“Ano ang nasa dakong paroon, bunga ng malilikot na pagiisip,
Likha ng balintataw o halaw mula sa daigdig ng kababalaghan
Di kayang ipaliwanag ngunit alam mong magaganap…”
If you can relate to and recognize these words, then you belong to the generation traumatized by this eerie voiceover heard every Wednesday night on Channel 13’s Pinoy Thriller. We may be laughing at it now, but at that time, we were like zombies glued to our seats scaring ourselves off with cheap blood mixture or bad make-up of tyanaks. But boy, were we terrified s***less nonetheless.
When I was young, I was a sickly child. I had asthma attacks every month, coupled with very high fever. What was so strange about that was I also had nightmare attacks everytime I got sick. Sometimes, it would be a normal sleepwalking episode. I would crawl out of bed and talk to whoever would be awake at that time. I would not be able to recall it the next day. But more often, my nightmares would be a hair-raising experience for my family. I would wake up screaming, as if possessed, shouting at everyone not to come near me. I would shout at anyone who would try to calm me down. My father, armed with a rosary, was the only one who could get to me and hug me back to sleep. Of course I didn’t remember what happened the previous night. Every time I got sick, all the people in my house were prepared to be woken up by my scream. This went on until I was 12 years old.
Later, I tried to recall what was going on in my mind during these bouts of nightmare. I remembered a feeling of being crushed by a kaleidoscope of heat and colors. When I heard people’s voices trying to calm me down, it reached my ears as if they were demons trying to take me away. The most alarming episode my mother could recall was when they brought me to our altar where the images of the Holy Family and Jesus were there, and I tried to crawl up the altar like a child possessed, shouting “Save me, Jesus, Save me!!!” Spooky, huh?
My childhood, happy though it was during waking hours, was tinged with these nightmares, that’s why my mother brought me to a host of different doctors, albularyos, espiritistas, and quack doctors. She was desperate in finding a cure to my nightmares. (Imagine if your child was like this every single month, wouldn’t you be unnerved too?) In all of these sessions, most of them said that a ‘spirit’ was watching over me. One said it was the spirit of my Lolo; another said it was a dwende; while another said it was an elemental living in our front yard. Fortunately, these bad dreams suddenly stopped coming when I became a teenager.
Until now, we still can’t logically explain why those things happened to me (and a lot of other strange occurrences. Will write about them next time!) Whether it was because of elementals, bad sprits, or just pure hallucinations brought about by high fever, no one has ever found the right answer to this mystery.
Maybe some things are better left unexplained?
P.S. Numerologists believe in the power of numbers. So what does 11/1/11 mean to them?
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