DREAMS

I used not to believe in dreams especially if they're about dead people.

We were brought up to believe that dead persons communicate with us through our dreams, that it's their way of asking us to pray for them. I've listened to countless variations of this theme, the most vivid of which came from Mother Honey Patrimonio. In her dream, her Nanay Pacing told her she felt cold, so cold her teeth chattered. Mother Honey woke up crying; Pacing had been dead for years and it was her first time to dream of her.

It was raining when she went to Tago cemetery later that day and there she discovered that the roof above the tomb of her Nanay Pacing had been toppled, and the rainwater coming from the roof of the adjacent tomb flowed directly to her grave.

While I respected these tales for whatever they were worth, I was not inclined to believe them. Is this because I don’t like talking about dead people? Maybe. Here’s a secret: the easiest way to ruin my day is to ask me or talk about dead members of my family. Dead friends okay, but not my family! Do that and you cease to be my FB friend in two seconds flat!

Nobody saw me visit the graves of my parents during All Souls Day of 2010. It had something to do with my siblings not telling me that the structure over our parents’ graves was in such state of disrepair that it had to be demolished. I got wind of the situation two days before the annual celebration of the dead. There was no way I could construct a new one without turning into my greatest pet peeve---people cleaning and painting graves on November 1!

And so I passed. That year I also didn’t make unique flowers for the dead, to the dismay of Elaine Pareja and Nita Manzano who have this habit of eagerly awaiting the floral magic I whip up every single year.

Tanie, my brother, went home to Sagbayan after I had decided to do the construction early next year as it was already rainy season. But three days later, I dreamed of my father.

In my dream, Papa put his hand over my shoulder and walked me through an area where four posts stood at certain corners. He pointed from one corner to another and told me numbers I realized to be dimensions. When I woke up, I wrote the numbers on a piece of paper. Then I sent Tanie a text message, telling him to come back to construct the structure that would house our parents’ graves.

When I told ‘Yo David and Tito Vols about this, Marites quickly applied mathematical operations to the numbers, came up with last-two combinations, and placed a bet on them. She lost!

Last October, Emily told me that Heledeza Elizalde-Rubio of New York had sent her money for the upkeep of her parents’ graves because she had dreamed of them. I smiled. But this time not the mocking smile of a non-believer, but the smile of someone who knows there are things he just has to believe in.