I have a dream. 

We don’t always remember our dreams- in fact, most of us rarely do. The dreams to follow all stood out to me in my life as they happened as important: I was self-actualizing in my sleep, working out a problem ahead of time, using personal voodoo magic to project myself into the future. I have travelled in my dreams, performed in my dreams, been menaced in my dreams, had sex in my dreams, even written fully formed poetry in my dreams. In my dreams, there is often magic, fear, a great struggle… even death. Where is the power, the confidence, and, in all this confusion… my Jungian Freudian psychoanalyst dad? Dad! What does it all mean? My dad didn’t “talk shop” with us about our dreams – not even our nightmares- but my dad did have a graphic novel style illustrated book of Jungian dream interpretations, which I pored over silently in the living room when no one was around, curious lil voracious reader that I was. He occasionally did share a dream interpretation over breakfast. Who were those strange characters in this book, and what were those strange goings on?

1963

It’s a cloudless blue sky New England day after lunch in late spring/early summer. School hasn’t let out yet, and everyone is on the playing field for gym class, running around and yelling joyously; the explosion of energy that is New England spring/summer: fecundity bursting all around.

I drift over the school, about 30 feet up, over the gymnasium and into the back where they are all playing.

They don’t all see me at first, and I smile silently like the Mona Lisa as I watch them play.

Then someone spies me, and calls out “Look! It’s Pegasus!”

It’s true, I am magnificent, an enormous white horse with a gigantic white wingspan, and I am gliding over their heads, casting a shadow over the grass. My body feels perfect, strong, supple, coordinated, long, large. As I smoothly traverse the baseball diamond at the far end of the field, and start heading over the trees lining the street to leave them all, I hear their cries of anguish that they will soon lose sight of me. I’m so grand, I arch my long white neck, toss my mane at them, and let out a short snort of pleasure.

Then I wake up in a pool of hot urine, a tiny 2nd grader, tangled in my sheets, sopping wet, furious at being wrenched from my true reality.

1968

Martin Luther King gave a speech about his dreams. He dreamt he was flying, and while he flew he dreamt that all people would join together, Black, white, all colors; and that we would live in peace. He dreamt he would get to the mountaintop. He dreamt he might not live to see his dream come true.

I’m hiking, carrying a baby in my arms in a forbidding landscape, pine trees, craggy peaks, a rocky trail up a mountain. I’m climbing to the top to see someone, thinly dressed, sweating, but chilled by the wind and the effort. I get to the mountaintop with the baby. I know it belongs to someone other than me, because I’m only in grammar school and therefore too young to have a baby. I may already be a babysitter, but have no period, no boobs, no puberty in sight so that child is definitely not mine. But in the dream it’s critical that I bring the baby to the mountaintop. It’s very difficult to get up, I’m barefoot and don’t have enough clothes on so I’m really cold. The baby is a hot bundle so I keep him to my chest for warmth. He doesn’t cry at all, but looks at me with blue eyes, trustingly, sure I will care for him.

Then I wake up in a cold sweat, the covers having slid off me in the middle of the night, now in sixth grade, sick with a fever again and perplexed.

At breakfast I ask my dad, the psychoanalyst, about this dream. “What’s up with this baby and the mountaintop?” He’s a Freudian/Jungian so takes a long thoughtful pause as he recollects Jung’s Book of Dreams as a guidepost. “It’s not what you think”, he says. “Indeed this baby isn’t yours, the whole thing is about how you must strive in your life to go somewhere difficult, carrying a burden that doesn’t belong to you. But you are responsible for this burden, and you will get to the place you need to go with it. What happens after that, well, we don’t know.”

I get to school that day rattled and everyone is in tears because Martin Luther King had been assassinated while I was dreaming about the baby and the mountaintop. The wind is cold and I’m already sick, so I go to the nurse’s office and ask them to call my mom so I can go home. She’s in a flutter because of the situation with MLK and the panic that is coursing through the US. We live outside Boston in Wellesley now so there’s no rioting at our school or anywhere in our town, but there is unease in general that lasts for weeks.