By Lily C. Fen

They called us "dreamers", or "dreamservants," for lack of a better term.

It was an uncreative name, but that was our job. Dreamers were assigned to every bedroom in the Andrada Estate – a towering high rise called The Andrada Suites Alabang.

We created nightly visions for every hotel guest there. It was not as if the Andradas advertised the added service, but it was something the Suites staff treated with gravity.

Twenty-one floors of the Suites rose to the skies. I was bound to one room, as each Dreamer of the Estate was. The municipality of Muntinlupa could not have renegade Dreamers running amok, after all.

I couldn't tell you what life was like before my existence as a Dreamer. All I remembered, before the Suites opened its doors to its first hotel guest, was training with all the others. I no longer knew my name from the time before the hotel.

We were all named after the rooms to which we were assigned. I was Dreamer #1749. Most of us learned to accept our fate. It wasn't as if any of us could recall a life beyond the walls of the Andrada, anyway.

Though I was also allowed to walk the corridors of the seventeenth floor, I wondered what lay beyond the confines of Room #1749. I could see the lands of Muntinlupa sprawled below me, beyond the windows of the high rise in which I worked. Dreamer #1748 and I established a friendship. He reminded me of someone I once knew, but every time I tried to look into the past, the vision would fade.

Once in a while, during the off-season, he and I would take the elevator down to the lobby. We were allowed there too.

The entire staff of the Andrada Suites knew of us, but never acknowledged our presence. We worked in the same hotel but weren't made of the same stuff and existed in different planes.

None of us Dreamers were visible to any other human being. Sometimes, those with a third eye could see us as flitting fragments of stars, much like fireflies, or the sparks that come after an electric shock. Camera footage around the hotel sometimes caught us as shadows in human form.

I belonged to the world of imagination and the rest of the staff lived in the land of blood and sweat. I could smell it on them, the sticky perspiration that clung to them from beyond the air-conditioned hallways of the Andrada Suites.

I'd wander into the lobby whenever I didn't have a guest to conjure dreams for. The lobby stank of heavy lilies yawning in their vases. A mixture of blossoms and sour sweat assailed my spirit senses whenever I was there.

When the glass doors opened to let someone in from the hotel driveway, I could breathe in the sun outside. It smelled of warmth, like blades of grass baking in the heat. Or the sweat of the manong guard soaking into his shirt as he stood outside in his European-looking uniform, with long-sleeves, hat, and dark blue polyester pants.

Beads of sweat laced his temples, vexing him. I could see the salty drops from where I was at the lobby, for Dreamers have sharp eyes. They congregated around that secret area behind his ears. Sometimes I smelled the sun on the receptionist, hidden underneath talcum powder that she liked to dab on her underarms and back. It was a layer of white beneath her crisp receptionist's shirt, much like the Johnson & Johnson baby face powder that was too light for her dark face, but which she dabbed on liberally onto her nose anyway. Anything to keep the Manila sweat away.

I was unperturbed by the heat. I felt as cool as the Bermuda grass outside, water running through every blade.

Sometimes I would step outside the glass windows that stood between the room I worked in and the world beyond. Walking through walls was an easy thing for me. I got as far as two metres beyond the confines of the building, standing there in mid-air, weightless. Some of the Dreamers in adjacent rooms who were not working those afternoons stared at me. What was I doing, breaking boundaries?

I saw Dreamer #1748 attempt an escape once.

He took the elevator down to the ground floor, just as the humans did, and walked out of the lobby. He went through the glass doors that the security guard held for visitors and VIPs. My neighbour and closest companion in that entire building walked past the driveway, onto the neatly trimmed Bermuda grass in front of the Andrada Suites. But just as he was about to cross the white line that demarcated the private property of the Estate from the main road, a mesh of fire and lightning blockaded the entire perimeter.

A shockwave coursed through #1748 and the air sparked of gold. His fingertips ignited in bursts of white. He stood frozen to the spot, a being of fire and flame. Smoke rose from his blackened body, for Dreamers also have bodies. Men of flesh just couldn't detect them.

All of him was charred, yet he stayed standing. When the embers died away, he stumbled backwards. Searching for balance, he found his way back inside. He took the elevator back to the seventeenth floor. Back to Room #1748.

He sat on the sofa, unmoving, while his charred body repaired. He was a handsome spirit of a man. But witnessing that ruled out any more notion of trying to get out for me, or, for that matter, any other Dreamer.

He looked at me, then, as the blackness and soot and smoke rose slowly from him, his spirit flesh burning, his eyes spoke of a freedom we did not have nor understand, only yearned for. I looked back at him, saying nothing.

He never tried to leave again.

I had been creating dreams at the Andrada Suites for a while now. Many monsoon seasons had passed. Fanciful holidays swept through the lobby of the Andrada Suites, from Christmas and New Year to Valentine's Day and Biyernes Santo.

