Dreams

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Happy New Year! Hope you had your round fruit, polka dots and other holiday traditions out in full swing. Look, I’m not typically a luck-orientated or superstitious person, but come on, we need all the help we can get. We need a turnaround in 2021. Or I do, and if you could hope for one simply for the sake of others, that works and can spare your pride a bit. 

But anyway, while New Year’s Resolutions aren’t an important tradition in the Philippines, I’m still going to incorporate some of that logic in my daily life. One of my resolutions is to create things. Because, you know, you get told growing up that creative pursuits are useless, and now as an adult, you’re tempted to overcorrect. Or not quite overcorrect, to be honest. Or I don’t think that’s what I’m going to do right now. I’m just making the sorts of things I want to make, and I’ve been doing that for a while. I’m just ratcheting up the intensity a bit. 

And that includes a new season of The Oracle of Dusk, whose trailer I’m including at the end of the episode. That audio fiction show was based on an experience I had that surprisingly finds its roots in my Tagalog heritage. It also features a bit of the… resulting moral quandary that comes from such a thing.

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You see, dreams are the sort of thing that… Well, maybe we should not put so much thought into them. We know rationally it’s just our brain trying to amuse itself or something of the sort. The brain’s neurons are firing at random while it’s still trying to make sense of what it’s doing. Or… Well, okay, there’s some thought to there being a revelatory nature to them. Usually of our present or of our immediate past; there’s something we’re trying to make sense of or come to terms with, but because we’re constantly trying to avoid the subject when we’re awake, our brain needs to make its point when it has a more captive audience and all that. After all, you can’t literally run from such realizations while you’re sleeping. 

But in the Tagalog, well the pre-Hispanic, pre-Catholic tradition that still lingers today, dreams were not about the present. They were like a dialogue with the future.

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Now, it would be a gross simplification to say that the indigenous religions of the Philippines featured a thinner veil between the physical and the divine than modern religions do. But that simplification is easy to make, and it makes a certain point. Our understanding of religion--collectively--has changed. And whether or not this is true of your religious beliefs, there is a lingering sense in which religion nowadays is highly contextualized. There are places, times, and set parameters for the rituals done in honor of certain beliefs that may not always cross our minds as we go through our daily life. This compartmentalization is a modern one. 

For the indigenous people of the Philippines, all of life was a dance with the divine. Every aspect of life had a deity who was known, understood, and worshipped. Every creature had a spirit of its own. And every action--even the subconscious ones--had meaning. Including dreaming. 

For the Tagalog people, there was this belief that when a person sleeps, there is an opportunity for something like a conversation with the divine. A sleeping person may or may not dream of the omens of Bathala himself. Bathala, being the creator and ultimate god, stands at the central point of all things, people included. And so, there is almost like a channel through which a person might see a literal omen or a glimpse of the future. 

But this isn’t meant to be moral preaching. There is no indication of what someone should do. There is no guidance regarding action whether to prevent the events foreseen or to make the dreams come true. The dreams aren’t really only warning, only possibilities drafted by the god Bathala. Possibilities that could happen or could not. Free will still holds true.

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And like I said, this belief hits home to me. I didn’t learn about this belief until a couple years ago, just before The Oracle of Dusk launched in 2019. Up until then, I’d been dealing with a series of weird and unexpected dreams. Dreams that… technically could have been offering me glimpses of the future. I mean, I was seeing things that did, in fact, happen, I knew I got into my alma mater before the acceptance letter came, even getting my financial aid award right down to the last cent. That’s the happy example. But I also knew the day a priest in my parish was going to experience a fall, a fall that--at his age--he couldn’t have come back from without help. Immediate help. Help that I could have provided him, but I didn’t believe that this could in any way be a real thing. So I didn’t.

I had so many small predictions that Occam’s Razor was starting to lean into the supernatural a bit. It wasn’t just the university and the fall. It was outcomes of sports games or the random anecdotes that make up high school: the sorts of events people remember and think back of fondly but really are inconsequential. I wasn’t on any of the sports teams I was having visions about nor did I understand much of the plays. So this wasn’t me cheating or gambling or anything. It was just a bunch of random snippets of a life. Until it wasn’t.

