"New Pens" (Night of Monday, February 9, 2015)

Significant Events of The Day:

We'd been painting the whole day inside the studio. I felt impatient because I thought that our work wasn't proceeding fast enough.


The Dream:

I am at my ground-floor desk, between the studio and the library. A shipment for me arrives from the U.S. It contains a pen case, inside which is a pen with a ferrule shaped like a peacock's feather. It also has a converter. I'm glad I didn't order this pen, which I'd always wanted, on the Net, since it was coming to me anyway. Inside the case there are other pens, including a Frankenstein (parts mix-matched) Parker pen. I am absolutely delighted.

I am going to school. I fill the pen with with one of my inks. I first choose my orange-colored ink, then settle for a blue-violet ink with the name "Prince". The hue indeed befits royalty.

I keep going back to the room where the desk is in. Dad turns off the lights because he wants to continue sleeping. (?)

I decide to bring my new pen and ink bottle with me to school--or is it to the office? (My God, I am still employed in my dream life?)

I go outside onto EDSA. I walk near the overpass. I try to take photos of my new pen on the stair steps but can do so only with my cell phone. I need to go back home for my camera.

On the overpass steps I see a crystal ashtray, a glass fruit tray, and a captain's cabin hanger that I decide to take back into the house. They are located outside one of our windows in this dream, and that window, like a basement window, is beside the stair steps. I'm surprised that no one picked up any of these items, though a bulb from the hanger is missing.

Back home (again), I am suddenly in the back area of our ancestral house in Pampanga. The room immediately near this, my eldest aunt's bedroom, is a dressing room. I hang the slim belt I am wearing on a clothes horse because it's the wrong belt. Another slim one, Dad's, is on the clothes horse. The belts are too slim. I want my usual, Haring Bakal, belt to hold my pants up with.

Rose is telling someone about the children. I seem to be too late for school and want to stay home rather than hunt for a taxi. I tell Mom, "Hindi ako pinapapasok ng Diyos" and laugh, but she says that I should go anyway. It's my last semester anyway, I think to myself, and I am confident that I will pass the exams.

I go down yet another staircase which is located, in this dream, below the servant's window--the place from which I lowered kittens in a cardboard box on a rope (the rope snapped and the kittens died) when I was a little boy--I begin to descend the steps, and think that maybe I should go to school because I haven't been attending my History and Economics classes for so long and I need to catch up, especially for the exams.


My Notes:

New pens, new projects. Yet, there seem to be unexpected and unforeseen delays.

The motif of stairs, going up (the overpass) and down (below the servant's window). My psyche automatically associates the latter with death.

Belts: My Haring Bakal belt has always been my protection, and it is missing in this dream; Vulnerability?

Again, having to take exams: the need for more knowledge.

Other motifs:
--"School": The need to increase my knowledge.
--"Back": The locus of my Unconscious in this dream.
--"Hang": To give up something or to take risks.

Over-all interpretation: I should be able to see new things that come to life not only as progressions but as symbolic regressions, particularly to episodes in my childhood. My Haring Bakal belt is missing in this dream because I need to be more vulnerable and more sensitive to other people.