dreaming

My dreams last night were set back in the early 1950s.   Some of the details are fuzzy… all but the one where my home was set on fire.

We knew it was coming.  We had been warned by a good white man to put the children in the attic.  I know, I know.  That doesn’t make sense to put your children in the attic when your house is about to be burned to the ground, but in the dream it was what we had to do to save our children; somehow it worked in dream world.  The opening was only big enough for the children to get through.  It wasn’t big enough for me, so I knew I would be going down with the house.

In order to keep the children from suffering smoke inhalation from the insulation, (I know if it were true life, I would have had no insulation in my home) I was furiously tearing it all out and throwing it on the ground to smoke.  Hoping that the terrormongers would be smoked out themselves.  That exposed all my children in the attic (who would still be saved somehow as long as they were in the attic) and they were crying, scared.

I was trying to comfort them as I tore out the insulation as fast as I could go.  The house was becoming consumed with fire, and I didn’t have long.

Throughout this dream there was the constant worry of being hurt or maimed, the struggle to find work and keep work, the difficult jobs I had.  And today I am just a little depressed.  I am so very sad that the human race hates with such intensity.  Oh, what if that were just the opposite and we loved with such intensity?

So why did I dream this dream?  Is it because we are being blessed with Nia, a little brown girl (instead of blue, Owen’s choice) to be adopted in the next two or three weeks?  Does God want me to experience first hand what my sisters and brothers of another color experienced?

The one thing I know is that I will never forget how it felt:  the scary, scary feeling of helplessness and anger and hate and harm.  And how sad I am today.