My two-cents worth and then some. An online journal by LP Brown.

Browsing Category Dreams

Unlocking Dreams and Recollections

by on ·Dreams

Sometimes I have the weirdest dreams, like the one the other night. That was more aptly a nightmare, and it reminded me of a book I read as a teen where machines suddenly come to life and begin attacking humans. An unseen force turns televisions, laundry machines, and other appliances on and off. Kitchen knives go airborne and fling across the room before embedding in the wall while dishes crash to the floor. Vehicles drive into buildings as people, terrified by the chaos, run and hide. I wish I could remember the name of that book. I believe it was written by either Stephen King or Dean Koonz. I read that when I was into sci-fi, horror movies, and scary books. I’m not anymore. My dreams must not know that.

In many of my dreams, I see dead people. Deceased loved ones occasionally visit me as I sleep. Those visions often reflect previous real-life interactions with departed friends and family members. Sometimes they occur on different nights; other times, it is the same night with kaleidoscopic shifting scenes. Mother and I sit at the dining room table, enthusiastically battling on the Scrabble board. * * * It’s early morning on the 4th of July, and Dad and I are at the wharf. He is buying a bushel of crabs for our family get-together later that day. * * * Aunt Ida and I are fishing at the mill pond. I am overjoyed because I just caught a tiny fish but puzzled because she tells me I should throw it back. * * *  Sain and I are in her kitchen fixing a breakfast of country sausages and eggs. Biscuits are baking in the oven. I am laughing at one of her jokes.  

Once, Uncle Allen showed up in my dream. It was the first and the only time I dreamt about him since he died 13 years ago. He and dad (always active sports fans) are alternately cheering and cussing while watching a baseball game on TV. 

About a week ago, just before I awakened at dawn, my friend Susan appeared in my dream for a split second. Her nicely coifed red hair framed a serene pearly face. She displayed a radiant smile but didn’t say anything. And in a flash, she was gone. I immediately awoke and, as I often do, tried to interpret the dream.

Dream experts say, “It’s generally accepted that dreams represent a collection of thoughts, struggles, emotions, events, people, places and symbols relevant to the dreamer in some way.”

Susan was one of my close Facebook friends. Contrary to what some people may think, all Facebook friendships are not superficial. In addition to Susan, I’ve made some genuine friendships on the site. Susan and I were introduced by Mary, another mutual friend, in January 2014. Perhaps because we were all writers, we bonded immediately. Sadly, we lost Mary in 2016.

Susan and I were writing books when we met; my first, her second. As I struggled with my initial draft, she generously gave me solicited advice and then celebrated with me after Legacy was published. We discussed the chapter I wrote about having met Stokely Carmichael (original name of Kwame Ture) when he was a student at Howard University. (For years during my childhood, my family lived short blocks away from Howard University.) “I am a year younger than Stokely would have been had he lived,” she said. Susan enjoyed telling me about some of her and her late husband’s activist days and travel adventures. I found them quite entertaining.

An avid reader, Susan has 67 reviews of various books on Goodreads.com, including one she voluntarily wrote about my book. (“Goodreads is the world’s largest site for readers and book recommendations.”)

The morning after I dreamed about Susan, I went to my computer and reread some of the correspondences we had exchanged over the years. Those included numerous emails and instant messages on Facebook. We even traded a few phone calls. Then, indicative of the bond we formed, after joyfully sharing the news that she had finalized the first draft of her second book, she sent me some chapters to critique.

In late 2019, Susan expressed how excited she was to be planning a move to another apartment. One of her emails contained an attachment depicting photos of two beautiful vintage African figurines she had acquired during her travels. She said she located them while packing and had not decided whether to keep or sell them.

A year earlier, Susan had talked about flying here from her home in Los Angeles to visit the recently opened National Museum of African American History at the Smithsonian. Unfortunately, her visit was an ill-timed one for me, and we missed an opportunity to meet in person.

Then, suddenly, our almost daily contact stopped for several days. I kept writing Susan but got no response. “What’s up, Susan?” I wrote. “Are you okay?”

One day I received a short email from her saying she had suddenly taken ill. “It came on out of the blue, and it is bad,” she said. “It seems to be some kind of flu.” She said she was in hospice care and would write me again when she felt better.

In December 2019, I received an email from Susan’s sister. After identifying herself, she said, “I’m sorry to tell you that my sister died suddenly following a brief illness. I know that she thought a lot of you.” She said Susan had asked her to contact certain friends if she did not make it. That was one month before the CDC reported the first case of COVID-19 in the U.S. I often wonder….

Dream expert Dr. Joshua Black says this about dreams, “The most positive dreams are the ones in which the deceased offers comfort through words or actions, or dreams in which the dream­er sees them, healthy and happy.”

