Of the psychological utility of dreams, much has been theorized but little is known. Still, we don’t need science to tell us that a nightmare betrays some knot of psychic upset, whether specific and discrete — stress about an upcoming job interview, a first date — or amorphous and unbounded, an emanation of grief, trauma, or other un-boxable hurts. You wake slick with sweat, heart pounding and teeth grinding, and though your world may abound with uncertainties, you can be certain in that just-roused moment of one thing: Something is wrong.

Many things are going wrong for the eponymous protagonist of Yñiga, the second novel by Filipino writer Glenn Diaz and winner of the 2024 Philippine National Book Award. To name just a few of Yñiga Calinauan’s problems: the boyfriend who just walked out the door; the sister who hates her guts; the mother who is dying; the mountain of papers to ghost-write for “lazy American undergraduates,” her sole source of income since losing her more respectable job in academia; and the encroaching fire that threatens to raze her Manila neighborhood. Not to mention the dead body buried beneath the tree outside her door — yet another nightmare in the legion of nightmares haunting her days.

“Yñiga had always had screaming dreams,” Diaz writes, but she smothers every wail of fear and fury upon waking, unable to express her bottomless grief in the naked light of morning. Since a pair of devastating losses stole her childhood — the drowning of an older sister, and the disappearance of her father, one of hundreds of civilians abducted and presumably murdered by a corrupt political regime — Yñiga has floated through life at a remove, refusing to try that hard or care that much for anything.

Now 40 years old, she endures in a state of apathy and deflection, letting homes, jobs, and loved ones fall through her fingers like sand. The one place where she’s able to access unmitigated emotions — her fierce enormity of sorrow and yearning, hope, and regret — is the hazy dreamscape of sleep. Only there, in a liminal suspension between memory and imagination, can Yñiga truly see.

“Sleep” is the book’s opening word, functioning as both a time stamp — it’s the middle of the night, and Yñiga should be asleep but is not — and a distillation of atmosphere, the after-dark entropy that fills every scene, no matter where the sun hangs in Diaz’s fictional sky. Across the street from where Yñiga smokes, soldiers are in the midst of arresting a fugitive general, a “decorated butcher of peasants and activists,” who has been hiding above the local bakery. His capture mounts a spectacle of light and sound that startles some of Yñiga’s neighbors awake, but through it all, she is unmoved, verging on catatonia.

From Diaz’s third-person narration — a coolly cutting voice that veers close to Yñiga’s interiority but never fully infiltrates it — we learn it was her “reluctant handiwork” that instigated the general’s arrest, though why and how won’t be revealed until the second half of the story. Much of the plot’s whys and hows are similarly occluded, revealed only in jerky flashbacks after lengthy delays of exposition. The result is a fragmentary narrative that can be thrillingly suspenseful — a taut flirtation with reader curiosity — and at times confusing, evasive to a frustrating degree.

After the opening scene, the course of action swiftly ramifies, wrenching Yñiga through a maze of high-stakes encounters. Life just keeps happening to her, chaotically, and her primary coping mechanism is to fall asleep. Diaz makes elegant use of sleep sequences, especially when he positions Yñiga at their blurry edges: falling out of consciousness or being dragged back in. On one such edge, she wakes with “a distinct sense that this scene had happened already or been narrated in her head before.”

Déjà-vu-like illusions are classic symptoms of trauma that trap victims in recursive memory loops as they struggle to make sense of the past. The trouble in Yñiga’s case is that the tragedy doesn’t make sense, no matter how many times she re-encounters it in dreams or flashbacks. Trying to map trauma in a logical chain of cause and effect is futile, like the proverbial jamming of a square peg into a round hole. Healing might be a matter of picking up that ill-fitting peg and exploring what else it could possibly do — where it could possibly go.

Where Yñiga goes, in the end, is the forest — a dense tangle of trees shadowing the river that once swallowed her sister. As she presses deeper into the wet wildness, she becomes 6 years old again, limbs springy and joints freed of middle-aged ache. Phantoms from her past shimmer among the foliage: a rush of lost loved ones suddenly, magically, un-lost. She is overwhelmed by joy, then forgiveness, then terror. The feelings are enormous; they affront her with ferocity. She becomes afraid “that everything, this tenuously conjoined new world, would disappear.”

It does. And in the vacuum of its disappearance, something else slinks into view. A darting movement, a shock of black fur. Is it another phantom, or is it real? Yñiga feels “the distinct sense of something coming” — something altogether new. Perhaps she is hallucinating. Perhaps she is dreaming. Perhaps, for the first time in her life, she is willing herself to wake up.

Frances Thomas is a writer and teacher based in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in Slate, Dazed, American Literary Review, Longridge Review, and elsewhere. She has an MFA in writing from Columbia University, where she was the print nonfiction editor of Columbia Journal. You can find more of her work on her website.