[FICTION] “Dream Chairs” by Jennifer Eagleton

Jennifer Eagleton on her story: I originally wrote the poem “Dream Chairs” after attending The Travellers and The Listeners, by Hong Kong artist Samson Young and his collaborators, at Freespace in the West Kowloon Cultural District in July 2023. The three-hour performance combined theatre, video, immersive soundscapes, moving images and live-art experimentation, and was loosely based on Walter de la Mare’s 1912 narrative poem “The Listeners”.

What interested me was the boundary between the living world and an unseen realm, and the possibility that the long-dead might linger in the material things left behind. In de la Mare’s poem, the listeners remain silent. In my poem “Dream Chairs”, the unseen realm begins to speak, although I still cannot quite hear what it is saying.

^{The Travellers and The Listeners}

A few years earlier, I had encountered a display of chairs at Pacific Place, Hong Kong. I later incorporated portions of the poem “Dream Chairs” into a short story for a writing-critique group, bringing these two Hong Kong experiences together. I find it interesting to move between literary genres and to see what happens when an original work is transformed.

The story appears first below, followed by the poem that helped to inspire it.

Dream Chairs

story

I went to Lane Crawford at Pacific Place to see a display called “100 Chairs”. Chairs are simple, everyday, functional objects, yet months of careful design may go into making them beautiful as well as functional, or merely utilitarian. There is, in fact, a certain art to choosing a chair. It expresses not only one’s lifestyle but also offers others a glimpse of one’s personal identity. For my part, I never buy a second-hand chair because of my unusual sensory condition.

According to the exhibition board, we were taking a journey “to honour the heritage, innovation, and functionality behind 100 iconic chairs”. The exhibition also “pays an ode to varied design eras, styles, and levels of craftsmanship throughout the last century”. There was a section devoted to “chairs as art”.

This section was set apart from the others in a special room. “Ghost Chairs” had a surreal, spooky atmosphere. In one chair, a haunted soul appeared to be trapped in acrylic. In another, a monstrous transparent octopus occupied an armchair. There was also a chair with a skull-shaped design. One consisted of a faint sheet draped gently over the “memory” of a seat. This last chair stood in a separate, dark-curtained room. An attendant told me that it was an antique “memory chair” incorporating a virtual-reality experience. She handed me a pamphlet about the chair’s history and a virtual-reality headset. She did not know about my unusual relationship with chairs.

I hesitated. When I sit on a second-hand chair, I often sense something of the history of the people who have used it, particularly when strong emotions were involved. Synaesthesia is a very real phenomenon, not something invented. When I tell friends stories about a particular chair, they often do not believe me and assume that I am simply projecting my vivid imagination onto it. A chair can express the happiness, sadness or tragedy of its sitter. I have long wanted to sit in a famous chair, sense something from it, research its history and thereby test the story, and my ability, against the facts. Unfortunately, museums tend to prevent modern bottoms from sitting on historically significant chairs.

I decided to sit in the “memory chair” and see what happened. Although the chair was apparently antique, the virtual-reality element would provide an artificial experience. I wanted to find out whether I would feel anything through my own peculiar faculty. I neither read the pamphlet nor put on the virtual-reality headset. Outside the curtained booth, the attendant pressed a button and told me that the virtual-reality experience was beginning.

I simply closed my eyes. At first, nothing happened. Then a kind of mist moved before my closed lids, and I saw a man on horseback approaching an abandoned house. He knocked on the door. It was as though he were expected, yet no one answered. Inside the house, ghostly shadows flitted past the open windows. These “listeners” stood in shards of moonlight, listening to the human voice outside. The empty house was disturbed by the visitor’s lonely call: “Anyone there?”

Outside, the visitor sensed a strange presence despite the silence that met his question. The sky above was full of stars, partly obscured by trees. He beat on the door again, more loudly than before. Then he called out, asking whoever was listening to pass on a message: he had come, but no one had answered him.

The listeners inside made no movement in response. The visitor’s words echoed through the dark, empty house and returned to the only living person there. The listeners heard him turn away and step back into the night. The silence of the forest quickly returned as his footsteps grew softer and finally faded away.

A voice then told me to open a door. There were chairs everywhere in the room. In the middle stood a decrepit wooden chair with a sign above it: “Sit Down”. I sat. I closed my eyes. I felt the past. I was no longer sure how much belonged to the art installation and how much belonged to me. I felt faint. I left my body and ascended.

You travel in your dreams to a land of chairs. Broken ones are piled chaotically high, shrouded in clouds. You move forward and begin to blow the clouds away.

You pull the chairs down and line them up in neat rows. You rip off the cobwebs, wipe away the dust and add varnish. The chairs gleam as if new, awaiting the descent of eager bottoms.

You decide that you want to summon those who had been seated in the chairs, but they have been away too long for their bodies to become visible, for their mouths to speak.

You decide to address the former sitters directly and boldly. Despite being rendered silent by visitors such as you, they have just enough strength left to respond to your call.

They begin to speak, first in a whisper, then in a strident cacophony, for a multitude of ghosts has finally overcome its muteness. Tongues loosened after forgotten centuries are eager to speak.

A large mirror suddenly appears, containing an ocean of eyes too painful to look at. You smash it into a thousand pieces. The assembly of voices screeches, murmurs and suddenly dies.

Silence surges forward, loudly.

Before long, the lights came on.

I got up shakily and went outside, trembling. That chair had history.

The attendant asked, “Are you all right?” I wanted to tell her what I had seen, but I thought she would find me strange. Instead, I looked at the pamphlet in my hand. The chair had been found in a decaying mansion belonging to an eccentric family who had isolated themselves from the world for generations. Little was known about what had gone on inside the mansion, but rumours abounded of satanic practices and rituals.

Dream Chairs

poem

You travel in your dreams to a land of chairs.
Broken ones piled chaotically high, shrouded in clouds.
You go forward and start to blow away the clouds.

You pull the chairs down and line them up in neat rows.
You rip off the cobwebs, wipe away the dust, add varnish.
The chairs gleam new, as if awaiting the descent of eager bottoms.

You decide you want to summon those who had been
seated in the chairs, but they have been away too long for
their bodies to be made visible, for their mouths to speak.

You decide to address the former sitters directly and boldly.
Despite being rendered silent by travellers such as you, they
have just enough strength left to respond to your call.

They start to speak, first a whisper, then a strident cacophony,
for a multitude of ghosts have finally overcome their muteness.
Tongues loosened after forgotten centuries are eager to speak.

A large mirror suddenly appears containing an ocean of eyes, too
painful to look at. You smash it into a thousand pieces.
The assembly of voices screech, murmur, and suddenly die.

Silence surges forward, loudly.

^{How to cite, Eagleton, Jennifer. “Dream Chairs.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 15 Sept. 2026. chajournal.com/2026/09/15/dream-chairs.}

Jennifer Eagleton, a Hong Kong resident since October 1997, is a close observer of Hong Kong society and politics. Jennifer has written for Hong Kong Free Press, Mekong Review, and Education about Asia. She has published two books on Hong Kong political discourse: Discursive Change in Hong Kong(Rowman & Littlefield, 2022) and Hong Kong’s Second Return to China, A Critical Discourse Study of the National Security Law and its Aftermath(Palgrave Macmillan, 2025). Her poetry has appeared in Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine, People, Pandemic & ####### (Verve Poetry Press, 2020), and Making Space: A Collection of Writing and Art (Cart Noodles Press, 2023). [All contributions by Jennifer Eagleton.]