Reading Deborah King‘s books and other materials has opened me up to numerous lucid dreams that are very emotional and thought-provoking.

 

The one I had this morning had me waking up very near tears. It felt so real, and the messages in them were astonishing.  Now that I’m awake, I don’t remember the exact sequence, but here’s a recap of what I do recall.

 

I was back in a college environment, getting assigned to a dorm room with several other people (guys and gals) of different nationalities.

 

I couldn’t get into my dorm room as I hadn’t been given the key during the admission process. But someone I was traveling with (a gal new to me) discovered that she was able to get my dorm room open with her key, so she let me in.

 

When I got into my dorm room, I saw that the various nooks and crannies that were serving as bedrooms were already chosen by other students, and I didn’t want to sleep in the larger barracks-type room with the others who were there because I didn’t think I’d be able to sleep well. (I’d experienced a barracks-type situation for a week when I won an art contest and wasn’t able to sleep then owing to other people’s snoring and talking in their sleep and telling me not to stroke/scratch the silk on the edge of my blanket, a coping strategy I developed for soothing myself enough to fall asleep as a child.)

 

So, I went out of there, intending to ask to be reassigned to a dorm room that didn’t already have a lot of people making claims, so I could choose a solo space to sleep.

 

I got to the place and was asked which building I was in, and I couldn’t remember the name or the route I took to get from it, so while I was pondering that hiccup, I spotted a guy with a bunch of youngsters of various ethnicities who was playing an amazing panel-like instrument (but not a piano) I had never seen before.  People were standing around listening and watching, amazed at the sounds that were emanating from the instrument.

 

Suddenly, he started to play the original Star Trek theme!  The youngsters who were with him gathered closer, and I was drawn closer.  When he finished, he said to the youngsters, “If you liked that, you’re my tribe. Let’s go discover what the original Star Trek had to say about humanity and the possibilities for our future!”

 

And away they went! I knew immediately that I wanted to end up in whichever dorm they were heading, so I followed them to discover where they were going.

 

When I got there, I discovered an anomaly: a distaff side of the optimism was also present in the same space they were in!  There were images of racial intolerance  and police violence being played on a large screen, and lots of white men were standing around, apparently enjoying the spectacle, as if enjoying a prize fight instead of a racist blood bath.

 

At one point, the screen showed a white guy embrace and kiss a black guy on the side of his face (they were comrades in arms, in a battle situation, not a  romantic one) and  a bunch of redneck white supremacists started cussing and disparaging the imagery.  I immediately thought, “I know what the Star Trek future looks like.  This is what my future looks like –this one — unless I change my course and start interacting with these racist nincompoops to share a very different perspective that will hit home with them.”

 

Then I was in a sort of bus station where a lot of people were trying to get on a bus but it appeared to have no door, so people were jumping up and scrambling in through the windows. I had to get somewhere, too, so I did the same thing, barely making it.

 

Then I thought, “Jeez!  Anyone needing to ride a bus has to be an athlete just to get on the damn thing.  And that’s not right! There are lots of people needing rides who can’t do what I just did to get aboard this thing.”

 

Then I noticed, across the way, another set of buses that had doors on one side, and people were getting on it without any problems, but other people were still boarding it the harder way, through the windows.”

 

And I just became enormously sad at these various instances of “privileged whites” and “marginalized others” to the point of weeping uncontrollably.

 

I realized it was easy for me, a white person, to choose my own “assignments” (to dorms, classes, buses, etc.) by complaining if I wasn’t satisfied with the conditions, while others had to settle for whatever they were offered as first options or scrambling against the odds for “better seating/equal seating.” To complain would make them appear uppity, ungrateful, or problematic, and to watch them scramble would make them look desperate and potentially dangerous.

 

Which is exactly the situation they find themselves in right now, all of it orchestrated by well-to-do white male supremacists. The guys in the catbird seats get off on the spectacle of others having to scramble for what they can get easily simply because they’re rich and white. Very few of them started out poor. Most inherited their wealth, so they’ve never been in the weeds and don’t figure they will ever be there.

 

Anyway, it was a very lucid dream. I felt I was really in those situations and trying to find ways out that would work for everybody without inconveniencing anybody else.  I didn’t want to arm wrestle anyone out of their chosen sleeping places; it never even occurred to me. I didn’t want to enter bloody combat with the racists.

 

I wanted to find a peaceful solution that would put everybody pretty much on the same page, to realize, as one wonderful meme explained it, “We are not all in the same boat. We are all in the same storm. Some of us are on yachts and cruise ships; others are in rowboats; still others are clinging to the floating remains of their watercraft hoping for someone to pull them out of the ocean; others are drowning.  Just be kind and help wherever you can.”

 

That was the bottom line. Put your heart right out there on your sleeve and let others know you care and will help wherever you can.