“I had a dream last night.”
Yessss, I’m aware of the gravitas of a black writer opening an essay with the words “I had a dream” and yet here I am, about to inform you, dear reader, that I did in fact have a dream last night. I’m sure that sentence doesn’t sound groundbreaking at all – and I suppose it isn’t except that I haven’t dreamt for over a year now. It’s not something I’m particularly distraught about, however, as a creative I do crave the Lynchian self-exploration of an intoxicating dream. I miss the thrill of waking up startled and sweaty, simultaneously prizing clumps of sleep from my eyes whilst scrambling for the nearby note-pad and pen. I cherish that very human desperation of scribbling notes from the fragmented memory of the dream.
So, I did what any upstanding daughter of academics would do; I researched. I trawled through journal article after journal article in an attempt to reunite with my absurd imaginary life and thus, I’ve whittled the answer down to two things. One – smoking weed at this frequency is definitely an (if not thee) culprit. Two – I probably am dreaming, it’s just at a different point in my sleep cycle. By the time my body wakes, the dreamscape ended hours ago.
So what then should I make of last night’s dream? Should I endow it with the certain grace one might give when reuniting with a long awaited visitor? Or – in a much less romantic way – maybe it was just a miraculous dream that slipped through the cracks of the unremembered. Whatever the case, I welcomed it with open arms.
Rest assured, this is not an incitement for rallying people (although I am a fan of that), but rather, an examination of dreams as a reflection of women’s entangled subconscious life.
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I come from a lineage of women with intense dreamworlds. The earliest years of my life, being an only child with my biological father-in-absentia, were spent glued to my mother’s hip, acutely aware of her routine, thoughts, fixations, dreams, and of course, nightmares. There were very few images of conservatism in my early life, and often other parents, teachers and sometimes kids, would remark on the lack of power play between my mother and I. One key manifestation of this democracy was my opinionated, unfiltered sensibility. Hierarchy in the home was null and void, and therefore, I chose not to engage with it outside of the home. I considered this the highest compliment. We’d constructed some strange utopia in which age distinctions were unnecessary if understanding was the ultimate goal.
Professor Joshua Meyrowitz states,
One consequence of the loss of the traditional parental perspective is more democracy in the home. There appears to be a greater sense of equality between children and parents, and parents today are more likely to confide in their children and to admit to their own anxieties, shortcomings, and failures.
This is very fitting to how I reflect on my childhood. I knew all there was to know about my mother; and that responsibility of knowing – what we’d now probably label “holding space” – was a role I took very seriously as a five year old. It’s common that children want to identify with the ‘adult’ – and in my case this manifested as a deep (as far as my capacity could stretch) examination of her internal experience.
In the second verse of Fleetwood Mac’s iconic song ‘Dreams’, Stevie Nicks sings,
“Now, here I go again
I see the crystal visions
I keep my visions to myself
It’s only me who wants to
Wrap around your dreams
And have you any dreams you’d like to sell?
Dreams of loneliness?”
My kaleidoscopic dreams of Polly Pockets and three-headed mermaids felt laughable in comparison to the complexity of hers, and so, like Stevie, I chose to “keep my visions to myself”. Instead I yearned to delve into the latent loneliness that laced the corners of her mind – eager to catapult from the greenness of my youth into the maturity of the ‘adult’.
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One unremarkable groggy morning as I sat hungry and curious at the kitchen counter, my mother relayed her previous night’s dream. Wayward shards of oil spluttered off the frying pan, a haphazard orchestral score supporting her as she spoke. I’d like to rewrite history and argue that my infantile self could identify the patterns in her dreams; notice the threads of similarity and follow them to some elusive truth. Frankly, it is my current self and the trusty power of hindsight that recognises that often there was a recurring identified threat, followed by the meat of the dream : her survival arc. Or maybe the hero plot line just hooked my virtuosic mind most. It stands to reason – and I will not take critiques on this – that even in subconsciousness, my Mum is a bosslady.
