BY ANDREW LAM, PACIFIC NEWS SERVICE
EDITOR'S NOTE: Dreams can terrify, amuse, or just be out and out nonsensical. But dreams can also instruct in an undeniable and powerful way, as PNS editor Andrew Lam found out recently. PNS associate editor Andrew Lam is a Vietnam-born journalist and short-story writer who lives in San Francisco. His previous articles are available at www.pacificnews.org/lam/
L ast week I had a dream that was so vivid I am still reeling from the experience.

In the dream I am zooming down the freeway toward San Francisco where I live when suddenly the car swerves out of control and turns as if by its own volition into a desert, skips a railroad track, and " before I know it " enters a boulevard lined with tamarind and flame trees. I recognize the area at once. It's my old neighborhood in Saigon, where I lived until I was 11.

I stop in front of my old house and walk through the rusted iron gate, my heart pounding. But to my horror, the house is gutted, an empty structure where once there was a place of full of life and immense love and the insular business of a family. Rubble and debris are everywhere " the once-smooth tile floor is a field of broken glass and shattered bricks and the walls, once adorned with paintings and a large Persian tapestry, are stripped to bare stones.

I rummage though things for a while and then, just as I'm ready to give up, I find a night stand that once stood next to my brother's bed. I pull at its drawer and out spill dozens of black and white photos.

I am ecstatic. The photos are intact. They are exactly as I remember them. Here is my brother when he was twelve, wearing his martial arts uniform and kicking his roundhouse kick. Here is my mother as a teenager posing next to Angkor Wat with her family on their vacation. My father as a young and handsome colonel in his military uniform, smoking a cigar. And me and my sister holding on to our dogs, Medor and Nina, as we wave to the photographer, smiling happily.

I should take all these photos with me back to America, I am thinking, everyone would be so happy to see them. But as I stoop to gather the photos into plastic bag, a boy wearing shorts comes rushing in.

"This is my home," he yells, "and you're trespassing."

"But these are my photos," I protest meekly.

The boy looks at me as if I were mad, until he sees that I am crying. Then he changes his tone. "Well, Uncle how much would you give me for these things?"

As I struggle to find the answer the boy laughs and snatches the bag of photos out of my hand. I try to grab it back, but it's too late " I wake to find my right arm frozen in a grip over the coverlet, fingers clutching at nothing but thin air.

The photos in my dream are no more. I burned them when my mother ordered me to. The Vietnam war was nearing its end and as Vietcong tanks advanced toward the edge of the city, my mother told me to get rid of everything incriminating. "Find all the photos, letters, newspaper articles in the house," she said, "and burn them."

Obediently, I removed pictures from the album pages, diplomas from their glassed-in frames, film reels from metal canisters, letters from desk drawers. I put them all in a pile in the backyard and set them all on fire. When I was done, the momentos of three generations had turned into ashes.

It was only years later in America that I began to regret the act. Why didn't I save the photos the way I slipped my stamp collection in my backpack hours before we boarded the C-130 cargo plane and headed for Guam? For years, I could not look at friends' family photo albums without feeling remorse that my family and I have nothing to show now of a way of life that no longer exists.

So my dream was a kind of revelation. For as I stared at my empty hand upon waking I saw that nothing is ever truly lost. What I failed to grab in the dream survives, if only as an exquisite longing.

After all, if words and language, as the poet Rilke tells us, can be made into a thing, mute as the statue of an orator, the reverse, I think, is also true. Precious things lost, too, are transmutable. They refuse oblivion. They simply wait to be rendered into words.