HW11: What is inside your bangungot

                Last night I was watching an episode of Danny Phantom entitled “Frightmare”. The episode is about Danny, having the greatest dream, he was the star in his football tea m, and he was smart enough to have an “A+” in his Science test. It was perfect until something shocking happened that turned his wonderful into a nightmare. He was desperate to save his friends from sleeping so he tried to wake them up by penetrating their dreams.

                While I was watching how Danny penetrated his friends’ dreams, I wonder what can be my friends’ dreams about.  I consider myself to be eternally curious, I wanted to ask my friends what they dream about, specially their nightmares. Do they dream about demons? Or do they dream about being attacked by monsters? Or do they dream about their strict scientific teachers?

                And so when I researched about it, I stumbled upon an article about a study on “A Phenomenological Study on Bangungot among Young Filipinos”. the study is about the common nightmares of Filipino people.

                The researched stated that most of the common themes of Filipino nightmares are supernatural activity, demonic encounters, a mix of reality and unlikely circumstances and being in paradise. Here is the tabulation of data:

                The results of the survey show most of the dreams that Filipinos have is unreal. A good explanation for this is maybe because we are familiar with a lot of legends about scary creatures, and that we were raised to be afraid of these creatures, we usually have them as the topic for our unpleasant dreams. We have been familiar with aswangs, tiyanaks, white ladies, duwendes, and other weird creatures. I bet that most of us are terrified of these creatures because when we are still young, our grandparents would usually scare us to sleep, using all these monsters and demonic characters.

                If you ask me, I think that it is because of our traditions and culture, why Filipinos tend to have the same types of nightmares. Because of how we learn stuff when we are kids, or how our elderly believe in the supernatural. Maybe this is because we had a historical background in terms of these things; we are all familiar that Filipinos are used to believe in spirits, worshipping inanimate objects. And though we had changed our beliefs when the Spaniards came, some of us still believe in these things. We may not worship them anymore, or look up to them in a religious aspect, their influence is still very much alive.