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.

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.

Dreams of Crossing the Street

Dreams about Crossing a Road
Well why did a chicken cross the road? Why did you in your dream?
In the dream, you had to get to point A to B. Two distinct points. In the middle of it is the possible danger of cars passing through or getting run over. It could also be an empty road leading nowhere or a road with a vanishing point. Still, in the dream you still manage to cross the street.

Dreams about crossing a path are not limited to roads or streets, you could also find yourself dreaming about crossing a bridge.

The possible explanation for this dream about crossing over are the following:

A Need for Transition
• You need to transcend certain issues in your life. A painful break-up, losing someone, childhood trauma.
• There are matters in your current situation that threatens your sense of security. Losing your job, health issues, financial losses.
• You need to bridge a gap from these two focal points. “Point A” may be a good starting point leading to “Point B” a new stage in your life.

Your Connection to Others
• You are crossing the road to reconnect with your roots
• To find your way back to someone you love
• To abandon a period of estrangement with a loved one
• To bridge a generation gap or misunderstanding

A Need to Conquer the Unknown
• Your curiosity is getting the best of you and you want to face your fears- the other side of the road, what is up ahead and unknown.
• You are letting go of past demons now and moving forward into an unknown future.



Here is one of my dreams a year ago about crossing the street:

This infamous person from our local circle, let's call him Bubblegay was eating at the restaurant apparently waiting for me. He was getting impatient with the menu now.

It is night time, and I am across the restaurant at Julia Vargas Avenue trying to cross the street. But I can't. The cars are at full speed ala Nascar. A large, beefy guy and his wife of African descent are now next to me trying to get across as well. The street suddenly turn empty of the blurring flurry of cars. We cross together. The cars appear almost instantly, I can't see them, but just feel the draft of the vehicles as they pass by me. I am not worried about getting hit. I'm more anxious about my meeting at the restaurant. I wake up.

---

This snippet was the tail end of my dream. I recall my dream being longer and fluid, having more twist and turns. But upon waking as usual I forgot everything, but I remember the feeling of the dream whenever I tried to recalling it today. It felt in the dream I was solving something to get out of a predicament. But the same predicament kept presenting itself again, unveiling these awkward scenarios whenever I succeeded in getting out.

I know Bubblegay, not as an acquaintance, but a figurehead in my age set who strive in the same field. But in his case, he is thriving. I haven't really sat down long enough with him in real life to say we are friends. We're just two people with the same kind of ambition, who know the same group of people and perhaps the same world.

What possibly cause him to be in my dream? A person from his group is to trying to acquire something I have, for a little less amount and for a short span of time. That has equally stressed me yesterday.

Lindsay Lohan and the Militias

Let me describe how my dream went last night:



First Arc:
Lindsay Lohan was kidnapped by these stealth militias. My presence seemed ominous, just watching events unfold. There was this other girl with her, she looked like Olga Kurylenko, but a rather helpless Bond girl. When they finally nabbed her they took her to a giant bed and all the militias started masturbating, Lindsay was just lying down moaning erotically. No one was touching her.

I don't recall the rest.



Second Arc:
I find myself in this vintage hotel with red interiors. I am pulling my luggage/trolley up the stairs. The feeling of this dream is familiar, I am certain I am in this hotel because of a film festival. At the corridor I meet other fellow delegates which includes my friend Otto. Four other guys are with him, whom I've never met. They had these strange ethnic instruments with them and they started playing tunes at the corridor. I'm unable to enter my assigned room, so they tell me to go down this ornate, circular winding staircase that leads to a very grand ballroom downstairs. I go to the concierge. I wake up.

---

I'm trying to comprehend how this dream possibly came about. Over the week, Lindsay was all over the news because a PETA girl threw flour at her. The militias I believe stemmed from today's headlines, I saw a picture of a gunman of the Mumbai Hotel attacks.

Otto my friend left a message for me on facebook, I haven't seen him yet to this day. He is a musician, who is launching his latest album on world music. The hotel seemed like from a different era or world, it look distorted, it had colours as vivid and eerie like in a David Lynch film. The people at the ballroom are like from an Agatha Christie novel.

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.