The Dream I Had Last Night

The Dream I Had Last Night

 

I need to preface this with the fact that I read a lot of history books from all different eras and places, and I’m keenly aware of the history that is being made right now (none of it uplifting or noble) and deposited for future citizens of earth to read and ponder (providing the powers that be don’t extinguish human and most animal life with their greed and shortsightedness, which, sadly, is a distinct possibility).

 

Last night I finished reading The Girl  I Left Behind, a memoir about one woman’s metamorphosis (during the 1960’s and 70’s, the decade in which I reached adulthood) from “go along to get as far along as you can under male-dominated culture” (which wasn’t far back then) to feminist and women’s advocate.

 

So the dream I had last night is all wrapped up in various eras and campaigns: the Holocaust, women’s  rights, and male-dominated culture/white supremacy among them.

 

In the dream, I was at some kind of large public event. In a room adjacent to the main auditorium I was in, a play was about to begin: I could see male and female actors assembling behind what looked like a long white lunch counter off to the left of the room they were in.

 

Intrigued, I made my way to a place where I could peer in and watch what was about to transpire.  At first, not many other people joined me, so I had a front row position (standing).

 

As the play got underway, the actors (white adult men and women of various nationalities) began to interact. The first actor to speak was a man with a foreign accent: I took him to be European (possibly German), or white South African (Cecil Rhodes type).

 

He was cleaning the lunch counter with a rag and speaking to the customers sitting at the counter. Most of them were listening to him, but one or two held newspapers and were reading them, not paying attention to the speaker.

 

As the time went on, the scene morphed into one in which the men and women in the scene slowly became cadaverous and naked. The audience where I was standing could see them from the back, so no genitalia were showing (the lower half of the guy behind the counter was shielded from view by the counter).

 

One thing  I noticed was that the women in the scene moved away from the counter and stood to the right of it (facing the back wall) almost directly in front of me but to the back of the stage/room. At first, while they were fully-fleshed and looked healthy,  a lecherous male actor was ogling them: I got the sense he was anticipating finding a way to have his way with them.

 

As the women lost tone, flesh and even height, the ogler became almost maniacal and possessed. He started taunting them, saying mean-spirited things to them, calling them sluts, and in other ways being a real ass hat.  (As long as they looked healthy and  desirable, he was silent, appreciative and predatory/opportunistic; the moment they became less than alluring, he became verbally abusive and insulting.)

 

Suddenly, I realized that I, too, had been stripped naked and become an object of derision and “slut-shaming”, even though I remained an audience member. (I dared not look around to see if other audience members were naked, too: I wanted to remain invisible because I felt vulnerable to attack.)

 

As the scene/play came to a close, the madman demanded of a short, shrunken old woman that she dance. By this time, she looked hardly able to stand or walk, let alone dance.

 

I was utterly appalled by the man’s cruelty. He was taking great delight (almost orgasm-ing) over her wretched condition, commanding  her to further disgrace (or humble) herself to his liking.

 

But… to my enormous surprise and awe, the tiny, emaciated woman did dance. In fact, she danced with such joy and abandon and utter mastery that everyone in the audience applauded wildly and passionately, to celebrate the fact that her spirit was still very much alive and that nothing the bastard could do would ever extinguish it.

 

And suddenly, I was clothed again in a long, pristine, almost-glowing white shirt that was long enough to cover my body from shoulders to below my crotch. I felt “sufficiently covered” again, and wondered two things: who had exposed me and who had come along to clothe me sufficiently again so I wouldn’t be embarrassed when I went in search of the rest of my clothing. (I was still missing my underwear and trousers.)

 

I think this dream was telling me that a woman’s essential spirit is far too robust to succumb to the variety of assaults that men presently send against it (and have, for eons, ever since goddesses were written off as pagan icons.)

 

Your thoughts?