For close to a year, I have had dreamless sleep, which is unusual if you know me. The night before, out of nowhere, Cynthia was conversing to me in purely Bahasa Indonesia. I suppose once in a while, we have this innate desire to feel closer to our mother tongue. I tried to hold a decent conversation with my limited knowledge of the language but soon, sleepiness hit us. And I fell asleep.
It may not seem to be that coincidental when Cynthia’s brother Eric appeared in my dream, outside a hut or a hideout, under a hot sun, conversing with me in Bahasa Indonesia. In this play, he whom I had not met before wanted to deliver an important message. How could I, in my sleep, create dialogs of a foreign language convincing enough for me to recognize it as Bahasa Indonesia, I do not know. The story goes something like this. Cynthia and I were in some undisclosed locations ranging from a hut to a small urban city to a futuristic spaceship and what have you. And one of the many bizarre things I did besides plotting to overthrow the incumbent militia was to gamble (!!). In fact, I don’t even remember the act of gambling. What I remember though was that this character Eric appeared and delivered a long speech in Bahasa Indonesia. I referred Eric to Cynthia and later on, in a spaceship filled with blue light, he needed to borrow some cash from me. For some strange reasons, in order to exchange my winning chips back to cash, I need to pay a commission in cash – a percentage of my winnings. But I had no cash because I gave it to Eric. I asked around and no one had spare cash to lend me. Feeling helplessly frustrated at the chips worthed of $320,000 that could have been mine, I heard a song.
If you have watched Nana, the Japanese animation series, you may be able to better appreciate this part of the story. I heard a song, a beautiful song. My guitarist J in real life was playing in my dream, together with a friend of mine from my Spanish class (let’s call her B), on a stage, in front of an audience. The guitar riff was minimalistic, the drum pattern was simple. He was on the microphone and instead, that should have been me! Cynthia – my real life bassist – and I were on our feet mesmerized by the performance – a scene tantamount to Nana and Nana watching Trapnest on stage. At the same time, I felt as though my pride was hurt as I was not part of the performance, not part of the song creation process.
Maybe the song was not much of a song, no more than the meaningless dialog recited by Eric in my dream. But I reckon if I was to grab my guitar in the middle of the night, I would be able to compose a song based on the fragments of a tune that lingered in my head. Instead, I spent the whole day feeling melancholy, unable to get that tuneless song out of my head.