The toughest part about dreaming about someone we care about – be it kin or friend – is waking up to remember that person is gone. True friendships cross color lines, unite cultures, and help people realize they are more alike than different.

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Rainy Day Reminiscing

by on ·Dreams, Exercise

At 5:30 AM this morning, my cell phoned blasted an Emergency Alert flash flood warning loud enough to wake up the dead. Unable to go back to sleep, I got up, walked to the window, and opened the blinds. Rain was pouring like Niagara Falls. Considering the wicked state of the world, I expected to see Noah’s ark floating down the street any minute.

Leaving the window, I walk to the table in the other room and open my laptop. As I pass the bookcase, I glimpse one of the books facing forward on the shelf. It is James Baldwin’s. I smile at the irony because the cover suggests I should not worry about the rain; the prophecy is for the fire next time.

It is predawn, the best time to sit down, do some writing, and introspection.

I think about one of my favorite Langston Hughes’ poems titled Harlem. Written in 1951, it begins with the line “What happens to a dream deferred?” Six years after he wrote that Lorraine Hansberry would parlay Hughes’ words into a prize-winning play titled A Raisin in the Sun. Although it has been decades since I first encountered the question raised in the poem, I think about it a lot. I suppose that a dream differed could wither on a vine, but it doesn’t have to.

I’ve read that Hansberry sometimes wrote during her free time while working as a waitress. I’ve never been a waitress, but the jobs I held, initially as a switchboard operator at the Pentagon and later in administrative positions, albeit some with creative titles, took priority over my dream since childhood to be a writer. The demands of a full-time job and the responsibility of singly raising two children after a divorce left little free time to pursue my dream. Throughout the years and to this day, I’ve often wondered what if my circumstances had been different? What if writing had been my primary profession instead of a sidebar? I’ll never know the answer to those questions, but I did the best with the time and resources I had, like Hansberry and numerous other resourceful souls.

Retirement has given me ample time to write but realistically speaking time is not unlimited. When I was still in the workforce, I seized every opportunity to compose everything from essays, letters to the editor, Op-ed pieces, poems, anything that inspired me, and that I thought I could get published. My perseverance paid off. I was fortunate to have some of my pieces published in The Washington Post, The Afro-American, The City Paper, and elsewhere. For three years, I supplemented my income writing as a contributor to the Metro Chronicle. That weekly newspaper stopped publishing decades ago, but I will forever be grateful to the editor, LaVerne Gill, for allowing me to swim in the journalism pool. Sometimes even the most unlikely angels arrive to help us along our way. In my now leisure time, I’ve published a book, and am working on another. I’m also a successful blogger with 12 years and nearly 400 posts to my credit. How blessed am I?

When I hear people say, I would have done this or that if I had had the time, but I had to work, I encourage them and try to convince them that it is never too late to pursue an obtainable dream. I say obtainable because an 80-year old whose lifelong ambition is to be a gymnast like Simone Biles might be a bit too ambitious. But then, you never know. Far be it for me to rain on anybody’s parade.

My cousin Akintunde Kenyatta was in his late 60s or early 70s when (like Ex-President George H.W. Bush, Wesley Snipes, and other over 50 brave hearts) he decided to jump out of a plane. Akintunde fulfilled his dream and proudly crossed skydiving off his bucket list a few years before going home to glory. I am still impressed.

Second to my passion for writing is exercising. Before the pandemic shut things down, I was an enthusiastic gym member for seven consistent years, usually attending three days a week. Before that, I was devoted to walking for exercise.

For over a dozen years, my neighbor and friend, Hazel Williams, and I regularly walked on most Saturdays. My treks started after she encouraged me to join her, walking inside the PG Plaza Mall. However, after a few years of strolling past storefront windows got boring, we opted for a change of scenery. That’s when we began walking outside, 5-miles round trip from our home to City Place (as it was then called) in Silver Spring and back.

Concurrently, we also began participating in walk-a-thons that raised money to support charities and causes like Osteoporosis, breast cancer, etc. Most frequently, we joined in the annual Fannie Mae Homeless Walk downtown on the National Mall. That walk took place every year on the Saturday before Thanksgiving. Hazel and I participated for about 12 to 15 years during the 24 years that the annual walk was held. Unfortunately, Fannie Mae ended the fundraising walks in November 2011.

If I could go back to my younger self and deliver a message to her when she was feeling discouraged and stuck in a rut, I’d tell her, “Girl, don’t you give up. A dream deferred does not die unless you let it. Don’t let naysayers, dire circumstances, or self-doubt stop you. You’ve got this!”

