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The Night I Burned the Currency of False Worth
I woke in the dark with my heart pounding, half-convinced that I was about to have a stroke. It was as if a great storm had passed through my mind — one so vivid and merciless that I felt ashamed even after waking. Like the cats and dogs after their private business, I sat for a while in that raw sense of exposure, trying to piece together what my spirit had just shown me.
The dream began — or perhaps ended — at home. My late wife was there, fierce as ever, confronting a few elderly Chinese peddlers who came selling medicinal herbs, teas, and sacred rice. She shouted at them until they turned pale, and I, in a blind rush of anger, chased them away with rough hands. Standing nearby was my old friend Lee — lawyer, art patron, and current chairman of the Penang Art Gallery — the same man I once called my brother.
He stood apart, watching quietly, while his friends muttered, “That’s assault! We can sue him!” Something in me broke loose. I walked up to him, holding a flexible ruler in my hand — the kind we once used for drawing lines and measuring distances — and began striking his face again and again until it was covered in red welts. “Now you can sue me!” I shouted.
At a distance, I saw his two children, hiding behind a car as though they didn’t wish to be seen. Yet their faces were glowing with a strange kind of approval — they were smiling and gesturing with the thumb and little finger, a sign that seemed to say, Well done.
Before that eruption, I had watched strangers rummaging through my paintings, buying them randomly with crumpled cash. They seemed to think they were doing me a favor. My friend stood by, saying nothing. At some point, he brought a woman who looked vaguely familiar; she, too, bought a few pieces and handed me a stack of fifty-ringgit notes. I took a slip of paper — perhaps a receipt — folded it around the money, and lit it on fire. The small flame flared and died on the floor.
When I awoke, I could still feel the heat from that burning — not just on my hands, but deep within my chest.
The Dream’s Message
In the calm that followed, I began to see the dream as a mirror. The money was not just money — it was validation, the world’s way of measuring worth. By burning it, I was rejecting the notion that art, sincerity, or devotion to truth could ever be priced. The paper was a receipt, a record of transaction — and I wanted no record of such exchanges between my soul and society.
The strangers pawing through my work were the faces of a marketplace that treats creativity as merchandise. And my friend, the lawyer, was perhaps the embodiment of that polite, administrative world that watches silently while authenticity is sold piece by piece.
The ruler I used as a weapon — a tool meant to measure — turned into an instrument of rebellion against judgment itself. In striking him, I struck at the whole system of metrics that has haunted artists, saints, and wanderers since time began.
And my wife — bless her memory — appeared as my inner guardian, the fierce feminine that defends what is sacred from the merchants of the soul.
In that dream, I noticed that not a single Malay or Indian came to buy my works — only the familiar expatriate Europeans and the Chinese collectors who have long dominated the Penang art scene through their networks, wealth, and influence. I awoke wondering if my resentment makes me a racist, or if it is simply the ache of one who has stood too long outside the gate, watching others decide what counts as art and who may be called an artist. Perhaps both are true — the wound and the bitterness that grows around it.
The hidden faces of the children, smiling from behind the car, were perhaps the most mysterious sign of all. Were they the silent generation watching the sins of the fathers? Or the part of myself that secretly rejoiced at finally fighting back?
Yet I sense that the dream has not finished its work. This one revealed my resentment toward the world that overlooks me, but perhaps another will come — one that turns the mirror inward, showing how my own people, and I among them, have also failed to nurture our artistic spirit. I almost dread that dream, for it may cut closer to the bone. But if it must come, let it come, for truth is patient and reveals itself in its own time.
In the end, the shame I felt upon waking was not guilt for what I had done in the dream, but grief for the anger that still lives somewhere inside me. Yet even that shame had its purpose — it washed the dust off my heart, reminding me that humility is the artist’s truest ally.
A Closing Thought
Perhaps this dream was not punishment but purification. It tore open an old wound to let the poison drain. It reminded me that my art, my struggles, and even my failures are sacred when they come from truth — not from the need to be seen, sold, or praised.
I share this here as a way of releasing it — setting it down like burnt paper, letting the wind carry the ashes.
A Quiet Verse
Let the fire burn what is false,
Let the ash return to the wind.
Let no dream shame the heart
That dares to face its own shadow.
Only through such burning
Does the soul begin again?
#artandspirit #dreamwork #selfreflection #penangartist #spiritualawakening #artandego #truthseeker #inneralchemy #creativehealing #burningthepast #awakeningthroughdreams #thecheeseburgerbuddha
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