Lyca and the business of dreaming

More than a decade after “Puede Nang Mangarap” was released, the song has suddenly returned to Filipino popular culture. Old clips are circulating again. The familiar choreography has been recreated. Memes have been made. Celebrities have joined the trend. Young people who were barely old enough to remember Lyca’s rise are now encountering her through TikTok edits, while those who watched her as a child are suddenly confronted with their own memories of growing up. Lyca herself has joined the revival, recreating the choreography that once belonged to a much younger version of herself. There is something fascinating about watching a cultural object return after more than a decade and discovering that it has acquired an entirely different meaning. The song remains the same, but the country listening to it is no longer the same. The audience has changed, Lyca has changed, and we have changed with her. What once sounded like an uncomplicated declaration of hope now carries an irony that could not have been anticipated when the song first entered popular consciousness.

But I find myself less interested in the dance than in the phrase itself, “Puede Nang Mangarap.” It sounds innocent. It sounds hopeful. It sounds almost embarrassingly optimistic in a country where so many people have learned to calculate their dreams according to the contents of their wallets. There is something revealing about the fact that a song about dreaming has returned at a moment when dreaming itself has become a subject of economic calculation. The phrase suggests that dreaming becomes possible after something else has been accomplished, acquired, survived, or paid for. It is as if imagination has a price of admission. One must first reach a certain degree of comfort before being allowed to think beyond survival. The joke, therefore, is not simply that the song is old or that the choreography is nostalgic. The joke works because Filipinos recognize the strange economic logic embedded in the phrase. We understand what it means to finally have enough breathing room to imagine something beyond the immediate demands of life.

The internet has transformed the song from an inspirational anthem into a kind of national punchline. Someone receives a salary and suddenly they can dream. Someone survives a difficult week and they can dream. A student finishes a thesis defense and they can dream. Someone finally buys something they have been saving for and they can dream. Even payday itself has become an occasion for the song. The humor is immediate because it turns an enormous concept into an ordinary economic event. Dreaming, something we normally associate with childhood, ambition, romance, art, and possibility, is suddenly attached to salary credits, deadlines, examinations, bills, purchases, and small victories. There is something genuinely funny about this, but there is also something deeply sad. When “Puede Nang Mangarap” becomes the soundtrack for payday, we are not only laughing at the song. We are revealing something about ourselves.

We have become a society where dreaming is often postponed until after the bills have been paid. We dream after tuition. We dream after rent. We dream after electricity. We dream after transportation. We dream after groceries. We dream after sending money home. We dream after surviving another week. The joke works because it contains a truth that many Filipinos understand immediately. We have been taught to dream big, but we have also been constantly reminded to be practical. Dreaming is encouraged in graduation speeches, classrooms, advertisements, motivational seminars, churches, family conversations, and social media captions. We tell children that they can become anything they want to be. We tell students to follow their passions. We tell young people that their future is limitless. Yet the material conditions necessary to sustain those dreams are rarely discussed with the same enthusiasm. We celebrate the language of aspiration while often ignoring the economic structures that determine who has enough time, money, education, security, and social support to pursue an aspiration.

This is where Lyca’s song becomes more interesting than the trend itself. When she first sang it, Lyca was a child who had already become a symbol of aspiration. Her story could easily be placed inside the familiar Filipino narrative of hardship transformed into opportunity. She was young, talented, poor, hopeful, and suddenly visible. Her success appeared to offer a reassuring story about what was possible. Talent could be discovered. Hard work could be rewarded. A child from difficult circumstances could become a national figure. The narrative was powerful precisely because it offered a version of the Filipino dream that seemed emotionally accessible. It suggested that circumstances did not necessarily have to determine destiny.

Now Lyca is an adult, and the song has returned to a very different audience. The child who once sang about dreaming has become a cultural reference point for adults who are exhausted from trying to make their own dreams financially possible. The difference matters. The original song asked us to believe that life could become beautiful enough to make dreaming possible. The current trend often asks us to laugh because, for a brief moment, life has become manageable enough to allow us to dream. That is a profound shift. The song has moved from aspiration to irony, from childhood possibility to adult exhaustion, from the promise of a better future to the small relief of surviving the present.

I notice this difference even inside my own classroom in Iloilo. Students are extraordinarily good at dreaming. Their ambitions extend far beyond the walls of the school. Some want to become writers, teachers, doctors, lawyers, artists, entrepreneurs, filmmakers, researchers, designers, translators, and public servants. Some want to leave Iloilo. Others want to stay and build something here. Some want to work abroad and return home eventually. Some simply want a life that is less difficult than the one their parents experienced. What strikes me is that their dreams are rarely separated from economic reality. A student does not simply say, “I want to become a writer.” There is often an invisible question attached to the statement. Can writing pay the bills? A student does not simply say, “I want to study literature.” There is another calculation waiting behind the declaration. What job will I get afterward? A student does not simply say, “I want to publish books.” There is another question hiding underneath the dream. Who will buy them? These questions do not necessarily destroy ambition. They reveal the conditions under which ambition has to operate.