 

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No Escaping the Dream

by on ·Dreams

I’ve cut-back on watching TV news and other programs where the main topic is coronavirus. I am tired of feeling bombarded by the subject, tired of hearing about it. The same applies to videos concerning racial violence that are shared on Facebook or in-boxed to me by friends. I don’t watch them anymore. Although I decided to take a respite from both issues, my subconscious must not have gotten the message, because last night, I had a troubling dream that integrated both subjects.

In my dream —

I am employed in a small office suite with my manager, Peter. We are moving an old, light-grey loveseat, to be discarded, from his office into the reception area of the suite.

As Peter goes back into his office, a burly-looking white man enters the suite and tells me that he has a new sofa outside to bring in. He is about fiftyish, 6’3″ tall, 280 pounds. On his line-backer sized body, he is wearing a wrinkled white tee shirt with prominent yellow underarm stains. His beer belly is flapping over the belt, holding up gray khakis; the pant legs sit above dirty, white, runover sneakers. Wavy, silver-gray hair grows around the sides and back of his bald top head. The sour expression on his puffy, red face and three bulging knots above his right brow make him look like he ran into someone’s fist before arriving at our office. He is either having a bad day or is mad with the world. Still, I smile when I greet him. (Although I am aware that I am dreaming, my conscious awareness tells me that it is essential to remember the man’s description.)

He is standing at one end of the loveseat; I am at the other. We are about four feet apart. As I am struggling to angle the loveseat so that he can walk past it and enter Peter’s office, he looks directly at me and purposely sneezes so loudly that Peter immediately pokes his head out of his office.

Surprised and angry, I backpedal away from him, trying to escape his germs before they reach my face. “You KNOW you are supposed to be wearing a mask,” I shout. Peter steps to the doorframe of his office and repeats the admonition to the deliveryman. The angry man walks over to Peter, shoves him back into his office, and begins attacking him.

I run out of the suite, bypass the elevator, burst through the nearest exit door, and run downstairs, rushing to find a security officer. I pass a fire alarm box, consider pulling it, but decide not to. Instead, I continue racing down the stairs. On the next landing, I reach the door and turn the knob. The door won’t open. I turn and run back upstairs, speeding past the door on the floor where my office is located. I keep running upstairs, sometimes taking two steps at a time until I arrive on the 7th level, where I see a woman trying to push a small desk through an open door. As I hurriedly squeeze past the desk, I tell her that there is a deranged man in the building and to call security.

Down the hallway, several feet from that door, I spot a guard’s station and run toward it. The officer is seated behind the desk, laughing and talking with a young lady who is in standing nearby. Breathlessly, I tell him about the deliveryman who I believe is killing Peter downstairs. Then, I look back toward the door that I had arrived from and see the deliveryman walking past the entrance to the hallway. He doesn’t see me, but I know that he is looking for me. He is wearing a lime green jacket over his tee shirt and carrying a vase of cut flowers. A clever disguise, I think. I see the barrel of what looks like an assault rifle protruding from beneath his jacket.   

“That’s him,” I tell the guard while pointing toward the deliveryman. The guard jumps up from his chair and rushes toward the man. He is yelling for the man to stop as I escape through a nearby exit door. I am running downstairs when I hear what I believe to be gunshots. As I continue my descent, I see that there is a fire alarm box on each level. Again, I think about pulling the alarm to evacuate the building, but I figure doing so would allow the deliveryman to escape with the crowd of office workers.

Finally, I reach the door on the ground level. Not only is it locked, it is also behind a fish-mesh fence. I’m afraid to go back upstairs because I sense that the deliveryman is on his way down. I reach to pull the fire alarm on the wall beside the door only to realize that it is broken. Then, I wake up.

Upon awakening, I am disturbed by the thought that my subconscious mind merged thoughts of the coronavirus with racism. Since COVID-19 has become a daily news feature, I’ve never dreamed about it. Not once, until last night. I got out of bed and recorded my dream in my journal.

I am sometimes good at analyzing my dreams, but I decided to do some research regarding this one. An article by Jeremy Taylor, author of The Wisdom of Your Dreams, provides some insight. Here is what he says in excerpts from the article.

There is a “human tendency to associate the direction ‘up’ with light, consciousness, and ‘goodness’ – while at the same time associating the direction ‘down’ with darkness, unconsciousness, uncertainty, and anxiety.

“This…instinctive response to ‘light’ and ‘dark’ in our shared environment and evolutionary history…is the unconscious source of racism. It is because it is unconscious that the problem of racism is so ubiquitous, automatic, and difficult to overcome.

“… our dreams regularly give us symbolic images and experiences which point to the nature and content of our unconscious lives, particularly those things in our unconscious lives that injure and limit us.”

Pleasant dreams!

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