Dreaming in Black and White : ‘The White Tormentor,’ ‘The Black Transgressor.’ How people see each other in their dreams may offer a key to untangling relationships between races.
Back in the 1970s, when Joseph Boskin, a professor of African American studies at Boston University, was researching American humor, he came across the following joke:
“Way down South in slavery times, there was this handsome fella, a muscular young slave. . . . One night he found himself stumbling out of bed like a sleepwalker. He slid out the door, not waking anybody up, and walked half-naked through the cotton field toward the master’s house. . . . When he got to the big white house, he went straight to the window under the magnolia tree where the master’s young daughter’s room was. The window was just a wee bit open for a little fresh air, and this fella opened it the rest of the way and climbed straight into that girl’s room.
“Now, when he climbed in, she woke right up, and she was so scared she couldn’t talk or scream or anything. He lifted her up in his bare arms kind of rough like and took her out to the edge of the cotton field and laid her right down in the dirt. She laid there a moment trembling, all helpless and everything; and he stood still above her, looking real powerful with the moon shining all over his muscles. When he bent down and ripped off her nightgown, she asked, real scared, ‘Are you going to rape me now?’
“He looked her in the eyes then and said, ‘I don’t know Missy. You tell me. It’s your dream.’ ”
This statement, “It’s your dream,” has profound resonance for me, leading me over the years into the thicket of who we, as Americans of various races and ethnicities, dream the other to be. I was born to a Mexican Catholic mother and an Anglo Saxon Buddhist father who met in the cultural ferment of Santa Fe in the 1940s. My father was largely disowned by his mother for marrying a Mexican, so though I am recognizably what the world calls white, my sense of kin and culture has always been Latino.
I was 13 years old and still very much in a child’s flux of confusion and longing when I first met a black man. After picking wild herbs along a levee, I set foot for home with a satchel of leaves and small purple flowers. At the spot where the dirt road crossed the railroad tracks stood the coal-black man, tall and lanky, carrying a suitcase tied with string. He talked fast while he shook my hand, telling me how hungry he was and how obliged he would be if I could get him a bite to eat.
Without thinking much about it, I took him home and made him a perfect 13-year-old’s meal of boiled hot dogs and ketchup on Wonder bread. Before eating, he blessed me and the food with a long, clearly memorized prayer in a sing-song voice that I found hypnotic. I sat quietly while he ate and made him a sandwich for the road. Then he got up and walked toward the highway, and I watched him until he disappeared, not knowing how completely this little interaction would change my life.
This stranger I met at the crossroads, who conscripted me into a small act of kindness, opened the door to the mysteries and misadventures that would dominate my adult life. At first it was simple, crazed wanderlust--by 15, I was the vagabond in the story, offering my own blessings from the crossroads. Later, the hunger for the open road was supplanted by the need to meet and befriend the other in myself. Early on, dreams became the uncompromising mirror through which I could observe my vagrant, changeable and multiple identities. Over the past two decades, the black man I met as a kid has returned often to visit me in my dreams. He always stands on the edge between the known and the unknown. He has a taste for the unconventional, this dream ally, and tends to direct me on the path that is most interesting and least likely.
Like many people, I was burned to the marrow by the fires the week of the Rodney King verdicts. I felt as if my soul was at stake if I didn’t find a way to respond. I had just finished writing a book about people’s dreams of the end of the world, collecting dreams spanning several decades from people of different countries and examining them closely for underlying patterns. The week of those fires, I began to ask questions about dreaming that underlies the anguish of race relations in this country. What are the core images and ideas that shape our experience of the other? At the deepest psychological level, whom do we imagine each other to be? And what may dreams tell us about finding our way out of the confusion around us?
In scanning the clinical literature on racial identity and racism, I discovered a couple of gaping holes. Although much literature speaks of the symbolism of black personas in dreams, there seems to be an implicit presumption that all dreamers are white. The thought that black people might also dream about white people is virtually never addressed. The way of the world, in which blacks are highly visible yet adamantly unseen, is mirrored in psychological research.
I began to interview friends and friends of friends about their dreams. Some people sent me dreams in response to a previous article I’d written on interracial dreaming. I also struck up a correspondence with white and black prison inmates. In this way, I have collected dozens of dreams of white people about black people and black people about white people from a wide range of society.
Sifting through them in a survey that is admittedly unscientific yet revealing, I’ve found significant recurring patterns and surprising parallels. Dreams of being shut out from or taken into the perceived domain of the other are common for both races. White people sometimes dream of returning to black vitality and soulfulness, after a kind of existential exile; black people sometimes dream of being excluded from or embraced by white generosity, fertility or emotional tranquillity. Members of both races often dream of being transformed into the other. But a particular flash point plays itself out vividly in the dreams of both: Each frequently dreams the other as the transgressor, the violator of boundaries.
