The Incredible Adventures of Fish Girl, Vampires from the Opera House and the Battle with Stone People
They were after us
My dad and I were off to somewhere. He was driving and I was in the passenger seat. It was raining. The sky was purple…
I was standing on the bed in the guest room near the tinted sliding window, a flimsy translucent pina cloth covering my nakedness. My mom was on the floor doing something with a bunch of scraps of cloth with an impassive look on her face. My dad was in the garage reaching out through the window and trying to grab my cover. I slap his hands away and cry out for him to quit what he was doing…
I slapped his arm once again and when I look at my hand, I was clutching a silver necklace with a pendant in the shape of a cornucopia.I was assaulted with a flashback of the pendant’s history: it was owned by a dwarf who fell in love with a human woman. He gave up the essence and his nature of being a dwarf–his image, his powers–and turned human to wed the woman. A battle happened in his old world and he was summoned back as a human. He died and his wife was carrying his child.
The woman disappeared from her town for a while. When she got back, she brought a healthy baby girl with her. The baby was wearing the silver necklace with the cornucopia pendant. The woman’s return was celebrated by her friends, including me. We were seated inside a bamboo treehouse, a TV mounted on the trunk of the tree. Looking down from where we are, I saw an open sarisari store and a bunch of guys were there.
Our group walked out and went inside a dark room with several seats, a stage upfront. I later realized that it was an opera house but it was being used in secret by “our” people and where the “other” people (from the sarisari store) hold meetings. Then every activity stopped. Someone announced that the owners of the opera house has arrived. Everyone went into a state of panic. The side doors burst open and I looked back. I saw a group of people dressed like they were the very audience of the Phantom of the Opera. They looked very regal, confident… and looked very much like they were about to kill us.
I flew out through the entrance doors opposite the stage. I was welcomed by the ocean with rocks as tall as an average human person. Someone mentioned that the war between the vampires and the stone people started a long way back. I now assume that I am part of this Stone People. And that behind the shores and the large boulders lie the portal to a safe dimension. All I definitely knew at that moment was that they were after our princess… Our Baby Fish Princess and they were after the pendant.
Our group reached a hilltop with a number of abandoned houses. Our group was divided into smaller groups, each finding an abandoned house to fortify and serve as defense lines. I found an old two-seater chair and lifted up the seat. I made myself fit in the space before covering myself up in the seat. I don’t know how long I’ve stayed there but I survived an attack in that hiding place.
Someone suggested that we should all try to hide in the most unexpected places, or better yet, hide in plain sight. I thought it was kind of ridiculous but I was pointed to hide on top of a shelf cabinet in the living room, which is completely visible to the front door. As I lay down on my side, someone placed a green plastic divider and placed it between me and the edge of the shelf to hide me. The mother of our Fish Princess hid in the cabinet at the corner of the room with her on the lap. The cabinet had glass doors. Right after our “general” secured us, the door burst open and a vampire man stood there, wearing a loose white long-sleeved polo tucked in beige breeches. He looked right at me and at the person hiding on the shelf I was on top of. I jumped out of the window and into the next house and I was chased by more rabid vampire people. I managed to avoid them. The next thing I know, I hear the mother screaming from the other house. She was saying that she left her princess alone in the room. The mother was crying loudly and was very angry at the vampires for destroying the 18th birthday celebration of her daughter. These vampires are kind of unusual since they attack us during the day. At night, we were free to roam around. That time, night was approaching already and we were confident that the vampires would retreat. When the vampires retreated, we went in search of our princess and found her on the toilet bowl… She has finally morphed into a fish and was still wearing the necklace.
She told us something about the necklace and then everyone was going out of their houses. She told us of a plan to finally defeat the vampires. We took off our clothes and changed into the clothes we found in the abandoned houses. I was feeling icky when I had to do that because I thought that dead people wore these clothes and we didn’t even have time to wash them. The plan of the princess was to confuse the vampires because they can only sense us via our scents. They cannot truly “see.” She said that when the vampires attack, we should all lead them to the edge of the hilltop where the golden boulders are. Before we were finishing with our strategies, daylight came and I was forced to hide behind a door of a house nearest me. A vampire soon found me and I ran screaming for the golden boulders. I picked up a golden rock and threw it at the clad-in-white vampires and to my surprise, it hurt them. They started to bleed every time we hit them with a golden rock.
I still don’t know if I survived or who won in that battle. I don’t know if the Fish Princess lived and if her mom is still carrying her around in the palm of her hand. And I still don’t know the deal with the cornucopia pendant. I was curious but the dream just ended the moment I realized I could kill a vampire with the gold rock.
~~~
I had made it a habit of writing down every oddest dream that I’ve ever had since I started taking interest in literary fiction. I’ve had the devil chasing after me with his pitchfork, walking upside down on the stairs while being stared at by a headless barong, found myself as a cyborg in post-apocalyptic high tech world, getting mocked by own reflection as I pray, and dying countless times in different ways.
For quite a while, there hasn’t been anything that left me wondering or shocked or scared when I wake up. Then the cycle started all over again. Recently, some of my dreams spoke of a central theme… and some scenes have come true. This is the latest dream that I had and I remember to write down the keywords on my phone upon waking up… and hoping to make sense out of some instances. Or maybe take some of these as plot inspirations. 
Keywords / Dream sequence:
Long drive with dad
Dark garage/guest room
Dwarf pendant
Girl who got pregnant
Gave birth to a cute girl
Celebration
Angas boys
Chase
Opera
Opera owners arrived
Chase
Vampire versus stone people
Houses with hiding places
Girl with pendant turns to fish
18th biirthday
Gold rock and stone people…
le gasp!