A Matter of Seconds

I had a dream last night that, when I woke up, was surprised to find myself in bed, to find that I had been sleeping at all — it was one of the most vivid dreams I’ve ever had. As most dreams, it was completely unrealistic, things happened which could not possibly happen in reality, or at least, the one we live in here on earth.
I also found that I could remember it, which is unusual for dreams as complex as this. I find it fascinating that most of this dream likely happened within moments of my waking up — what seemed like an entire novel, my mind was able to think of in great detail in a matter of seconds. So, I couldn’t wait to write it all down — as I showered and made breakfast I was terrified to forget it, so I just repeated it over and over in my mind, trying to remind myself of exactly how it looked. If only we could record our dreams and play them back later… Someday.

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Epilogue: In a dream before this one, I was on the streets of an African city (a city which I have never been to, and did not remind me of the ones I had), but as it happens in dreams, I knew in my mind I was on the continent, presumably in the area of Kenya. In this other dream, which I can hardly recall, many people died. One girl and her friend survived, they discovered a committee of men, white men, sitting at a conference table discussing the event. Whatever they discussed led them to believe the murders were plotted.

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A girl is running. She is running backward at first, watching her parents (one of whom is wearing a bright green t-shirt, and the other orange) as they chase after her shouting for her to stop, to wait. She doesn’t stop, she is wearing red cotton shorts and a tan t-shirt, her hair is braided in cornrows back over her head — she is beautiful, thin, but she is not smiling. She’s running to escape, running over dense, red-orange clay. Not to escape her parents, whom I can tell she loves very much, but to escape something else entirely. To the sides of the road there is tall, green grass and green trees in the distance. When she reaches train tracks she pauses, turns for one more look at her distant parents who are screaming now, and then grabs onto a metal car that is painted dark green mixed with orange, scratchy rust and the brown metal revealed below. The jolt is painful, she is afraid of losing grip, but she swings herself up and over the edge. For some reason, this moment feels like an accident — as if she never intended to jump on the train, but had no other choice. I have no other explanation for this.

The train takes her to an airport, although she didn’t know that was where it was headed. When she arrives there, she somehow acquires a computerized ticket. Instead of a paper plane ticket, she has stolen a small hand-held computer, which is dark blue and looks like a thick, scientific calculator, which she hands to a person behind a ticket booth (like they have at the movie theater), and the white woman with blond curly hair hands it back telling her that she is scheduled for the next plane to the United States, with some kind of conference. The girl’s face lights up, she finds herself excited more than afraid. “America?!” she asks, before realizing that she is supposed to know whats on her own ticket. Her surprise and excitement feels disturbing, and I don’t like it.

She takes the computer ticket into a room that looks like a classroom and it has rows of light wooden benches, like pews, and all these American kids are sitting there listening to four teachers at the front of the room. She recognizes one of them, who is my English Professor Ian (in reality, the nicest most kind-hearted person you’d ever meet), and she is terrified of him, and I know she is because I can feel it too. And they’re all sitting around in a lazy way, with their legs slung over benches. She sits next to some of them and listens to what they’re saying and she notices their long, soft, blond or brown hair slung over their shoulders. She listens to the way they talk about boys and is sort of offended, and sort of intrigued. Suddenly, she sees someone she knows — her closest friend in the world. He sneaks over to her, looking around as if he is going to be murdered just for being there, and he sits next to her but doesn’t say anything. When everyone else gets up to leave to get ready for the flight, they talk. He tries to convince her to stay and go home with him but she insists that she has to go, that she wants to see the United States and he is so upset with her. She gives him a sloppy, clumsy goodbye kiss and then goes to the part of the airport where he can’t follow.

In the airport, she is suddenly uglier. I know this because of the way everyone is looking at her, at the way her bottom lip is sort of larger and her cheekbones exaggerated. I know she can’t actually be uglier, but somehow she is. She watches as three teenage girls make a video diary with a tiny hand-held camera among the tourist shops near a spinning shelf of African postcards. They’re making it for a project, but all they’re recording is themselves talking about themselves and each other. It seems as though they never even left the airport, their shoes have no signs of clay, they are in pristine condition with no indication of humidity or sweat on their skin or curling their hair.

Then, a young man approaches her, he has long brown hair that sort of sits over his face, a strong chin and cheekbones and blue eyes. He is attractive, but not in the way that most girls would find attractive right away — his face is too square. He invites her over to a table of people who are all somewhat strange. One girl sits at the small, round high-top table leaning far back and sucking on her hair. They all sit down and they’re talking, and she can tell they’re friends but the way they talk to each other isn’t friendly. A girl walks up and pulls up a chair and for some reason the guy gets very angry — something about taking someone else’s seat. He grabs her arms and is yelling at her, pressing her against a heater. The African girl (who, if she has a name, I do not remember it), breaks them up because she is afraid he’s hurting her.

