Intersections in Philippine Dream Time

I learned of the Visayan word tuyaw during a conversation with a spirit medium in the central Philippines. One of the medium’s clients came to her in distress about a recurrent dream that started not long after her husband died in a typhoon that killed many across the region. Eventually, the spirit medium diagnosed the woman as experiencing tuyaw, or in her case receiving an omen from the dead warning of future water-related disasters.

Later, I came across a slender manuscript titled “Philippines”, by the French-Algerian feminist writer and scholar, Hélène Cixous. What seemed the obvious association of the word “Philippines” to me as an archipelago in the Pacific colonized by the Spanish and the United States was not in fact Cixous’ reference point. The country is never mentioned once in the book. In the Francophone world, “philippines” recalled a game played between people who come across twin almonds. The text interweaves Cixous’ daydreams, autobiography, and conveying what she regards as telepathic messages. Cixous’ “Philippines” was inspired by a favorite book from her past, where two childhood friends reunite as adults in a shared dream that takes place in a primeval forest.

From the late 19th-century forward, psychoanalysis reframed Western discourse on dreams in terms of desire, ruptures in childhood development, and the unconscious. The psychoanalyst’s couch became a staging area that for many transformed how we as so-called “modern subjects” relate to dreams.  Something like tuyaw, or a message from the dead vía dreams conveyed by a spirit medium, is arguably a transmission from an elsewhere not convergent with the figure of the subject as circumscribed by Enlightenment discourse. As such, it has been common for over a century in the West that dreams authored by the dead or any other non-human or more-than-human entity fall under the purview of the occult, possession, trance, hallucination, or shamans.

As a first-generation U.S. immigrant of the Philippine diaspora, I drift between two paradigms on dreams and dreamwork. What of my “Philippines”? The one that is not an almond or the name of a colonial Spanish monarch? And what of tuyaw, which in the hands of Freud would become an articulation of repressed desires into symbolic form, but in the hands of a spirit medium might also be a transmission from a non-or-more-than-human subject elsewhere converging with an ontological experience irreconcilable with the Freudian subject?

Inspired by William Burroughs and Brion Gysin’s process called “cut-up", I draw from ethnographic fieldwork in the Philippines on the mediation of dreams and juxtapose it with Freud’s methodology of dream interpretation.  Reflecting on dreams reported to Filipino spirit mediums and Cixous’s enchanted prose in which “Philippines” marks an imaginary whereby people can meet in a shared dream, I seek an emergent decolonial vocabulary for Philippine dreaming in this moment of ecological crisis, resurgent demagoguery, and erasure wherein the dead – so I am often told – seek to be heard. What are the dead seeking to tell us, and why now? How might tuyaw sent by the victim of a past ecological disaster shape one’s ability to imagine  surviving the next? In what ways can alternate conceptualizations of the dreams, dreamers, and their subjects open up new vistas for human responses to the climate crisis?