Dreams are an amazing part of our lives, not only when we are sleeping, but they fuel our drive to live. As we sleep our dreams are a form of our inner-conscious coming out of our mind whether we intended to or not. In a book I am reading for a class, Black Like Me, the author has a dream. I will put it in perspective for those of you who have not read the book by John Howard Griffin. He is a white man from Texas who decides to head to the deep South to find out what fuels the whites hatred of the Negroes. He takes medication (Oxsoralen),tans under an ultra violet light, and rubs a dye on his skin to make it appear as though he is black. One night when he is hitch hiking across Mississippi Griffin is picked up by a young black man who takes him home to his wife and six kids so he has a place to sleep...
“Mr. Griffin...Mr. Griffin”
I heard the man’s soft voice above my shouts. I awakened to see the kerosene lamp and beyond it my host’s troubled face.
“Are you alright?” he asked. In the surrounding darkness I sensed the tension. They lay silent, not snoring.
It was the same nightmare I had been having recently White men and women, their faces stern and heartless, closed in on me. The hate stare burned through me. I pressed back against a wall. I could expect no pity, no mercy. They approached slowly and I could not escape them. Twice before, I had awakened myself screaming.” p.116
He writes in his journal a few days later of a similar experience.
“I slept and woke up shouting from the old familiar nightmare of men and women closing in on me, shuffling toward me. I lay there fully dressed under the cell’s bare globe, trembling. I felt myself flush with embarrassment at having disturbed the Trappist silence. Surely monks sleeping in other cells,their bodies exhausted from work in the fields and hours of prayers, heard me and lay awake wondering.” p.138
It is from reality that Griffin has these thoughts but it is not until he is sleeping, peacefully that these night-terrors escape from his inner conscious. I personally do not dream much anymore, why I do not know, but I do miss it. The nights as a child when I would have nightmares made the connection to life much stronger, because to be truly living, a person must have fears, regardless of what they are. Dreams get people through tough times, it could be as Griffin explains of the nights he dreamt of his children when he was dealing with tough times in the South knowing he was doing something crucial for blacks around the world.
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