The name of the place

The other night he had a dream somewhere between a dream and a nightmare. He knew this dream must have some universal lesson of a sort, must have some message to tell him. If only he knew what it was.

The dream begins in a busy jeepney terminal. He is there with his family.  He is happy. They are going somewhere distant, a mountain resort they have gone to many times before. But the terminal was rather busy with passengers milling all about in a bustling flurry as terminals often are in the holiday season.

“Everybody is in a hurry to get somewhere.”

He thinks this to himself as he is shoved around, bodies shoving him forward until he loses sight of the rest of his family. He ends up climbing up through the window of a red jeepney and finding himself seated right behind the driver. The jeepney leaves the terminal and goes on its way.

He does not worry for his family. He knows they will be okay. He is sure of it. And he will meet them at the end of the trip. The jeepney goes on its way through the scenic countryside. He always enjoys himself on trips like this. And this one was not at all different. He dozes in and out of sleep, in and out of the dream.

The jeepney winds through mountain roads overlooking hills and farmlands until it makes a short stop at a terminal near a beautiful mountain lake still caught in the early morning mist. A former student alights here and waves goodbye to him. He himself has still a way to go. He is sure of it. But it is here where he realizes he has absolutely forgotten the name of the place he and family were  going to.

Try as he would, the name of the place would not come to him, would not pop into his head. He could almost taste in his mouth the familiarity of this name. How comfortable it was in his mind, like a pillow to rest one’s head upon? He felt more than knew the closeness of its letters and syllables, which he played in various possible arrangements in his head and mouth. And here, he recalls this was exactly the same feeling he had many times before in his youth when he was solving a test in school and needed a name he had forgotten, somehow and inexcusably.

He gets this more and more these days though it does not worry him too much. He is after all getting older. And he always had this problem even when he was still a little child. Names, proper nouns, exact numbers were always hard for him to recall. When he was in school he always had a problem with tests requiring him to memorize items and lists. But he always could get by just by keeping in his head the big picture of topics at hand. Big pictures, the cognitive map, the 3D geometry of problems at hand were his thing. And often, he could use this facility to navigate through problems in school and with life in general.

And in this dream, he knew he had a map in his pocket. But there was only the problem of knowing the name of the place to where he was going. The map would do him no good unless he recalled this name. And he could not.

Not in this dream, at least. Thus, he sets his mind to trying to recall this name, and then realized in his heart how this name grew farther and farther from him the more he tried to remember.

He woke up from sleep this way. Wondering, what could this dream mean? But more than the meaning of this dream, there was the word itself, the name of a place close to his heart that he has forgotten. And even now, as he goes through this day, he waits for the name to pop in his head as it should or must as soon as he stops trying to remember it.