Twin dreams

Early Friday, I had just slept for a couple of hours when somehow an SMS beep managed to wake me. Normally it wouldn’t, as I’m not the type naman to keep my cell phone so close by at all hours. Let’s say at more than an arm’s length when supine.

Besides, my sleep is usually deep, more often than not induced by great labor and good whisky till the wee hours — when all the non-smokers in my time zone are already in snore-dom. 

Oh, but then on Thursday evening it was vodka (Skyy, in a nice cobalt-blue bottle) that accompanied dinner at a party, serving as a digestif for all that fine Cebu lechon. Since the spirits overtook me early, I suppose that was why I also turned in much earlier than the usual hour. 

It was 4 a.m. when the beep reintroduced me to the GNN reports on Middle-Eastern mobs exercised over a naughty online film. Someone dear had texted to say she had to take her mom to the village clinic following a slip that had caused a head wound.

The texter thought I was still up. I said I’d been asleep, and seemed to be in a dream state when her beep somehow woke me, which was unusual, but that’s okay. Several texts capped by a brief Skype session established that she had to bring her mom to a hospital for a CT scan, which showed no further alarm, and all that had to be done was a few stitches.

Well and good. By then I had brewed a cup of coffee and checked my mail and my alliances in social media. I turned back in again and nodded off at a little past 6 a.m. But before I knew it I was rousing myself up at 8, knowing I had fallen into a dream state again, and this time I was determined to remember every vivid detail of… well, whaddaya know, actually two separate dreams, can’t tell now if one segued into the other, must’ve been so, since I could recall both very clearly, and in the proper sequence.

 You know how dreams are often as inchoate as they can be vivid. No rhyme no reason in the narrative, just the quirky presence of hopscotch details, sudden arbitrary turns, and even a motley cast of characters — in brief, from unfathomable to inexplicable. 

There was a time I when I kept a dream journal. Boy, was that a wild, private blog, almost entirely reflective of the substances that then daily led me through a myriad of doors of perception.

But I had given up the practice long ago, it seems the dreams, too, or rather dreams that one remembers with crystal clarity.

So what I experienced last Friday was really quite unusual. And when I sat up, with all those images and turns of event still so fresh in my mind’s eye’s screen, I decided to take down this laptop to the kitchen, opened it while I brewed another cuppa, and recorded the twin dreams posthaste.

What you read now is not that first rough-and-tumble draft, but the product of a few more hours of gestation (inclusive of yet another nap).

Here goes (Dream No. 1):

D. and I are in the countryside, surveying an Amorsolo landscape. There’s a distant cluster of modest bamboo structures all in a line, forming a horizon. Suddenly the village appears to be bombarded by fireballs. We watch fascinated, not aghast, since the distance is quite great.

There is nothing we can do, anyway, so we remain passive spectators. Until the flames that are engulfing that village suddenly leap forward across flat fields and strike one single hut close to where we are.

This time we realize that the bamboo-and-palm-thatch affair, not really a kubo but quite extended although of one level, is part of D.’s farm. So we rush forward, pell-mell and willy-nilly. And I pick up a thick blanket from the ground then a conveniently located pail that’s right in my path. And somehow the pail already has water, so I wind up heroically drenching the parts of the bamboo walls that are burning.

By then D. is nowhere in sight. I run out of water but remember the blanket on my shoulder, and how I had once put out a fire just by beating on the flames with the heavy cloth. So I do the same to what little is left of the fire.

I reunite with D. and we assure ourselves that nothing’s smoldering anymore, so we take a leisurely walk away from what had been ablaze. We’re surprised to find ourselves inside what looks like a freshly developed gated village of concrete townhouses, with a very shallow kiddie pool at one edge.

More to our surprise, on that edge there’s no security wall, not even any sentry box or gate. What we behold up a knoll is the same bamboo house that we had saved from flames, and behind it more of the same structure, now standing in contrast to the concrete and more modern-looking residences behind us.

Then we see flames leap up once more in that bamboo house. We hadn’t killed the fire entirely. This time D. rushes forward, while I backtrack to the kiddie pool where I had seen kiddie plastic buckets.

I run into Cho, the nine-year-old son of a former sis-in-law. He’s brandishing a toy wooden gun. I tell him to lay it down and follow me, help me put out a fire. The kid’s excited. We both pick up buckets of water from the pool and run to the bamboo house, but by the time we get there the fire is out, and there is now a milling throng and D. is speaking with some kin.

As Cho and I walk away, his grandfather appears on the scene and motions to him. The boy goes up to the old man and they chat a while, as I watch from a distance. Then Cho saunters back and we look for his toy gun by the pool. But someone has taken it away. End of dream.

Segue (or not, heh heh) to Dream No. Two:

Three Bedan high school classmates and I find ourselves in New York. Two of them are Bert Martinez and Pete Martinez, unrelated but both of the same 4-40 section I was in. That means we were all pretty close. The third fellow, I’m not sure who he is now, but it may have been Boy Santillan, also an actual classmate.

I tell them we should look up Lino Dionisio who happens to be living in NY (untrue; he and his wife enjoy a unit in Serendra). And that Lino (of a different class but whom we all elected as our batch alumni president) had told me he’d reward us if we bring him mung beans. Yes, monggo.

So we get to his place, which appears strangely structured. He’s in a high-rise that we can’t reach unless we go through a small, low building that appears to serve as maids’ quarters. We jauntily break in and go through it until we can ring a bell and summon Lino down.

While I wait for him, wondering if indeed I had monggo in my pockets, the three other guys take off towards a pretty river that looks man-made. As I wait, it seems Bert decides to take the plunge and joins other swimmers in the wave-pool-type of river or canal. A sudden jet of water amps up the current, and they’re all carried off into a cascade.

But Lino’s now come down and we’re making small talk while people are shouting for help by the canal bank, presumably including Pete and Boy. Then everything gets resolved; the line of swimmers who had all clung to a long pole get rescued.

Pete and Boy recount that it was a pair of dogs that do the trick by somehow getting their fangs on either end of the long pole and swimming back with the erstwhile beleaguered swimmers.

Bert stands there grinning from ear to ear, his hair still wet. Lino’s smiling, but he still hasn’t asked me for the monggo. Meanwhile, I’m hoping he’d treat us all to dinner, the way Pitong or Pete Roxas, another friend in NY but of a junior class, once had… me, at least.

One of Lino’s maids approaches us and protests our break-in through their quarters. I smile sheepishly. End of dream.

Wow. Neither makes sense, of course, albeit both are quite amusing, if not intriguing. And if I choose to join the legion of amateur shrinks among us, by all means I can come up with primal codification of possible references, allusions, hints, what-have-you… Leitmotifs and rationales as well.

But hey, real dreams (I mean those we indulge in while we sleep) are dreams. And far be it for me to aspire to be one with the Senoi tribe and now foretell my future or my obligations to that future by interpreting these twin dreams.

Maybe I’ll just sleep some more, and see if the next imagistic scenario proves to be a prequel. I just hope it doesn’t tie up the loose ends and turns everything into a series a la Twilight.