Waking up to the sound of falling bombs

"life is like a dream, we wake up when we're dead."
- Charlie Crews, Life

My Dream for December 2, 2008:

War bombs fell slowly from the sky. Vintage bombs- the kind they would unearthed in campus lots or public areas in the Philippines.

I watched them fall in slow motion. I was by a large window. My mother was in the room with me.

I hear an infant cry. My mom runs to the crib, I pick the baby up. It cries loudly against the slow fall out of bombs. We hide in the house. The house is not our home, but a Castillian house in Makati. Its at the corner of SS-highway and buendia.We hide, the bombs explode, a flash of white light. But the sound is disappointingly not loud enough to scare me off. I thought we would have been annihilated, but we weren't. The baby kept crying. The bombs stop falling.

The soldiers arrive in trucks in front of the house. They storm through the door and tell us to escape with them. The area is no longer safe, they tell me. It feels like WWII, but it is the present.

The day clears. I cross Buendia near the train tracks, my dad is there waiting by a bench. My dad asks me about my brother. I tell him he is with his new girlfriend, which in my dream looks like a girl from our childhood.

My Tita Let is with me at this bus stop with my Dad. A car arrives with her relatives and friends from Tarlac. She gets into the car and they speed off.

My aunt died a few months ago, this is one of those dreams where I see her alive and well.