When they get to America she ends up with an African American family, how or why I don’t know — they’re in their fifties, the man has wrinkles in his face and darkness in his eyes, his hair is grey. The woman is round, with short hair, and in a floral dress. Their house has brown shag carpeting and old, recliners in front of an old television set — it is dark, though there are lamps on that glow orangish yellow. They don’t care what she does and don’t pretend to. She goes out with her friends after school, and still she is ugly. Maybe uglier still than she was before, although she isn’t really ugly at all (you know how dreams are, when you can see something one way but know it to be another, like a friend who doesn’t look like them self but you know that’s who they are). One night, she gets home late from hanging out with her friends, whom she assured that her parents didn’t care, she refers to them as her parents as if shes forgotten they don’t belong to her at all, and finds that she is in trouble. They lock her in a tiny closet space with a tiny window carved into it. Through the window they pass her little scraps of food, but mostly they just stare at her — with their eyes pressed against the hole or their lips talking into them and I feel terrified, so I know she is too. She catalogs everything she eats, and tries to convince them to give her more but they think she has eaten enough.

Suddenly, I hear a sound to my left. My left, not hers, and this is when I realize that I even exist at all. When I look toward the sound I find that I’m looking into a hallway, and my boss is walking between a bedroom and a bathroom wearing tuxedo pants and shirt. When I look back, I find that I had been watching the girl on TV the whole time, I’ve been staring at the TV with my head in my hands and my mouth hanging open. I can feel my elbows against the glass table for the first time, and the chair beneath me. I look around and realize I’m in a tacky bachelor pad full of black leather sofas and metal and everything else. I’m somewhat embarrassed to have been so engrossed in the TV, because I’m supposed to be house-sitting for my boss, and he is getting ready to leave. Somehow, I know this. When I look behind me, I find four other men all dressed in tuxedos. They’re cracking jokes about my love for TV, and they perceive the show I was watching to be one of those soaps for teenagers full of drama and silliness. When I look back at the screen its not on anymore. I find myself forgetting about the girl on the tv, and point out to one of the men that there is a kool-aid stain on his shirt, which I know to be from another night of their drinking escapades. He laughs and hides the stain under a cumber-bun.

When my boss comes out, he puts on his tux jacket and it looks as though it were designed specifically for him — it appears black at first, and then when he moves you can see that there are slits in the top layer that reveal a white satin fabric underneath and it appears striped. I say, “You look really good,” earnestly. He answers, “Amber!” and I wait for him to say something sarcastic as he normally would, but instead he says, “Thank you,” with a broad smile on his face. He takes a moment to consider me, which I find strange. Then he says, “You should come with us.” I laugh and shake my head and pour every excuse I can think of — I don’t have any clothes, I’m supposed to be house sitting, I don’t think its a good idea — but he goes into a room and brings out a dress — its beautiful, and even I think its beautiful, and I hate dresses and dressing up. So, I take it and go in the bathroom and he shouts behind me “You have fifteen minutes” and they’re all laughing about something and I know it concerns me but I don’t care. I put on the dress and it is gorgeous. Its black and long, and in the center there is a bundle of white fabric that drapes down and then divides into two pieces that hang around the sides of the dress like parted curtains. I fuss with my hair and somehow it ends up looking great — even though I have no comb or hairspray or anything but a hair tie and two banana clips. Suddenly, I realize I have no shoes, so I shout to my boss.

He says that I should go barefoot, and I laugh but that’s exactly what I do. We go to leave the apartment and I don’t look back at the TV, and then I wake up.

And all this had to have happened in less than an hour and twenty-two minutes because that is how long I had been asleep since my alarm went off. And when I told my roommate what happened in the dream, she didn’t really believe me, or the detail with which I remembered each scene — the colors, the sounds, the size of the furniture… How vivid it all was! And still is! Although it would take me an entire novel to describe it exactly as I imagine it.

The truth is, I haven’t thought about Cameroon, or Uganda in a long time. In passing, sure. In conversations with friends who had been there, in e-mail updates I read from organizations I’ve worked with, in the Presiden’ts statement after signing the LRA Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act a few days ago, a bill I worked hard to see passed but feel I had nothing to do with in the long run.

Why did I dream about this now? What brought that girl into my mind, someone I never met. Why did I have a dream not from my own perspective and not from hers — as a third party looking in on someone else. This also, I’ve never had happen before. I could feel the sloppy wetness of her kiss on her friends lips, though. I also watched it happen. I could feel her terror watching those bulging white eyes stare in at her as she was trapped in a tiny closet with darkness and crumbs, but also watched her from the outside looking in.

My mind is a dark, and terrifying place sometimes. I think I’m afraid to delve into the deeper meanings of this dream. What does it say about me? About the way I think and feel about people? Maybe I don’t want to know.