The black rapist, the insurgent slave, the one who does not know her place, the thief in the night--these images are old and durable, the familiar heart of darkness that translates easily into white racism. Less familiar is the parallel imagery of terror and pursuit in the dreams of black people. White people are often combined with the specter of animals that, in black folk legend in the South and in central Africa, devour one’s vitality as one sleeps. Like the black transgressor, these white tormentors have an old history, which can be traced back several hundred years to the initial Congolese contacts with the Portuguese.
The following dream was sent to me by a young man, a white Angeleno, self-described as “. . . a downwardly mobile Yuppie.” He regarded this dream as a pivotal moment in a time of great emotional turmoil when he was, with the help of a therapist, facing harsh childhood memories.
“I was in a little cafe near the beach in Venice when this large, sexy black woman sat down at a table near me. I started to talk with her about something and was being a little flirtatious, trying to impress her with what a sensitive guy I was. She took my hand, and we walked to the beach, where she basically threw me down on the sand and started kissing me. In the back of my mind, I wondered if she’d find me interesting as a sweet and intelligent man or whether I should try to make love to her like I figured a black man would. In the beginning, I sort of liked her passion, but soon I felt a little hurried and eventually completely overwhelmed and scared. I didn’t know how to get away andfelt humiliated by my fear.”
The tangled web of interrelated motifs in this dream makes it emblematic of many whites’ dreams of the black transgressor. The rich sexual mythology of white sensitivity versus overwhelming black instinctuality--the white man with the brain, the black man with the phallus is a familiar trope. The violation of the boundaries that separate public and private is also a common theme--the black as the one who does not act with propriety, bringing disorder into an otherwise orderly world. The transgressive sex--overwhelmed in a public place--is different only in that the transgressor is a woman.
The hundred-plus dreams I’ve received from white people feature twice as many black men as black women. It is the black man’s phallus, knife, gun, public anger--or the stealth with which he climbs into the window at night--that most frightens white people. But this young man gives some insight into why his dream so prominently featured an overwhelming black woman.
“I had this dream when I was uncovering memories of incest by my mother when I was a young boy,” he wrote. “In my therapy, it felt like I was in a life or death struggle over who owned my sexuality: My mother or me. This dream was the beginning of the end of that struggle. I’ve noticed a definite change in my relationships with black people since then. They’ve become ‘just folks.’ ”
Real healing seems to require not self-censorship but self-awareness: recognizing that one’s fantasies are about oneself, not about “them.” Notably, the black transgressor is always paired with the “white one who is innocent and transgressed upon”: the master’s nubile daughter, the man overwhelmed on the beach by black sexual aggressiveness. But white fear coupled with the fantasy of white innocence is lethal. If people unconsciously live out the fantasy of white innocence protecting itself from black transgression, whole institutions of exclusion--from jobs, neighborhoods, opportunities--are inevitable.
The following dreams were sent to me by a black man in his early 50s, serving time for armed robbery in a New York prison. After some initial suspicions, he extended his trust and sent me about two dozen dreams. When he was young, his grandmother had encouraged him to pay close attention to his dreams, and, consequently, he has volumes of journals documenting an exceptionally rich dream life. “One of the high points of being in jail,” he wrote, “is you get to sleep and dream a lot. One thing the white man and his bull- - - - system can’t take away from me are my nightly dreams.”
In another letter, he confided, “I hope you can understand I don’t have a lot of love for white folks, and I find myself killing them in my dreams quite often. I really wish that I didn’t feel this way.” In fact, none of the dreams he sent me were about killing white people, but quite a few carried powerful images of terror, pursuit, capture and being devoured.
“I dreamed that I was on a large stage screaming at the top of my voice, and there was all these white folks looking up at me, and their eyes seemed to merge together into one eye. . . .”
“Again I dreamed that there was these Chinese, blacks and whites, and the blacks was being served to the Chinese and white people as chop suey.”
“These white people was riding around on these giant ants catching me, but I would always escape, and they would find me and make the ants bite me on my butt and head. . . .”
“There was these big white chickens eating black people up and then spitting them back out and eating them over and over. I started to cry because I did not want to be eaten. . . .”
It is no doubt possible to look at these dreams from psychological perspectives developed in Europe, but I have found that Freud and Jung carry numerous assumptions, especially about the separateness of the psyche from community and nature, that have no equivalent in traditional African culture. So it has been far more fruitful for me to examine the dreams of African Americans from the angle of African tradition. Some dream motifs have survived not only the passage from Africa to America but also the migration from the rural South to the urban centers of the North and West during this century.
