The boy who flew away

I am in a tundra like somewhere in Mongolia. A tribe is having a wedding and I am the bride. My husband is a sword-wielding Chinese warrior clad in iron. The wedding is interrupted by a beast looming over. I hear a child's giggle. Overhead this beast, this dragon-like figure delivers the child to me as a gift. There is uproar from the tribesmen. They don't want me to accept the strange child. They believe the child is cursed. But I decide to take care of him against my warrior husband's wishes.


I give the child daily baths. He has shiny green skin, but adorable and cute. The Chinese warrior I am betrothed to thinks the child is bad luck. Yet, I keep on taking care of the boy.

The child learns to call back the beast that brought him to the land. It starts to fly around the village. It is not yet time, so the beast leaves again.

The child unearths riches from the soil. He laughs. He is proud of what he has dug up with his hands. Liquid gold oozes from the soil and rises to form a froth then a bubble.The villagers begin to accept him. They want the child to keep digging.

I take the boy up the mountain where steam oozes out when the rocks are unturned. He looks at me happy. We sit down and watch the tundra below. I know the beast will come for him and with a heavy heart I know, I don't want him to leave. He's not that small anymore like the time when he arrived.

I see him fly away on the beast's back, sitting proudly.

Teenage Dirtbag at 16

I am a teenager. I am 16. The dream was long, but I only remember this part. A teenage guy with blond hair likes me. He tells me so, and wants a date with me. He tells me this in front of his girlfriend who is also 16. She begins to cry and scream at him, but not me. She leaves furious. But he only has his eyes on me. I smile back, I am my sixteen year old self.

I wake up.

This dream was particularly sweet to me. I look and feel sixteen and not a care in the world. But growing up, this was very far from my reality as I grew up in an all-girls school and the sight of boys were very rare. But I would have gone school girl gaga if a boy had asked me out back then.

Lavender Fields inside a Sea of Flood

Dapitan is flooded. We are getting vaccines for my son. I live in a new high-rise building with a mall on the first floor. The mall escalators going up are turned off, while the ones going down are on and filled with shoppers.



I am at a meadow filled with flowers and lavender, but the colors are different. It feels like being inside a terrarium, outside is the flood and suffering city. The colors in the meadow are that of a Matisse painting. Its like the countryside of France, the view which I saw from the train a few months ago.

I see a house from my past, it is the house of my high school classmate, Marie. Their house is known for their huge lawn and for being empty all the time.

Enzo arrives and tells me to leave with him. We need to get the vaccine for my son. I tell him he is safe and doesn't need one anymore because he got his shots.

I find myself in an office reception area. Someone asks me who I am waiting for. In my dream I answer a name, but I no longer recall who it is.

I am at a food court at the top of a building. I am writing something on a notebook amidst these strangers eating and talking. From this view, I can see the whole of Dapitan flooded. I also see how far it is from the ground. I wobble a bit, afraid how high up I am. But I continue to write on the notebook.

I remember I was constantly thinking about my son and how to get to him through the flood. It is difficult to get home. He is constantly mentioned in the dream, but I never see him.

During the middle of the night or this dream, I wake up struggling to breathe, my throat is dry and locked. I have sleep apnea which usually happens when I'm very tired. But my throat locking for a few seconds hasn't happened in a long time. Its never a pleasant experience.

An Unlocked Door

First Arc:
At my uncle's house in Pampanga, a relative is presenting me with paintings. The house feels like a gallery. My friend Jas is there cooking in the kitchen. My relative comments that I should have introduced her sooner. She is making lunch. My relative tells me my uncle died that morning.

Second Arc:
Julianne is screaming at me because I have kept her imprisoned in a room and that I have locked her in. But that was never the case, she has imprisoned herself in the room. The door was always unlocked. She never tried to open it.

I go out the door, she follows me, still screaming wildly. She opens the adjacent room and proves her point. The small room next to hers, has a two-way mirror. I can clearly see her bed from there. She tells me this is my room. But I don't remember sleeping in it.

