Phantom Burns

"All things in life are temporary. If they're going well, enjoy them. They won't last forever. If they go wrong, don't worry. They can't last long either! What's nice about life is that each day is never like the other. Life is beautiful, so bask in it!"

-- the forwarded message my father sent me just now

I had a good night's sleep yesterday nestled in love's embrace and sung to sleep by the sound of rain. And deep in my subconscious recesses, my mind managed to work up another dream, two dreams in fact, to which I'd been left baffled yet again not knowing what the message would've meant.

All I can remember is that the gas tank had caught fire -- a constant, glowing yellow-blue flame. I told crumpet about it so we tried to exhume it (recalling in my mind, the horror story about their uncle(†) whose face and body got severely burned one stormy night when the floods invaded their home and the gas tank floated and caught fire. He successfully turned the knob off with a wet towel but had to sacrifice himself to do so) and hoped crumpet wouldn't suffer the same fate as their uncle.

Crumpet's shirt caught fire. I was horrified, but somehow, we were able to blow out the nasty flames and everything was ok.

The weirdest thing, our cleaning lady was there too. Aling Diling's shirt and shorts caught fire too and she went into a frenzy trying to dowse off something that could've killed her. I think I was able to throw water on her, and everything was all right again. But what does it mean for the two of them to get burned? What is my mind trying to tell me?

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The next dream I had when I woke up at 4am looking for my blanket. The wind was chilly and the electric fan had been blowing on my face. After I found my blanket, I fell asleep again ...

Crumpet and I were in another Asian country, which resembled Kuala Lumpur a lot, and we were sightseeing and doing all the touristy stuff. I don't remember much of it, except that we stopped to stare at one of the ongoing developments there. It was a huge construction site with steamrollers and tractors digging earth and displacing everything en-site. They said it was going to be the biggest mall complex ever -- mall with a sprawling hectare of greens, a luxurious spa, an olympic-size swimming pool with jacuzzis, and a shopping center that would outdo anything we'd seen so far. Imagine: Buckingham Palace Shopping Center or Le Palais Commerciale de Versailles or Beijing Bird's Nest Olympic Commemorative Commercial Complex.

And when I woke up, it was time to go to work.