A Dream
I had a dream I had to write about.
We were leaving the beach. We privileged. We carefree. We were walking from the beach to the grass, through the fields, toward the forest and the forest’s edge.
But on the way, danger came. Danger in the form of people. As we got further away from the beach, we left the safety and the comfort of like kind. Beyond, we were disliked, scorned, and hated.
For our color.
As we left the outskirts of the beaches, past the enclaves, through the fields, we became the hunted. So we ran. I felt terror as a hand slapped my bare back with a resounding smack, felt the pain between my shoulder blades. A person as black as night was on my heels, hitting me again and again with all their might, hating me, wanting me gone, just because I did not belong in their world. Just because I was white.
I was desperate to get away. I ran and ran as hard as I could toward the bottleneck of the grassland surrounded by forest, closing in, toward a gate, a solid metal door at the edge, closing, closing, top coming down. It slammed shut.
So I shifted course. I ran around the trees, along the edge of the V, and then recalibrated, aiming for another metal door starting to close at the treeline in the crux of another bottleneck V.
But I didn’t make it.
A girl, no older than I, caught me. She was beautiful and brown. But she hated me. Just because I was white. She hated me so much that she tried to overtake me, beat me down. But when that failed, she turned her attention to hurting herself knowing that, by doing so, when the others found me, they would think I did it and would kill me. When I tried to stop her, she tried to fling herself on the rocks. All because of who I was. What I looked like. Something I could never change. All because of the color of my skin.
I awoke.
My entire life, I have railed against bigotry, racism, and inequality. I have felt sadness for those who have been thrust against these hurdles, mountains that seem to reappear every time they seem conquered. As a woman, I have experienced challenges of my own. I have been denied the esoteric privilege of being male. I have faced sexism, felt the brunt of it. Until recently, I was considered “normal” in appearance. Add a tattoo, a half-shaved head, and an eyebrow piercing, and things change. Now, I am looked at differently. And yet, overall, I am still the same - a middle class white woman who fits the banal mold of the general majority.
On the outside.
On the inside, I am a tornado of…I don’t know. But I do know that, in that dream, I felt something real. Something visceral, something gross. Something terrifying. But it was real. And it will stick with me for the rest of my life.
As a woman, I have stared down the stone cold barrel of inequality and disrespect. And yet I imagine it is nothing like the hatred one experiences from being accosted, hated, or hunted for the color of your skin, for your race, for your religion, or your lifestyle. Sadly, in some places of the world, it is this way for women as well. But the human race physically needs the entity of women in order to survive. We are physically necessary for procreation. So, in standard eyes, we have at least that much going for us. In maddening contrast, many people believe other kinds of variance is unnecessary, “justifying” the more-than-shameful practices of racism, slavery, eradication, discrimination, and genocide.
This dream made that sickeningly real for my underlying psyche, more so than any waking version of me could ever understand. But why send this message to me?
In the dream, I felt desperation, fear, gut-wrenching sadness, and devastation, all because of things I could not change. But these are things that should not be changed - Difference. Variety. Diversity - the actual lifeblood of human existence. Even for those who insist on having no conscience, we cannot deny nor ignore what nature relies on for the existence of everything.
I had to write about it. It was compulsory, necessary.
But I have no delusions of self-importance or righteousness. I can only relate to what I, myself, have experienced. I have no claims of knowing or feeling what it is to be discriminated against in such a horrible, violent way. Believe me, I know that this dream in no way puts me in the actual shoes of individuals who have or still do suffer these awful injustices. But for a moment, for a brief second, I think I felt something akin to it. In my dream, I felt unimaginable hatred directed toward me. I felt the desperation and the fear run through my body like sick adrenaline and drop out of my guts like a sinkhole. I felt the unbelievable madness of it all.
I was hunted for something I could not change. I was hated for something that made no sense. And all of this happened even while I did not hate. It was in response to nothing.
The power of the dream, the voluptuous insanity, had me up in darkness typing.
I had a dream. Not the valiant, resonant dream of history makers and world changers, who are way above and far beyond. It was just me and it was just a dream. But it was a dream that was meant to be heard, a reminder to wake up. It was an education for us all in humility and empathy, a disturbing reversal of the reality that still plays out today. I am sharing it now in hopes that it counts for something.