Christmas in Muntinlupa meant a tall plastic tree decorated by giant, glittering orbs that reflected the room, New Year's Eve was champagne. Valentine's Day meant the men took their expensive mistresses to the Suites in the evenings. On Biyernes Santo, the world stopped. People took the week off. Some went up north to Pampangga, to watch the men crucify themselves on the Cross, like the Christ I sometimes saw in their memories, which I often looked to for inspiration for the dream creation.

One cleaning lady whose dreams I liked to visit (she liked to nap during her breaks in the basement) believed that God was dead during Holy Week.

Seventeen plastic Christmas trees had come and gone, 17 Valentine's Days with illicit love affairs. I walked into fantasies of marriage in the Dreamings of mistresses, the occasional nightmare of purple penises in the minds of queridas who wondered what the hell they were doing with their old men at the Andrada Suites, when they could be doing something better with their lives.

I knew all their thoughts from the time they slept till the time they woke, for I was Dreamer. I could access everything a man had ever thought, dreamed, learned, read, or lived. I could reach into every nook and cranny of the mind, and it surprised me at times what sorts of things I learned while working as a Dreamer for the Suites. I learned about the heat outside, how humid everything was in Muntinlupa, especially for the manong guards and receptionists on day shifts.

On slow nights, when I didn't have a guest checked in at Room #1749, I could wander downstairs to catch the night shift asleep. I'd plunge my Dreaming hands into their temples and sneak into their thoughts, find out how their day had been.

It all began for me one particular weekend. It was when a certain Colleen Cheung checked into Room #1749. Floor-to- ceiling windows gazed out at a Muntinlupa that was slowly developing from a verdant bukiran to a metropolis with wide asphalted streets. Red and white lights whizzed past below me. It was a room deserving of a career woman like Colleen.

She let out a deep breath as she slid under the covers, the weight of the day leaving her. Her black hair slid over the linen pillows and rustled against the fabric. Andrada Suites Alabang had achieved the impossible, a quiet room in a bustling metropolis. I could hear the minutest event, even hair sliding over linen.

Perhaps the silence was possible because Muntinlupa wasn't quite a city yet, though massive houses in nearby Andrada Alabang Village were popping up, one at a time. But crickets still sang in the evenings, a chorus within a tiny jungle of creepers and towering trees.

Colleen turned out the light on her bedside table. I got to work. I preferred standing over my sleeping subjects, setting my hands over the temples, letting light from my Dreaming hands wash over the subject's head. It was tedious work, creating dreams for others. But I was used to it.

I gave Colleen time to slip from the place of waking into the land of dreams, where I belonged. Colleen was full of thoughts about the day. About the business meeting and the stress she felt having to deal with her new contact in Makati City, not to mention that horrendous sea of cars she had to endure for her final meeting with the Andrada family, who had also provided this generous room for her. She was thinking of quitting her job that required leaving Hong Kong so often.

Colleen thought of Statue Square in her native city of Hong Kong, where the Filipino domestic helpers spent every Sunday. They came in droves, sitting on the stretch of free concrete and speaking in their noisy Tagalog and Visayan languages.

I was familiar with those women Colleen had seen. The other Dreamers and I had practised on the brothers and sisters of OFWs, Overseas Filipino Workers. The ones who worked blue collar jobs as drivers and janitors at the Andrada Suites.

Their jobs brought steady pay to tables with 13 mouths to feed. They could wear neatly pressed clothes for eight hours of the day and walk air-conditioned hallways. They could pretend for a day that they rubbed elbows with the rich, though what they did was scrub their toilets and mop up their mess after breakfast at the dining hall. That was close enough to the life of the wealthy. I remembered their dreams.

Then Colleen thought of her 10-year old son back home in Hong Kong, and how she loved his laughing eyes and chubby cheeks. She wished she could race down a highway to see him, then and there. I took that as a place from where I could begin.

I let Colleen's imaginary highway turn into a sheet of grey, placing her into an empty room of shadow. Then I let Colleen's image of the thoroughfare fade again into sight. Colleen looked around her as the picture shifted back into focus. "So this is where the dreams begin and where my wandering thoughts end," she said.

That took me by surprise.

Colleen was aware she was in a dream.

As an official Dreamer of The Andrada Suites, I could access all of Colleen's thoughts and memories, tap into the archive that contained her previous dreams. She had a few of her flying over cities and treetops – I enjoyed those, in spite of myself.

Colleen could pause a dream mid-way, like watching a movie played on a tape recorder. I had never seen anything like it.

I stepped out of her mind as Colleen slid out of an REM cycle. I dislodged the glow of my hands from Colleen's temples and fell on the carpeted floor of the hotel room. Something was amiss. Dreamer #1748 looked at me through the walls that separated us. He had no guest that night and was sitting on the couch. His eyes searched mine, saw in me what I had witnessed in Colleen's dreams.