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For the longest time, this made for a fun story to tell at parties. In fact, the university admission story made for a great story at said university. Because it was small, inconsequential things that didn’t in any way require action. And as an aside, the sports dreams ended when I graduated high school. But as The Oracle of Dusk’s story goes, it didn’t stay that way. Suddenly, the story took on a more dramatic bend with higher stakes and… Well, it involved people I cared about, and I’d already had one slip up with the priest and his bad fall haunting me.

The story of The Oracle of Dusk is… fiction with pieces of my real life interwoven. But the catalyst to the fiction, as it were, wasn’t this realization of my culture’s old beliefs. It was more modern speculation. 

Some people think dreams can predict the future. Without fail. Or it can predict a possible future that the dreamer must avoid. The idea being that the dream shows you a point that requires an intervention, and then you--presumably--have to intervene as the only person who knows about this. And emphasis on you being the only one who knows when you’re in a community of people who try to think (quote) ‘rationally’ about these sorts of things, ignoring the mountain of weird coincidences you’ve had in your life with a flick of the wrist and no thought to you and the clear emotional weight this has put on you. You’re at fault for even starting this in the first place with your (quote) ‘wild, fanciful’ ideas.

And then the people who do believe you put the emphasis on morality. (quote) ‘You are morally bound to intervene,’ ignoring the detail that I don’t have the sort of relationship with the people I’ve dreamed about to intervene. Confessing to nightmares of misfortune is a big step of intimacy that I don’t want to take in certain relationships. And in all likelihood, the inappropriateness of that step means no one is going to take me seriously, anyway. So suddenly, I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t. 

The actions of the titular Oracle of Dusk is one way out of that resulting conundrum. The premise of the podcast is that she is making these recordings on an RSS feed, out there for her clients to find, so these messages are packaged in a way that her clients will find acceptable because there’s enough plausible deniability for it to not be an attack but a catalyst to actual reflection. And in the narrative, they’re receptive. Or the titular character can think as much. 

But in reality, the traditional beliefs offer me--the creator and not the character a way out--because it offers the assurance that these visions aren’t presented with moral imperatives or obligations. They just are as they are. I can’t change them. I can only move forward. Free will still holds true.

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This isn’t to say that I fully believe in the old ways. I see the overlaps and draw some insights from there, but that is it. And for me, the insight is that free will holds true. Even against me. 

Ultimately, the first season of The Oracle of Dusk was about connectedness. It depicted a story of four people interwoven not just through the oracle but in other ways as well. And it is this network of connections that can save us, not prophecy. It does not matter if we know how to help each other as long as we know to help each other. It’s not about the future but a reminder about the present.

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This has been a production of Miscellany Media Studios with music licensed from the Sounds like an Earful music supply. Thanks for listening! Find more information about our shows at miscellanymedia.online or follow us on Twitter @miscellanymedia for updates on current and future projects.

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I saw you in the store today. I didn't follow you in or anything like that. I was already there. Then you walked it, and I saw you. Once I did, I'm sorry, but I couldn't look away.

I was getting some medicine. You see, I've been having trouble sleeping lately. The… the dreams... are getting harder to ignore. They've been getting more intense and more frequent. I've never fully understood them. And even if I did, that doesn't mean I would know what to do. I just know that if I sleep deeply enough, I don't dream. Or--at least--I don't remember my dreams, and that counts for something. So for a while, I tried something I started calling sleep cycling. I'll be awake for twelve hours and sleep for two. When you're freelancing, a sleeping schedule like  isn’t impossible. It’s just not advisable. And you're right, the numbers aren't adding up on that front. It's the only thing that has worked so far, though. Even if it's not sustainable.

Or it did work, for a while. But now I’m dreaming of you again. I don’t know what to do.

Melatonin is supposed to help you sleep, right? That's Plan B. And it’s completely safe as a plan B. Maybe it’s not the best Plan B I could have. I know what I should do. But I can't do that. It would be too hard for me. I know what I can do, though. The question is: (Music cuts) are you listening? (Music fades in)

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