Third Arc:
I am shooting a TVC in an industrial lot, we are on a long dolly track that spans a block or so. It ends at the most decayed part of the lot.

I go home to my old dorm in Dapitan and I find my old room mates there. I remember Kahlil being in the dream playing with cards on her bed. They tell me they invited my gay uncle for a sleep over. But my uncle is dead and that doesn't seem to bother them. In this part of my dream, his memory and presence seems alive.

---

Like my Aunt, my Uncle died a few months ago. Just a month apart from his sister, I guess I am still grieving the loss and somehow at times I forget they are gone.

Maybe my dream is about self-made prisons too, where we forget that there's just a door somewhere that could set us free.

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.

My Clock is on Reset

I think all this dream blogging has a positive effect on my circadian rhythm. I look forward to sleep actually, I might even forgo being the resident insomniac.

More on circadian rhythms

Humans have biological rhythms, known as circadian rhythms, which are controlled by a biological clock and work on a daily time scale.

Due to the circadian clock, sleepiness does not continuously increase as time passes.

Instead, the drive for sleep follows a cycle, and the body is ready for sleep and for wakefulness at different times of the day.

Know more about Circadian Rhythms

A Lost Tourist in Manila

Lately, I don't seem to recall the first part of my dreams. I have vague snippets of visuals, I don't recall my reason for being there.Then again, it is a dream, do I need to have a reason? Most of us are jumpers in our own dreams, we seem to teleport to one dreamlike state to the next.



First Arc:
I remember being in waist-deep flood waters, but there was so much waterlilies everywhere you can hardly get through. The water was stagnant, but I know this type of flood was caused by a typhoon. I remember being on a jeep that cruised through the floods without stalling. It seemed to function more like a boat than a jeep.

Second Arc:
My friend Ria was playing tourist in Manila. I find her in a halfway house, in a room under a staircase. She was shaking and scared when I opened the door. But she was wearing winter clothes like the ones when I was with her in Berlin. The stairway was situated in the middle of this carinderia. People just kept eating, they seem to either ignore her or not see er at all. The room under the staircase seem to have a different perspective, it looked bigger and spacious from where I stood. But I knew it to be impossible since the door was the width of the stair case.



A bus arrives in front of the carinderia (a local cheap diner) with a sign board that says Pasong Tamo. I get Ria safely on the bus, I tell her to go to my house and wait for me. I promise to take her to the airport and book her a flight back to LA. But she seemed reluctant, she told me she needed to bring pasalubong (a Filipino custom of affection by bringing home gifts to relatives and friends). I told her Americans don't need pasalubong, only pinoys do. But she insisted that I pack her a luggage full of Jack and Jill potato chips, pirated DVDs and a video game console with a Japanese subtitling mechanism for her Japanese lover. In real life, she has no Japanese lover.

With Ria gone, I was left at the halfway house/carinderia. I started bunking inside the room under the stairs. There I suddenly had roommates: my old high school classmate, Flor and my first grade teacher, Mrs. David. Both of them start helping me secure the potato chips.

My relatives out of nowhere start offering their precious heirloom glasswares for my supposed guests, my classmate and my teacher.

As I pack the potato chips, Flor shows me how the video game and its microchips work, so I can work the Japanese subtitles.

I wake up.

---



This is one of those senseless dreams, that random people from my life pop in and out, seemingly out of thin air for various inane reasons such as glasswares and potato chips.

I haven't heard from Ria in months except that she left California to campaign for Obama in Ohio. Flor just added me this month in Facebook. My relatives I last saw at my uncle's funeral. As for my first grade teacher, I don't know where she lives now.

My First Dialogue

Information is good if it is stored in memory and whenever you need it you can find it easily. It is dangerous only when you don't need it and it goes on throwing itself at you. - Osho



I want to catalog my dreams starting today as much as I can. I feel it will also help me understand how my subconscious collects things.

I keep tabs with a pen and notebook by my bed side. I try to jot down quick key words that highlights the whole dream. I have a short term memory problem due to my exposure to anaesthesia from past surgeries. But these key words often unravel for me, snippets or segments of my dreams.