Strange dreams

 Excerpt from a  Memoir titled “Talking to my children” by Mr.Tăng thiên Thại

Your Grandpa had given each of the four of us a nickname. Mine is Mộng Lương, and your uncles Hối, Tài and Tư are Mộng-Thoại, Mộng-Lý and Mộng-Tùng respectively.

Although there were four Mộngs (meaning dream), only mine was based on a strange dream.

You know Grandma had a total of twelve children, with a nanny hired each time to take care of the newborn baby.

One day at about midnight, Grandma was woken from her dream by an old man with white hair and beard, who was tapping on her hand and shouting: “Get up right now to save your baby from death.” Grandma quickly got grandpa up, then ran over to my room to find out that I was turning blue, because the nanny went to sleep while breast-feeding me, preventing me from breathing. Grandma quickly yanked me out but I was already a motionless body. Grandma kept tapping me in the back and after a few moments, I started to cry, while the nanny, with closed eyes, was running around in the room in a complete state of fearful shock, her hands covering her head! Grandpa stopped her, tapped her back then guided her to sit down on the bed. It took a while for the nanny to recover her mind and to recount what happened: she said while breast feeding the baby, somebody kept throwing tiles from the roof at her. In order to protect the baby, she tucked him in tightly under her.

How can anybody explain this strange dream? Was that old man a saint or a deceased member of the old Tăng’ s generation who came back from the other world to get grandma up and at the same time, tried to wake up the nanny to save my life?

The next day Grandpa gave me the nickname Mộng Lương, which means a “good dream”.

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By the time I was about 8 or 9 years old, I was hit with a serious case of  indigestion after eating fried rice, causing an inflated and painful stomach that kept becoming worse and worse. The Oriental family doctor was called in, but his medicine did not have any effect on my condition. I kept reeling in pain until I drifted into an exhausted sleep at night. Another strange dream started during which my maternal Grandma, who passed away a few years ago, appeared from the distance with a sweet smile on her gentle face. She started to approach me, smoothly caressed my hair, then took out three black pills from her pocket and urged me to take them. After that she slowly moved out to the house on the adjacent lot, where another son and daughter of hers were living.

The next day when I woke up, I was feeling quite well as if I was never sick, and my stomach was returning to its normal shape.

Is there an invisible world that runs parallel to our normal one? Although neither science nor religion can really explain that question, it is wise to consider that good deeds will always result in good rewards, or at least a peaceful feeling of rightfulness that satisfies our life as well as our soul.

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Around 1988, when I was sixty years old, I was visited by another strange dream during a hot summer night.

I was in deep sleep as soon as I got in bed and I saw myself walking in a very big warehouse toward an open window on the right side. I climbed over it then followed a small trail toward a lightly forested area. Pretty soon, I saw a small three-room pagoda through some trees. Upon entering the pagoda, I met a young bonze coming from the back of it, who showed me a big painting of a full size lady bonze looking very gentle but also very serious. She was wearing a gray outfit and she looked quite alive. All of a sudden, she stepped out of the painting while the young bonze simply disappeared.

Without saying anything, she moved slowly to the altar on the left, then kneeled down and prayed. There weren’t any Buddha statue on the altar, just stones aligned in piles looking like statues. Suddenly, three of the stones fell down as if the lady’s prayer had been accepted. Standing up slowly, she whispered: “Follow me.” I obediently followed her on the trail leading deeper into the forest before we were blocked by some big bamboo trees. The lady told me to grasp a bamboo branch, whereupon I was lifted into the air before being gently brought down into a narrow valley with ankle deep water. The lady was already in front of me, and I continued to follow her until a grandiose spectacle appeared before my eyes. On the left, an open but empty sea spread out into the horizon. On the right, there was a high mountain with rows and rows of round roof brick houses looking like Indian pagodas, spreading up from the base of the mountain upward. Looking into the biggest house at the base of the mountain, I saw a monumental Buddha statue, filling almost the entire main room. One middle age bonze came out to talk to the lady while I was looking around. The sky was a clear blue, the atmosphere was so peaceful and I was feeling so fresh although there was no trace of wind. Between the sea and the straight up mountain, the trail continued forward to the far away horizon. Based on the position of the sun, I guessed it was around five o’clock in the afternoon, although the sunlight did not change at all. Time looked like it was at a standstill, and I was really enjoying such heavenly out of the real world minutes when I heard some very distressing cries from somebody. A girl was crawling in front of the lady bonze, her body was covered with fetid open wounds. The lady bonze took off the vest she was wearing and put it on the girl whose cries ceased instantly.

I awoke suddenly and looked at the clock which showed 4:30 a.m. It was still dark, and although we were in the middle of summer, my room was comfortably cold and I felt so good as if the wonderful dream that lasted from 10:00pm to 4:30 a.m was still going on for me.

Fearful that I could forget all those strange events in my dream, I woke my wife up to tell her everything in detail, and asked her to try remembering them. Later on, I visited your Aunt Chín, my Buddhist sister, to tell her about my dream. She told me I was so lucky to be allowed to visit the West Valley (Xứ Tây Trúc), the Buddhist Holy ground, where only privileged honest people were granted access. It is different from Niết Bàn, similar to the Christian paradise, because if you were there, you would see a sea of different and rare flowers in an explosion of colors, and also hundred rare singing birds. As for the lady bonze, I guess she was the Goddess of Mercy (Phật Bà Quan Âm), and the middle age bonze was the Honorable Di Lạc.

I asked myself happily: “Did I really visit the peaceful Buddhist Holy ground ?”. Any way, I think if one can’t do good deeds, at least one should try hard to avoid bad actions, to be able to keep yourself at peace through your life.