ATSING Emy comes to our home every morning, lunch, and dinner, an almost irreplaceable part of our household for as long as I can remember. Like an older sister, she sometimes cooks for us her famous asado recipe, updates us on what goes on in her own household, and shares with us her own family's milestones, whether it be a marriage, birth, or graduation.
Whatever her roles may be to our family, to my mother particularly, in our community she plays a peculiar role. People tell her their dreams and life events in exchange for, hopefully, winning numbers.
I have gathered this much: images in dreams are translated into numbers. A rod or a snake is a definite number one, while a big snake is amplified as a 31. Imagery of houses or small buildings might be interpreted as four, and number four may also refer to a chicken or four-legged animals. Animals with tails, like pigs, however, may merit a 5. A young maiden is given a sweet 16, while a little girl is a number 6 and a young boy is a number 7. Meanwhile, number 15 may mean a beautiful or handsome person. The number 33 denotes anything that flies or that is happy.
Numbers 22 and 11 refer to things in pairs like shoes or slippers. Eleven may also sometimes mean a walking horse or a straight path. Thirteen is, of course, considered as anything bad, unlucky, or unfortunate. Religious figures are not spared a number, too. The Virgin Mary is number 8 while her son Jesus Christ is number 25.
Groups of numbers connote a variety of things or events too. Numbers 8, 18, 28, and 38 may mean excrement, largely dependent on the quantity, 38 must be feces that's mountains-high at that! The numbers ending in 9 such as 9, 19, 29, and 39 refer to a death, depending again on the age of the person. Meanwhile, numbers ending in zero, such as 10, 20, 30, and 40 may mean round objects, depending on how many or few. Body parts merit a different article altogether, depending on the kaladia, a chart that assigns numbers to human anatomy.
Atsing Emy has all these numbers up in her head, has built an extensive inner drive in her brain that comprises a database which helps her process and interpret the dreams, nightmares, and events that her followers experience day by day. Her role has been upgraded from jueteng kubrador to STL (small town lottery) bet collector, but her position to her customers has always been largely coterminous, based on the trust and confidence they have in her. She has been one of my constants since my childhood days, a permanent fixture of our lives.
I think that anyone in the barrio whose family is similarly engrossed with the numbers game, whether lotto, STL, and jueteng, also has their very own interpreter of dreams and milestones. Games of numbers are a gray area in Filipino culture, with us frowning upon some while approving others, while they have been present throughout our historical development.