We had been given a scenario like this in Dreamer School when we were being tutored about Dream Work. But it had only been a simulation and a passing exercise. I never expected I could come face-to-face with a human who had some power over her dreams.

Was it my fortune that Colleen Cheung, a woman who was aware of her own nightly visions, had checked into Room #1749?

The third dreaming night was what broke the mould for me. For two nights, Colleen and I had been creating fantasies together. She was such a strong dreamer that I fell into the abyss of her mind's inventions.

I barely needed to steer the scenery around her in the midst of Colleen's constantly firing synapses. Instead of fading into Colleen's identity, which was standard protocol, I had taken my own form in Colleen's Dreamworld. Only in Colleen's dreams could I do it, no one else's.

Colleen's imaginary universe in the land of Dreaming was so vivid that there was room for me to exist.

I had grown curious about Colleen and had decided to follow her, letting Colleen steer the direction of the story we were in. We caught each other's eyes as a car whizzed past on the Dream Highway.

I had made contact with her. I was no longer a Dreamer setting up these illusions for her backstage. Colleen came up to me and touched my hand. She looked straight into my eyes, her brown ones searching mine like the golden laser points that held us to the land of Andrada.

Her hand encircled my wrist, her eyes scrutinising mine. "Who are you?" she said. I was taken aback by the question. "You don't belong here," she said. "You don't belong in this dreamscape."

"I am Dreamer Number 1749," I said, struggling to get the words out. No one had ever asked me in a Dream before who I was, let alone even noticed my existence.

I let her eyes search mine, much like the way #1748 did, as if fishing for answers from within a well. The world, her Dream, wasn't going to go anywhere if we took our time.

The Dream shifted and we were by a pond which flowed into another bed of water. Grey stone steps spread away from us and koi in iridescent orange and white swam in the shallow pool.

Sakura trees with cream and tangerine blossoms sprouted around us.

"All I know is that I am Dreamer 1749," I added. "I don't remember anything else beyond my life at the Suites. I wish I could go beyond the walls of the hotel, but I am bound to the Andrada."

I told Colleen about Dreamer #1748, how an invisible force field around the premises had sparked gold and fire when he had tried to cross the boundary.

"You should be able to leave," Colleen said.

Her dream stretched on forever, the horizon bleak and grey where orange flowers didn't grow. Colleen didn't say anything more, but I knew that her mind was going at the speed of lightning. She squeezed my hands.

I hadn't realised they were cupped inside her small ones, her fingers slender candles.

Colleen looked up and the clouds parted. A wormhole appeared in the fabric of the Dream. As Colleen's warm hand wrapped around my wrist, I suspected what Colleen intended to do. I bent my knees just as Colleen did, and braced myself for the leap.

We jetted upwards into the swirling mass above.

I felt my hands become warm, and, as I opened my eyes, I saw trickles of light at my fingertips. It spread up my arms, becoming a great glow that shot out of my chest, setting the room ablaze. Dreamers from the darkness of the other rooms looked. Then the light from the very centre of me flashed a blinding white, and all went black.

Colleen woke up with a start, temples dotted in perspiration. She was gasping for breath. Her pyjama shirt was damp.

The radiance in Room #1749 began to dissipate.

Only a fraction of the light was left behind, a tiny star flickering in Colleen's chest.

When my senses came back, I looked around me. I was no longer in Room #1749. In fact, I was no longer inside the hotel. I couldn't believe it.

I was beyond the borders of The Andrada, past that white line that had burned #1748 to embers once.

The lush bukiran just outside the estate smelled of earthworms and wild papaya. I felt gravity pull my fleshly feet to the ground. I was in the heat and humidity of Alabang, a few steps away from the vast bushes and trees that hadn't yet been razed, covered in asphalt, made into skyscraper.

My gaze turned to the 17th floor. I could tell which room it was because I knew those haunted eyes of Dreamer #1748, those which had stared at me through cemented walls and embossed wallpaper. Our eyes connected from across the distance. He gave me an approving nod. I see you. You must go. You are an example for all of us.

I hesitated, took a breath. I now had the form of woman, one that other humans like Colleen or the Andrada guards could see and touch. I had dreamed real clothes on myself, and looked like one of the hotel receptionists in a crisp, button-down shirt, a navy blue skirt, black flats. I felt each piece of clothing graze my skin. What a glorious thing to be alive.

I took my first step away from there.

Something burned on the inside part of my wrist. I looked down to see a letter and numbers emblazoned on my skin. "D1749," it said.

"Goodbye, Dreamer 1748," I said, as I looked behind me one last time. I met his gaze, pressed two fingers to my lips in farewell. I would not forget where I had come from.

But now I was free.

_____