16 July 1992
My flight for Hartford left at 7 in the
morning, so I awoke at a bright and cheery 4:45 to shower and get ready for the airporter
which was coming between 5 and 5:30. A bizarre dream / hallucination from my aborted sleep
replayed in my head. I said goodbye to Ann just as the doorbuzzer buzzed and rushed out
the door. There were two other people in the van. As soon as I sat down, I pulled out my
DayTimer and jotted the following in the notebook.
16 July 92 5:15
On my way to the airport for an east coast
vacation. Has a dream / hallucination / OOBE last night during which or involving being a
black woman, the Democratic Convention, and Freddy the cat. The whole thing was centered
around doing the right thing. There was tons of motion, commotion, and gala fanfare brass
music -- a'la DNC. I was the total representation of good -- in some sense and bolstered
by voices who told me such. I would certainly be great and the dark times of the Bush
Administration would certainly be at an end by my hand.
During this time - in the physical world - Freddy was desperately trying to loudly purr and cuddle with me. I was thrown into this limbo where the confidence bolstering rambunctious atmosphere was interspersed by questions of who I was. For a long time - relatively - I was a black woman holding my cat on the podium at the convention. For a while I was a young black boy playing on the streets of North Omaha. But for the longest time I was a human socio-racial amalgam -- looking at this weird "best of the best" concurrently proud of all my human family and historical accomplishments.
Meanwhile, my cat purred and rolled around -- while in my half sleep he became this bizarre symbol of innocence and potential for the voices. "Don't let go of it's purity. You can achieve. You can achieve great things. The essence of purity," the voices said. The deafening music, the cat, the voices, the changing self-perception. The incredible clarity of feeling in the first person a sense of self that was not my own, several times over. The feeling of being something, someone, else. Looking at my body as an African American woman, standing on the podium with the cat, stroking it with my long fingers. Feeling a sense of social continuity and inertia, something I guess I have felt as a queer white male, but never realizing the impact of it until I was placed in this position socially distinctly different from my frame of reference. And all the time, the voices convincing me that I could make a difference -- that I was not a waste of space.
When I was finally able, toward the end, to
distinguish between myself and the human amalgam I was a part of in the dream I came away
with a mix of awe and regret. Awe over, first and foremost, the intensity and the
incredible texture of this dream and the regret that this incredible bulk of humanity and
all the potential for the world is still quite distant. Regret for the obvious amount of
work involved in almost any interracial endeavor.
This is certainly the type of experience that many people would take for "seeing god" and I, the good Maslovian that I am, would claim that it was a spiritual peak experience. Recent discussions about people's religion and people's peak experiences with same are really interesting with regards to this event. It is indeed obvious why someone would say that they saw god in such a vivid, emotional, flash of insight, positive reinforcement, and (arguably) confusion.
The feeling afterward that one is capable of, if not responsible for, positive change would certainly be much easier for a Christian to accept from their god, due to people's (mine included) societal imposed predisposition to devalue themselves and the activities in their own brains. Even I am willing to ascribe some spiritual element to this event -- spirituality for me being a bit more vaguely defined. I feel there was some sort of shared common consciousness involved because the human amalgam element of the event was definitely not something that my brain has just randomly conjured up previously.
There was also much warmth and movement in
a physical sense -- much of which, I suppose, was provided by the cat. However, when I was
a black woman a was feeling such -- clothes, piercing eyes, looking out over the crowd and
the world with a world view of determination and confidence and certainly a sense of
purpose that I as J. LeRoy have never before felt. The amalgam was a huge range and mix of
emotion -- mostly a weird feeling of gratitude for a kinship between people -- all people
-- which was have previously been denied.
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