Your Messenger message:

"Good Day, Sir Tony!

"Happy New Year! "Thank you for all the guidance and illuminating words you have shared with us throughout the years. I pray for you and your loved ones' good health for all the years to come. "I am writing this while quarantined in a government facility in __________. I've just arrived a couple days ago and am slowly acclimatizing to the weather. I was hoping you could interpret this dream I just had if it’s not too much trouble: "The dream starts with me waking up in my quarantine room. Everything was normal enough until I start to get visitors coming into my room. These first visitors were my closest and best friends in the Philippines. They come in a few people at a time and I welcome them until I remember that I’m supposed to be in quarantine. The penalty for breaking quarantine rules in ____________ can reach up to half a million pesos. I quickly try to disperse them, hoping we weren’t noticed, but as soon as I get my friends to leave, more people come in droves. Literally, too many for me to handle. This next batch of people were, as I imagine you would call them, 'atchays' and were really typically just exhibiting standard atchay behavior. By this point, I considered myself just fucked, and as I looked outside my door, I saw all the other rooms and whole facility was totally swarmed by people as well. I turn back to my room and at the back corner by the window there is an elderly priest giving a sermon. If I can remember correctly, he asked those listening 'What is the Quest of the Parts?' A voice from the crowd answered 'The Quest of the Parts is the Whole.' At which point I wake up from my dream. "Thank you very much for your time, Sir Tony. I wish you a pleasant day. "Respectfully yours, "_________"

My reply:

Hello ________!

Your dream was an anxiety dream--a result of being in a foreign country, being in quarantine, being afraid of breaking rules, and being already homesick. The setting and action you describe are a veiled image of a funeral wake--your funeral wake. You have two types of guests: non-atchays and atchays, reflecting the social circles you've been straddling all along, when you were still in the Philippines. They could also represent two sides of your personality. You look around you and the facility is swarming with people. The facility, then, becomes a complex of funeral chapels, underscoring the image of dying and death.

As to the ending of the dream, the priest (in this case a mediator between life and the afterlife--or between the Conscious and the Unconscious) is your Higher Self, wanting to ensure that you get the message of the dream right. "The Quest of the Parts is the Whole" refers to what happens to a shaman after he is killed and dismembered: he must be reassembled and rise, like the legendary phoenix, as a new and more powerful person.

You've experienced many kinds of death in the past. Yet, you simply went with the flow and did not bother to reassemble your severed parts. Now in a foreign country and with a promising albeit uncertain future before you, it is time to reassemble yourself.