It begins with a home invasion. My mum finds herself comfortable in bed, breathing heavily in total relaxation, the way you do when your personal safety isn’t up for grabs. The bed is strewn with a strange mixture of pillows and miscellaneous home furniture she recognises from previous homes and family members. I suppose her imagination is borrowing assorted elements from the familiar – perhaps her mind did that metatheatrical thing that kids’ brains sometimes do when they dream they are on the toilet when in actuality they’re peeing in bed.
She dreams that she dreams.
It’s poetic to think about now. Slowly, she drifts into the thick wave of sleep, smooth and uninterrupted – til it fractures.
A crack splinters through the house.
Glass smashes through empty space. Her ears prick. Panic renders the world comatose; shutter-speed.
Her mind whirs, offering options like:
1) lie in bed in total denial
2) call out a feeble “helloooo??”,
3) find a weapon-like object in this strange room and get ready to fight,
4) flee?
She envisions what each option looks like, how real the prospect of them actually feels. She picks the latter option : flee – and, like a moth to a flame, enters alert mode. Heavy footsteps hit floorboards in what sounds like the bathroom. She has seconds to get a head start before the anonymous heavy-footed villain engulfs her.
Now, this is where absurdity takes over; in that very particular nonsensical way that dreams do – the only mode of transport available to her? The bar stool, of course.
A short time leap. She hurtles down the highway on her trusty bar stool, ducking and weaving between cars as a motorbike would amidst teeming metropolis traffic. And just like that, the dream ends. She wakes. A few hours later and she’s retelling this getaway to me, while my chubby childlike form perches on the exact bar stool that provided her refuge. It’s uncannily circular.
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I could comprehend my mother’s desire to run before I could identify my own. I lost and found myself in her reflection, coddled in the warm orange hues of her hair. I was – and still am – the apple of her eye, and yet, there existed undeniable distinctions that estranged us. My dark chocolate eyes searched for reflection in her bright blue ones. In my home, there truly was no stone left unturned, so the concept of race was demystified before I can remember. I could describe what the air smelt like in the Islands before I had ever been, because my mother’s democratic dialogue never shied away from the truth. Her truth. My truth too, I suppose.
We discussed the threat of men, the distinctness of the masculine footstep in her dream and what that meant for her own sense of safety. I could trace this to moments I’d experienced in my mere five years of life; a man calling his wife “stupid” in the supermarket, the scene in ‘She’s Gotta Have It’ when Jamie Overstreet overpowers Nola Darling in her own apartment, and even Lily Allen’s words in ‘Knock ‘Em Out’.
“I recognise this guy”
That’s what she’s thinking
As he comes over her heart starts sinking
She’s like, “Oh here we go”
It’s a routine check that she already knows
She’s thinking they’re all the same
In many ways, this early understanding of threat versus safety rendered me into a premature state of ‘adulthood’. One that armoured me with a certain wit and criticism that have, to this day, protected me. I can, however, see the downfalls of this experience, particularly when race comes into the conversation.
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It’s important to state that I am no stranger to play and frivolity. As a girl and now a woman, I pride myself on my ridiculousness. Truly. Two things can be true at once. In the safety of my own home, I aligned myself in proximity to adulthood in the innocent desire to connect with my mother. But somewhere along the way I lost agency, I was no longer driving myself towards maturation. Rather, society deemed me an ‘adult’ years before I actually was one.
Psychologically, this was difficult to get my head around. Something that was once a unique identifier – my ability to understand – now felt like a punishment. Admittedly, in some ways it was gratifying. For so long I ached to be recognised for my knack at examinations, and so maybe, people treated me like an adult because they noticed this skill? I felt immobilized. Did I want to return to a childlike state? Is that even possible? Or – rather – did I want to dive headfirst into this preconceived notion and consume as much understanding as I could? What would that look like? Why didn’t other girls – my white counterparts – ask themselves these questions?
