dream – cindy agoncillo

August 12, 2012August 12, 2012 Cindy Agoncillo Blog, Dream Journal

Dream Journal: Dream or Memory?

I was just about to fall asleep, but then I remembered a work email I needed to send. As I laid in bed with my laptop, I quickly typed up an email to a client about needing to cut several tenths of an inch off her organization’s advertisement for my company’s magazine. I hit send, closed my laptop, and went to sleep.

When I woke up in the morning, I vaguely remembered emailing the client before bed and was going to tweet about how I wasn’t sure if sending the email was a dream or a memory. It was a memory, but it apparently didn’t happen exactly as I remembered. I soon got a phone call from my coworker Lance. He was in Chicago (both in the dream and in real life) on business at an industry event. He said that a woman had received an email from our company, but she was concerned because it had been marked as spam. He started to describe the contents of the email, and it sounded like the message I had sent.

“Yes, I sent that email last night before going to bed. Does it say something about an ad and several tenths of an inch?”
“Yes, but are you sure?” he asked. “Are you sure you didn’t send it while you were asleep? It’s all backwards.”
“Backwards?! What do you mean?”
“Just check your sent folder.”

I logged into my email and checked the sent folder. There was the email I remembered sending. When I opened the email, though, I was really confused. The words were all jumbled and running together. There was a string of random numbers as well as an unusual link to an unfamiliar website. The email had been sent to Gail Rudowicz (a real person who is an icon of our company’s industry), who was NOT the intended recipient of the email I thought I had sent.

I was trying to make sense out of everything when I finally got to work that day. Was that email a dream or a memory? Both, I guess. I really did send an email, so that was a memory. However, staying awake to type it and hit send was completely a dream. Who knew that sleep-emailing was a thing?!

You can imagine my confusion and concern when I woke up in real life…

December 25, 2011December 27, 2011 Cindy Agoncillo Blog, Dream Journal

Dream Journal: “Remnant”

The inspiration for this dream journal came from a dream I had this past weekend. I woke up in a South Carolina hotel, our stop for the night as my family and I drove from Pennsylvania to Florida for the Christmas holiday. It was one of those dreams that made me sit up in bed and think to myself, “Was that just a dream?” This dream could not be forgotten and had to be written down – just like all the other dreams from now on.

Nearly the entire dream was a commercial for a new ABC drama, “Remnant” – except that the show doesn’t exist… yet.

The commercial opened on a Tom Wopat-type Caucasian male in his mid-40s. The setting was a dusty, possibly war-torn, modern America – so dusty the commercial was almost in sepia tones. He was standing by a river or possibly on the loading dock of a shipping/warehouse facility surrounded by floodwaters. He was there with his adopted son, an African teenage boy in a wheelchair. The father presented his son with two feet, which had possibly been the son’s before they were amputated – hence the wheelchair. “I believe you have been healed,” the father said. “Now go swim.” The son stood up from his wheelchair and dove into the floodwaters.

As the son dove into the water, the commercial cut from the sepia America to a near black-and-white parallel world. In this world, “Tom Wopat” is a wilderness man with a wife and 10- or 11-year-old daughter. They lived in either the “Oregon Trail” or “Little House on the Prairie” era. Wrapped in wolf fur, Tom swam through a frozen river, pulling his wife and daughter on a sled behind him.

The “commercial” then cut back and forth between wilderness Tom and the African son swimming through their rivers, though the African son seemed to be drowning. Sepia Tom dove into the river to save his son. As these various scenes flashed, a big red title, “REMNANT,” appeared on screen as the voiceover told us when the show would be airing on ABC.

The dream then turned to my dad and me watching this commercial for “Remnant.” Just as I said, “What’s with all of these parallel world TV shows lately?” my dad said, “I really enjoy these parallel world TV shows!”

June 17, 2011 Cindy Agoncillo Blog

Upside-Down: My Crazy Dream

I just woke up from the weirdest and craziest dream ever! I was with “my friends” – current friends and random people from my past – about to go to a jazz dance class at a community center. We were waiting to leave in a classroom, which looked like my high school but was possibly in a dorm building on my old college campus. Some moments we were all outside watching the tennis team film a dance routine in muddy puddles. Then a few of us were in a different classroom. It was dark, and we were sitting at desks in the center of the room. I felt the building sway so much that I could look out the window straight down at the street. It looked like Pasadena outside. The building wasn’t so much swaying – more like the top part of the building was on a hinge or was rocking back and forth. It didn’t seem connected to the rest of the building. A teacher walked into the room carrying another teacher’s baby. The building swayed again, and I asked my friends if they could feel it. “Look at Angelina’s water bottle!” I said. The water inside clearly indicated the building was moving drastically. “It feels like the building is about to flip over!” “That’s because it IS!” screamed the teacher. We tried to run for the door as the classroom plummeted to the ground. Suddenly, we were outside and safely on the ground, looking at the top half of the building, which was actually standing right side up and was surrounded by bodies, shocked students, and emergency personnel. I could see students lying in the stairwell with laptops and cell phones out, tweeting about their safety. I stood there crying, thinking about friends who were probably still inside and saying, “I feel so… lonely.” My college roommate stood next to me and didn’t say anything. A passing stranger patted me on the shoulder and awkwardly said, “There, there. It’s okay.” As ambulances started taking people away (I didn’t see any dead bodies being moved, so I suppose everyone survived), I saw my current roommate. She rushed toward me and started telling me how her best friend’s dad is okay. She was just with him at his house and was supposedly taking care of him with alcohol wipes. I interrupted her and said, “Do you see this building? I was INSIDE when it fell! So I don’t really care about your friend’s dad right now.” At that point, someone said it was time to search the rest of the building for survivors. My roommate and I went upstairs to the second floor, which looked like my junior high school, and we heard someone tell us to search the music room. We opened a random door and almost stepped on people. Everything in the room was still right side up, though, and people were still in their desks. The students were little children, like 7 years old. My roommate didn’t know what to do, but I started going to each one, asking, “Are you okay? Does it hurt anywhere? Does your head hurt?” The first child was okay and was able to leave. The next child said her wrist and knee hurt, so she wiggled around until she was seated comfortably to wait for a paramedic. Her “identical twin” – sometimes they looked the same, sometimes not (the first girl was Indian, and the second girl was pasty white with glasses) – was okay. I then realized the parents had come to school that day, because the next person was the twins’ mother. She was at least the first girl’s mom, because she was from India. She appeared to be okay, too. I don’t remember if anything else happened after that…