This is why I find the Lyca trend useful as a classroom phenomenon. I can imagine putting the song before a class and asking students what it means to be able to dream. The question sounds sentimental until students begin answering it. For some, dreaming means having enough money to continue studying. For others, it means having time. For others, it means having a safe home. For others, it means being able to choose a profession rather than simply accepting whatever job is available. For some, it means being able to remain in Iloilo instead of being forced to leave because opportunities are concentrated elsewhere. For others, it means being able to leave Iloilo and knowing that leaving does not have to mean abandoning the place that formed them. A viral song can therefore become a discussion about inequality, education, labor, migration, family expectations, cultural aspiration, and the geography of opportunity. This is one of the reasons I continue to believe that popular culture deserves serious attention in the classroom. It gives us access to the emotional vocabulary through which people understand their own lives.

This is what popular culture can do when we stop treating it as disposable. A TikTok trend can be silly and intellectually useful at the same time. That is something educators sometimes forget. We tend to divide culture into respectable and unserious categories. A poem belongs in the classroom. A novel belongs in the library. A scholarly article belongs in a journal. A viral TikTok, meanwhile, is treated as something that belongs outside serious intellectual conversation. But students do not experience culture that way. They move from a TikTok video to a political argument, from a meme to a song, from a song to a television clip, from a television clip to a historical reference, and from all of these to a conversation with their friends. Their cultural lives are not organized according to our academic categories. The classroom should not pretend otherwise. If anything, teachers should be curious about the things students are already watching because those things often reveal more about the emotional and social conditions of young people than the formal texts we assign them.

The Lyca trend is particularly useful because it allows us to ask what happens when an old cultural object is brought back into a new historical moment. The song has not changed as much as we have. The internet has changed. The audience has changed. Lyca has changed. We have changed. The meaning has changed. This is how popular culture works. A song released more than a decade ago can become a completely different cultural object in 2026 because people bring new experiences to it. A teenager who hears the song today may simply find it funny. Someone who remembers the original release may experience nostalgia. A worker may associate it with payday. A student may use it after submitting a thesis. Someone struggling financially may hear the irony differently. Someone who has achieved a long-delayed goal may hear the song as genuine celebration. The same song can hold all these meanings simultaneously. That multiplicity is not a failure of interpretation. It is culture doing what culture does.

And Iloilo gives us an interesting place from which to observe this. We live in a city that increasingly presents itself as modern, creative, educated, cultural, and cosmopolitan. We have new buildings, cafés, malls, festivals, restaurants, creative events, universities, book fairs, cultural programs, and increasingly sophisticated public conversations about the arts. There is a growing vocabulary around creativity and cultural development. We speak about creative industries, cultural heritage, tourism, innovation, literature, design, film, food, architecture, and the arts as important components of the city’s identity. Yet beneath this image of a developing city are people still negotiating very old questions. Can I afford to stay here? Can I find meaningful work here? Can I build a creative career here? Can I publish a book here and find readers? Can I make art here without constantly treating it as a hobby? Can I study what I love and still support my family? Can my children dream beyond survival? These are not abstract questions. They appear in classrooms, offices, cafés, libraries, publishing spaces, universities, and family dining tables across Iloilo.

This is why I find the phrase “Puede Nang Mangarap” both amusing and unsettling. It makes dreaming sound like a privilege that can be switched on when circumstances improve. Salary arrived, therefore I can dream. Thesis defended, therefore I can dream. Promotion received, therefore I can dream. Bills paid, therefore I can dream. But why should dreaming have to wait? Why have we accepted the idea that people must first become economically secure before they are entitled to imagination? There is something politically important about asking this question because imagination is not simply an escape from material reality. Imagination is one of the ways people learn to challenge material reality. Before a society can build something different, someone has to be able to imagine that different thing. Before a student can become a writer, someone has to make it possible for that student to believe that writing is a legitimate way of understanding and participating in the world.

This is where education has a responsibility. Schools should not simply teach children to dream. They should teach them to examine the conditions that make some dreams easier to pursue than others. It is easy to tell a student to dream big. It is harder to ask why one student has a quiet room, a laptop, books, stable internet, supportive parents, transportation money, and enough food, while another student is studying after helping with household work, sharing a device with siblings, commuting long distances, or worrying about whether there will be enough money for the next semester. Dreaming is not distributed equally. Neither is time. Neither is attention. Neither is opportunity. Neither is access to books. Neither is access to culture. If we tell every child that the future is theirs to shape without asking whether every child has the tools necessary to shape it, then we are turning aspiration into another form of individual responsibility.

This is why libraries matter. This is why public spaces matter. This is why affordable books matter. This is why community cultural programs matter. This is why schools should have spaces where students can read, write, make art, experiment, fail, and imagine futures that are not immediately reducible to employment statistics. A child needs more than motivational slogans. A child needs conditions in which imagination can survive. A young writer needs more than encouragement. A young writer needs books, mentors, readers, time, spaces for publication, and a cultural environment that does not immediately ask whether literature is profitable. A young artist needs more than applause. An artist needs opportunities, institutions, audiences, and a community willing to recognize artistic labor as labor. If we are serious about building creative cities, then we have to stop treating creativity as decoration and start treating it as part of the social infrastructure of a city.

