For three nights in a row now I've gone to sleep and dreamed I wasn't the German/French/Irish Caucasian that I am, but a person, twice a man and once a woman, with skin formerly described by one author as "black as coal". Each night I've waked up and done pretty usual post-dream stuff -- brushed my teeth, or gotten a drink of water, or fought going back to sleep for a while, only to crawl back between the sheets and finishing one's sleep cycle like it or not -- and all three times the dream has picked up where it left off with no interruption.. until I was slept out.
In two of the dreams I was a teenaged African American boy in the US in some kind of meeting room full of people sitting on pretty nice metal folding chairs (padded bottoms and backs); and surrounded by other black persons. Various adult men and women get up and talk about their experiences with white men and wonen in their lives. Most of these men and women are NOT business owners or doctors or attorneys like the Huxtables in the Cosby show, they're not sports stars or drug dealers or what have you standouts -- they're the working just-above-poor folks for the most part. Many are talking about their jobs working for white liberal families, working as janitors in libraries, universities, offices in Washington, DC, for congressmen and government related well-off white men and women. At least one dream is the black community in which people are earning a living in DC and seeing political events happen as live observers, human cameras in some instances. and telling the next two generations what it's felt like and what they've seen. What they are saying is important. I get that. People are passing around "souveniers" and older men and women are putting their long fingered beautiful hands on my arm to make a point to me at times, and sometimes they're pulling me in and up out of my chair to hug me, and the hugs are gentle and trusting and I don't want to leave the comfort of those hugs.
In the last dream, last night's, I'm a woman in a fictional matriarchal tribe of hardscrabble Africans, where failures of either gender are eaten. Times are hard and protein is protein. I'm valued as a cook because I know how to make stringy meat tender and tasty.
Look, none of these dreams is me, obviously. Dreams allegedly reflect what one feels or experiences, or sees or what happens to them. Why had I been having these dreams? I've got a houseguest, my dearest closest friend in the world visiting. The visit is going swimmingly. She hasn't said or done anything and there's nothing in *our history with one another that would bring such dreams on. So, what happened to make dreams like that occur? Oh. Saturday night. That was it... More below the fold
I don't think I realized HOW angry I was after the Zimmerman verdict. I *did do something deliberately irritating on Monday. I asked white people I didn't even knowe what they thought of the Zimmerman verdict and MOST of the people in this town and the nearby larger city with whom I had some contact Monday told me variants on, "It's over and there's nothing worth seeing or saying and it doesn't involve anyone, so just move on."
WHAT THE FRACK? Do they REALLY think they can sweep this shit under the carpet? Do they think that their relationships with or interaction with Black people in this country is going to be the same as last Friday, for instance?
I'm dreading sleep tonight. I keep fighting it. I'm still fighting it. I need to understand. I need to see that others REALLY understand what a god damned facist shit-hole this country has become and why we are internationally despised and that change MUST occur. I don't see that around me. I sometimes don't see it in those who comment here, as if horrors can just be brushed off like hair scurf on one's shoulder.
I'm so tired. I'm so bone-weary, soul-achingly tired, so grief-sodden tired. I didn't realize how tired I was.
And am. And I didn't realize how little I have of real intrinsic value to lose. Until that verdict.