I have been having these dreams again lately.
I never really paid any attention to my dreams. I attempted once, to chronicle them as a writing exercise, keeping a notebook beside my bed. The experiment was a failure. Aside from the fact that I have very poor memory (you know this only too well), the moment I attempted to recall my dream as soon as I wake up, the images escape me. It’s like sand—the tighter I hold on to it, the more I cannot grasp it. And so I was never really able to chronicle a single dream.
There are those dreams where the images were so strong that they could not be forgotten. I still remember this vivid dream I had as a child, where a white whale was chasing me around an open public school stadium somewhere in Makati. I don’t remember the rest of it, save for the image of the whale chasing me.
Later on I learned to control my dreams. This was something I had to learn because I always wet my bed. I had to learn to distinguish dreams from reality. I had to know whether I was awake or dreaming. Once I mastered identifying the universe I was in, whether it was the dreaming or the real world, I stopped wetting my bed. But this mastery brought me to a more exciting place—I was able to control my dreams, go to places inside my mind and explore, and cross the boundaries of morality and ethics, of possibility and probability, of repression and expression. Later on I learned how to pre-program my dreams. Before I went to bed, I would tell myself where I was going when I dreamt…and whom I was flying with.
And then I grew up and got busy. This part, you know already and has largely become the topic of a lot of our arguments. I fell in love with art. When I realized that I could forge these dreams into real stories on stage, I stopped dreaming. Maybe I thought that if I could go places anyway outside of my dreams, I might as well make them real. And so came my fascination with theater.
I stopped dreaming probably because I learned how to write and I was starting to master my craft. I had an outlet. I emptied my mind on a blank sheet of paper or a white page on a word processor. My mind had a real workshop where it can construct these dream-like spaces and populate them with lucid characters trying to make sense of their existence. Tragically, my mind was a dark void at night. I wake up as if the evening never happened.
Then I started to dream again. A dream so real I had to tell you about it when I woke up. I called you and described to you my dream. I have to be honest, as I wasn’t that day when I recounted to you the dream, that I was so disturbed by it. I was trying to hide my concern by making a joke out of it. You laughed. We both dismissed it. Or actually, I dismissed it.
Because both of us know now, that the dream was actually happening at the moment I dreamt it. It wasn’t a dream. It was a vision.
A week later, I confirm, that the dream was real…or it became real.
It was then that I realized, that dreams are the soul’s way of talking to itself, reminding itself of the things it missed in the waking life.
I saw the signs. I heard the shift in the tone and pitch of your voice. I saw those small expressions and twitches in your face that were alien to me. I pieced together little instances that would normally have no significance or meaning. They will never make sense in the real world. But the Dreaming has a way of making sense out of incoherence. And that night, I saw the future. I was terrified of it.
I was too afraid to stop it from happening. Now I suffer the consequences.
I know you will never read these letters. But I am compelled to write them not for you, but so that my mind can once again make love with the virgin-white page of the word processor; so that my mind can empty itself on paper; so that I can stop dreaming and never see those images again, which I know, will happen, is happening, or have happened already.
I do not want to wake up on the verge of tears anymore, fearing that the Dreaming and reality are not two different worlds, but one and the same.
This, Xandra, is why I write you.
I never really paid any attention to my dreams. I attempted once, to chronicle them as a writing exercise, keeping a notebook beside my bed. The experiment was a failure. Aside from the fact that I have very poor memory (you know this only too well), the moment I attempted to recall my dream as soon as I wake up, the images escape me. It’s like sand—the tighter I hold on to it, the more I cannot grasp it. And so I was never really able to chronicle a single dream.
There are those dreams where the images were so strong that they could not be forgotten. I still remember this vivid dream I had as a child, where a white whale was chasing me around an open public school stadium somewhere in Makati. I don’t remember the rest of it, save for the image of the whale chasing me.
Later on I learned to control my dreams. This was something I had to learn because I always wet my bed. I had to learn to distinguish dreams from reality. I had to know whether I was awake or dreaming. Once I mastered identifying the universe I was in, whether it was the dreaming or the real world, I stopped wetting my bed. But this mastery brought me to a more exciting place—I was able to control my dreams, go to places inside my mind and explore, and cross the boundaries of morality and ethics, of possibility and probability, of repression and expression. Later on I learned how to pre-program my dreams. Before I went to bed, I would tell myself where I was going when I dreamt…and whom I was flying with.
And then I grew up and got busy. This part, you know already and has largely become the topic of a lot of our arguments. I fell in love with art. When I realized that I could forge these dreams into real stories on stage, I stopped dreaming. Maybe I thought that if I could go places anyway outside of my dreams, I might as well make them real. And so came my fascination with theater.
I stopped dreaming probably because I learned how to write and I was starting to master my craft. I had an outlet. I emptied my mind on a blank sheet of paper or a white page on a word processor. My mind had a real workshop where it can construct these dream-like spaces and populate them with lucid characters trying to make sense of their existence. Tragically, my mind was a dark void at night. I wake up as if the evening never happened.
Then I started to dream again. A dream so real I had to tell you about it when I woke up. I called you and described to you my dream. I have to be honest, as I wasn’t that day when I recounted to you the dream, that I was so disturbed by it. I was trying to hide my concern by making a joke out of it. You laughed. We both dismissed it. Or actually, I dismissed it.
Because both of us know now, that the dream was actually happening at the moment I dreamt it. It wasn’t a dream. It was a vision.
A week later, I confirm, that the dream was real…or it became real.
It was then that I realized, that dreams are the soul’s way of talking to itself, reminding itself of the things it missed in the waking life.
I saw the signs. I heard the shift in the tone and pitch of your voice. I saw those small expressions and twitches in your face that were alien to me. I pieced together little instances that would normally have no significance or meaning. They will never make sense in the real world. But the Dreaming has a way of making sense out of incoherence. And that night, I saw the future. I was terrified of it.
I was too afraid to stop it from happening. Now I suffer the consequences.
I know you will never read these letters. But I am compelled to write them not for you, but so that my mind can once again make love with the virgin-white page of the word processor; so that my mind can empty itself on paper; so that I can stop dreaming and never see those images again, which I know, will happen, is happening, or have happened already.
I do not want to wake up on the verge of tears anymore, fearing that the Dreaming and reality are not two different worlds, but one and the same.
This, Xandra, is why I write you.
No comments:
Post a Comment