Adultification bias, by definition, is a form of racial prejudice where children of minority groups, typically Black children, are treated by adults as being more mature than they actually are. Naturally, hypersexualisation plays a huge part in this; as the ‘Jezebel’ paradigm rears its ugly head and exploits black bodies for public consumption. I myself have found this to be a particularly uncomfortable aspect of my identity.
Dr. Monique W. Morris states,
The assignment of more adult-like characteristics to the expressions of young Black girls is a form of age compression. Along this truncated age continuum, Black girls are likened more to adults than to children and are treated as if they are willfully engaging in behaviors typically expected of Black women.This compression [has] stripped Black girls of their childhood freedoms [and] renders Black girlhood interchangeable with Black womanhood.
My lightskinedness is integral to this discussion. Yes, biases like adultification perpetuate themselves onto black bodies, but it is undeniable that dark-skinned women in particular face this beast relentlessly. Toni Morrison describes colourism as,
The ranking of color in terms of its closeness to white people or white-skinned people and its devaluation according to how dark one is and the impact that has on people who are dedicated to the privileges of certain levels of skin color.
Sometimes, when asked what my dreams are, I just want to retort “that my choice to grow up was my choice and my choice only”. I dream of this liberation. I dream of it for all Black children.
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One of my all time favourite films around the age of five was ‘Singing in the Rain’. To say I found it mesmerising would be a gross understatement. We had an outlandishly large television, and I would load the film into the VHS player, and allow myself to be swallowed whole into the intoxicating world of 1920’s Hollywood glamour. I lapped up the fluid transitions from slapstick comedy to archetypal boy-meets-girl romance to full-blown musical theatre numbers. It was garish and camp and dated and I revelled in it.
Specifically, there’s a dream sequence dance scene between Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse that lives, in high-definition quality, in my mind at all times. The two performers flit amorously between each other across a vast lilac universe. I’ve always adored the colour purple. My name, Iolanthe, means ‘purple flower’ so it feels fitting to harbour this affinity. In hindsight, I think it made perfect sense to me that the dream sequence was set in a lavender paradise – I can’t think of anything more divine. It’s as though my juvenile mind absorbed this pas-de-deux, squirreled it away in a file for my future self to return to when she needed a reminder of what her childhood ‘dream’ was.
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You might be wondering what it is I dreamt of last night. What exactly spurred me on to engage in this discourse.
Last night, for the first time in my life, I found myself in sweeping plains of purple. Miles and miles of flatland to dance across. A slight haze of elusivity. Nothing too prescriptive. Just infinite purple hues.
I was ecstatic. I felt like a child again, and I suppose because I was asleep I didn’t have the cognition to hate that part of myself. Instead, I indulged in it.
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But the truth of it all is encapsulated effortlessly in Solange’s hypnotising track titled ‘Dreams’,
I grew up a little girl with
Dreams, dreams, dreams
Dreams, dreams, dreams
Dreams, dreams, dreams.
Irrespective of whether my cannabis induced sensibilities have warped the awareness of my dreamscape – I still have “dreams, dreams, dreams” for myself, my mother, my lineage, my spirit and my community.
REFERENCES :
Meyrowitz, Joshua. “The Adultlike Child and the Childlike Adult: Socialization in an Electronic Age.” Daedalus, vol. 113, no. 3, 1984, pp. 19–48.
Dr. Monique W. Morris. “Girlhood Interrupted: The Erasure of Black Girls’ Childhood”
Solange Knowles. ‘Dreams’ ‘When I get Home’ 2019 Album.
Lily Allen, ‘Knock ‘Em Out’, ‘Alright, Still’ 2006 Album
(1952) Singin’ in the Rain . Kelly, G. & Donen, S., dirs United States: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
MLA: Lee, Spike. She’s Gotta Have It. 1986.
‘I Regret Everything’: Toni Morrison Looks Back On Her Personal Life – August 24, 2015 WCMU PUBLIC MEDIA INTERVIEW
Nicks, S. (1977). “Dreams” [Recorded by Fleetwood Mac]. On Rumours [CD]. WB Records.