The most provocative thing about the Lyca trend is that it has unintentionally exposed how small our definition of success can become. We celebrate the ability to buy something. We celebrate surviving the month. We celebrate getting paid. We celebrate passing an exam. We celebrate finishing a thesis. All of these deserve celebration. There is dignity in survival, and there is nothing trivial about making it through another difficult month. But I wonder what happens when survival becomes the highest form of achievement we can imagine. What happens when the dream itself becomes a joke? What happens when “Puede Nang Mangarap” becomes funny precisely because we know how difficult it is to dream beyond the next bill? The humor becomes uncomfortable because it reveals how thoroughly economic anxiety has entered our imagination. We have become so accustomed to measuring possibility against affordability that even the language of dreaming has become financial.

The internet has turned Lyca into a meme, but memes often work because they compress complicated realities into a few seconds of recognition. We laugh because we understand. We share because we have been there. We tag our friends because the joke describes something we cannot easily explain. That is why I would not dismiss the trend as another example of Filipino internet brain rot. It can certainly become brain rot if we use it only to scroll, laugh, and forget. But it becomes something else when we ask what the laughter is hiding. Popular culture often gives people a way to articulate experiences that formal political language cannot easily capture. A meme about payday can express economic exhaustion. A joke about commuting can express structural inequality. A viral song about dreaming can express the strange relationship between aspiration and survival. We should take those expressions seriously, not because every TikTok trend is profound, but because people use culture to make sense of their lives.

The nostalgia surrounding Lyca is not only about Lyca. It is also about ourselves. Many of us remember being younger, when dreams were still uncomplicated, before salaries, contracts, rent, inflation, career anxiety, family obligations, professional disappointments, and the endless administrative demands of adulthood. We were once children who thought that wanting something was almost enough. Then adulthood arrived. We learned that dreams require money. We learned that talent requires networks. We learned that education costs money. We learned that books have prices. We learned that creative work is often precarious. We learned that staying in one’s hometown can be both a choice and a limitation. We learned that leaving can create opportunities while also producing loneliness. We learned that ambition is easier when you have a safety net. Somewhere along the way, dreaming stopped being an ordinary human activity and became a project requiring resources, planning, and a realistic assessment of risk.

Maybe that is why Lyca has returned to us now. She is not simply reminding us of a song. She is reminding us of a version of ourselves that still believed dreaming was an ordinary human activity. There is something almost radical about recovering that belief, although I do not mean the empty motivational version of dreaming that tells everyone that success is guaranteed if they simply work hard enough. That kind of optimism can become cruel because it places the burden of failure entirely on the individual. I mean something more difficult. I mean the right to imagine a life beyond survival. I mean the right of an Iloilo student to dream of becoming a writer without being mocked for choosing an impractical career. I mean the right of a young artist to imagine making art without immediately being asked how much money it will generate. I mean the right of a child to enter a library simply because they are curious. I mean the right of a reader to discover a book written in Hiligaynon, Kinaray-a, Aklanon, or another Philippine language and recognize their own world inside it. I mean the right to imagine that culture is not an ornament of a city but part of how a city understands itself.

That is the part of the Lyca phenomenon that interests me most. “Puede Nang Mangarap” is funny because we have learned to turn our small victories into jokes. But it is also moving because behind every joke is a person who is still trying. There is a student submitting a paper, a worker waiting for payday, a parent paying tuition, a young writer finishing a manuscript, a teacher trying to give students books, a family saving for a better home, and a young Ilonggo wondering whether there is a future for them here. They are all dreaming, sometimes quietly, sometimes ironically, sometimes through memes, sometimes through songs, sometimes through a classroom assignment, sometimes through a book, and sometimes through a ridiculous TikTok dance performed more than 10 years after the original song was released. The forms may be different, but the desire underneath them is remarkably similar. People want their lives to contain possibilities that are larger than the circumstances immediately surrounding them.

So when Lyca sings that we can dream, I do not want to hear it merely as an inspirational slogan. I want to hear the questions underneath it. What kind of society allows people to dream without having to apologize for dreaming? What kind of city gives its children enough safety, books, libraries, public spaces, education, culture, and opportunity that dreaming does not have to wait until payday? What kind of school teaches students not merely to dream of escaping their circumstances but to imagine changing those circumstances themselves? These questions move the song beyond nostalgia and entertainment. They turn a viral moment into an opportunity to examine the kind of society we have built and the kind of society we still want to build.

That, for me, is where the viral song becomes serious. Lyca can dance again. The internet can laugh again. Iloilo can make another meme. My students can use the audio for another video after surviving another deadline. But underneath all that noise is a very old human desire, the desire to believe that life can still become larger than what it is today. Perhaps that is why the song came back. We never really stopped dreaming. We simply became very good at pretending that we did not.

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Noel Galon de Leon is a writer and educator at the University of the Philippines Visayas. He teaches in the Division of Professional Education and at UP High School in Iloilo. He currently serves as faculty-in-charge of the UP Visayas Language Program Office and as secretary of the National Committee on Literary Arts of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA). His poetry has been recognized by the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature.