recent American-made one with the robots and the godawful dub (I have no idea why they insist on dubbing live-action stuff, it never fails to produce abominations unto cinema) - comes out of nowhere, cutting a swathe of destruction through the city. I cheer it on, actually. It's not often I see interesting things like this in my sleep.

Usually it's just the same old stuff - me, working at the hair-dressers'. The law (whether municipal or from Party HQ or whatever, I have no idea) requires that establishments the size of ours have redundancies, so that's where I come in. They say the iron rice bowl is gone forever, but some bits remain. I don't know if American hairdressers' are really like that or not, but the ones in the films never seem to have redundant people like me.

Anyway, my dreams are about as boring as my actual life - not least because they consist of me living out my life. Worse, they always seem to fixate on the most boring bits - like when we're sitting around, waiting for a customer, having exhausted every last possible bit of small talk but not being allowed to pull out so much as a pack of cards between us, because that would constitute slacking off on the job when, apparently, Hongqing playing that stupid candy-crushing game on his shiny new 'phone that he definitely couldn't actually afford doesn't constitute 'slacking off'.

I'd kill for us to be able to pull out a Mahjong set or something, though. That'd be kind of cool. Though in time, we'd probably get tired of that too.

But - I'd put a lot of thought into this, okay? We had a lot of spare time on our hands - we'd probably end up drawing lots for who would have to leave the game when we got a customer. And whoever lost would probably lack too much enthusiasm.

Anyway. Giant monster. It's all good fun, watching the Japanese military having its ass handed to it - serves them right, the little yellow bastards (though its still better than what the lot of them deserve) - buuuut it's getting a little close for comfort. Still, it's just a dream. An interesting dream. Why duck for cover and spoil the view, when I can just stand here? I'm not going to imagine myself dying of shrapnel. When the downed chopper lands not even fifty metres away, I walk closer to it to get a better look of the pilot trying to scramble out of the wreckage.

The sight inspires far more pity than I'd imagined - and precisely zero glee, though I remember laughing as a kid whenever I saw a dwarf-pirate like this guy meet a grisly end like this. Though the flames are searingly hot, I run to him.

Because it's a dream, when the helicopter explodes I resist the urge to flinch or blink so I can feel like more of a badass. Cool guys in the movies and on TV don't look at explosions. Unless you're that crossdressing wuxia-rabbit-god guy who's always acting super-girly and stuff (that show is weird).

I'm instantly crippled by the stabbing pain in one eye, which doesn't work anymore, and a host of other places. It hurts like fuck, and I'm still screaming bloody murder when everything goes black.

The average person in our world is a 30-ish Chinese man, apparently, and probably has been for, what, three millenia? Ever since East Asian peoples adopted Iraqi-style agriculture, anyway. Furthermore, there are more people are alive today than have ever lived, put together. So... contemporary Chinese guy in his thirties.