I do not carelessly share dreams. For I think they reveal our most inimate personal selves and often need to be protected. They are, imo, primarily for personal learning. However they sometimes touch on what is going in our collective life as a community, even as a nation. This one seems to have both of these elements.
That is why I reluctantly post it here as an example of how a dream can significantly change how one is presently viewing an important life situation or problem. Since one's truthful dream is not created by one's personal thinking consciousness it need not be offensive to one's self and hopefully not to others. It is simply there as a psychological or spiritually subjective fact. It arrives not through one's will. It really should not be attacked like one's conscious arguments might. So I'll not defend my or any other person's dreams. They are simply objectively what they are. And they are generally a surprise, like this one, to the dreamer.
What a dream means is a matter of interpretative opinion. I'll share my initial thoughts about this one. That should help expand the dream. After all the dream came from or through me. So it's right I try to learn from it more than anyone else initially would. I have that responsibility to it.
DREAM: My former white Counseling mentor, Dick D., invited me to preach at an all black church. I arrived and was warmly greeted by enthusiastic worshipers. But I had no words prepared. They gathered round me giving me songs and smiles of encouragment. I was being built up by them to a moment of hopefully having an important message. I was sweating, hoping for words to come. But nothing significant came to my mind or from my lips. I was talking between breaks in the singing but was only thanking and praising them for their goodness toward me. This went on and on. They had unlimited patience. They did not rush me.
I was even given a folded bundle of bills in thanks for coming. These looked like foreign money but I was not sure. They were a bright glistening green color.
Finally these words came clear, simple and repeatedly from me and nothing more: "Be ye kind one to another, tender hearted, forgiving each other." End of dream.
THOUGHTS: I think dreams nearly always seek to balance and make more healthy and true one's present conscious and always somewhat blind attitudes and beliefs regarding highly emotional matters.
My conscious reaction was to think this is what white people need to be told, not blacks...to be kind to people of color for their suffering mistreatment from our deeply ingrained systemic racism. But that is not the dream's message to me. It was to black persons not whites. It is significantly counter nuanced from what I'd expect.
IMPORTANT. It needs remembered that when a human family or group has been systematically abused and traumatized they most likely at first trun much of their sorrow, hurt and anger toward each other rather than to their abuser. For one reason it is much safer. But that use of energy may only make them less fortified at transcending the abuse and somehow most helping to stop it. And of disarming the actual nature of the enemy, in this case the harsh victimizing racism built into our American social and legal systems.
So the sermon is shown being primarily for persons of color. Black teachers and leaders I believe have said for decades that our minority people of color are wise to come together and galvanize themselves with acceptance of each other and with creative consciousness of their mutual wounds. Then, the dream seems to say, no outer injustice like racism or bigotry will be able to keep standing against the strong and righteous appeals for American equal justice under the law.
So, the dream implies black persons are strengthening themselves at the very core by "being generously kind to each other, tender hearted and forgiving each other."
The dream is saying that as discriminated against minorities keep making this spiritually courageous movement within themselves, which I trust is happening more strongly than ever before in our present moment, a growing mountain of white persons of good and honest will will finally 'see' and join them in their insistence for justice. And in the goal of finally overcoming the strong forces of bigoted racism that have plagued our nation. And have hurt the souls of us all from the very start. And which sadly are now being even more overtly expressed in highest places of national power.
This I think this is the social/spiritual message of the dream to me.
This perhaps is more than a personal dream for my own learning but one that could speak to the collective consciousness of both American whites and of color. This dream image, as I see it, potentially attempts to break into the one sided opposing polarities which divide us. This points toward a 'union of opposites' instead of the historical stalemate of cruel harsh divisions.
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