The roots of the African American psyche are in Western Bantu village culture, from the estuaries of the Zaire River as far inland as the Zambezi basin in central Africa. Western Bantu people--Kongo, Luba, Lunda, Chewa, Ovimbundu and others--account for perhaps half of the slaves imported to the American colonies. Unlike slaves taken from other parts of West Africa, who were ethnically diverse, Western Bantu people had mutually comprehensible languages and cultural sensibilities. The classical African American culture in the rural South is replete with “bantuisms” in language, place names, proverbs, stories, traditional medicine--even the religious imagery of old spirituals.
The cultural patterns of the Kongo people, and their ways of making sense of overwhelming trauma, are representative of other Bantu groups who were sold in the slave ports of the American South. The Kongo attribute nightmares to the clandestine activity of bandoki , those who grow fat and prosperous by capturing and eating their victims’ dream souls.
The Kongo have been in continuous contact with European people since 1483; since the early 1600s, one of their ways of understanding white people was to presume that they were bandoki. It was brought across the Atlantic with the slave trade; indeed, the slave trade itself was almost universally regarded as a form of soul-eating. John Thornton, professor of history at Millersville University in Pennsylvania, writes in “Africans and Afro-Americans in the Atlantic World” that captives in the slave port of Luanda in 1622 despaired over leaving their former lives, but they also felt they were victims of “a form of witchcraft.”
In Bantu culture, any nightmare is regarded as an assault on the integrity of the soul. When one sleeps, the soul travels about and is vulnerable to bandoki. Nightmares erode the edge of one’s soul, leaving one diminished of life energy. In this way, bit by bit, the soul is eaten. To be pursued, to be pinned down by malevolent white eyes, to be served as chop suey, to be devoured by enormous white chickens or bitten by large ants ridden by white people--these extravagant images of “soul-eating” are particular to this dreamer and similar to other dreams I’ve received from black people.
Three dreamers, all black women in their late 20s and early 30s, related the following dreams. Two of the women are solidly middle-class, the third a homeless person.
“The first dream I recall was really a nightmare. All I can remember is images of a cliff, hypodermic needles and a sinister white doctor who pursued me throughout the dream, trying to assassinate me. I awoke running from my bed screaming ‘The doctor’s trying to kill me!’ I recall being cornered on the cliff with the doctor and his hypodermic needle advancing on me. I was about 10 or 11 years old.”
“I’m about to make love with my boyfriend when I look up and see a white man standing outside the window, watching us. His face has no expression. We continue making love, trying to pretend he’s not there. I’ve had this dream three or four times.”
“The police were on a campaign to clean up the streets. They make all the black people--not only homeless people--walk off the end of Santa Monica pier into the ocean. They pull over cars and chase people down alleyways. All of the police were white.”
Two basic, often interconnected themes thread through African American nightmares about white people. The first is pursuit, escape or capture; the second, invasion and the puncturing of boundaries. This second theme plays itself out in harsh physical images--the doctor and his poisonous needles, flesh-pecking chickens--and in the recurring image of the white gaze as a sharp edge wielded against the soul.
The dream of soul eating is populated by dangerous, invasive white eyes. As dreams of pursuit are, of course, also dreams of being seen and getting out of sight, the two themes are present in the homeless woman’s image of the police on the streets of Santa Monica. The prisoner’s dream of the merging of white eyes into a single, vast malevolent eye would likely make a great deal of sense to this woman and perhaps also to the woman who dreamed of the stolid white man looking through her bedroom window. When this gaze infiltrates even the intimate life of a woman and a man, it seems as if there is no place in the world where one might be free of it.
The image of “cleaning up the streets” was described to me without irony or interpretation. Bandied around by politicians, it could be one of the primary metaphors of the day world that translates into the nighttime dramas of soul eating. As long as white peopleunconsciously live out their dreams of blacks as the source of disorder, then the white gaze will appear cold and disinfecting as well as malevolent to black people. The merciless white eyes seem to be key images in the drama of “soul-eating” in America.
In the traditions of central Africa, protection from bandoki is a communal affair. Ancestors, it is said, reincarnate again and again until, refined of all human imperfection, they rest in nature, in a kind of stone or the spiral of a seashell. Nganga (medicine men) skilled in these matters gather these objects, awaken them with traditional invocations and bury them at the edge of the village or under the doorway of a house or place them around the neck of someone endangered by the envy of others. In other words, the ancestors in one form or another protect people from soul eating. The American equivalent of these nkisi --called tobys (a Bantu word), mojo or hands --was quite common in Southern African American culture, and some black Americans still rely on these objects to protect themselves and their households. The Bantu anthropologist Fu-Kiau Bunseki has found some of them to be almost identical to those used in central Africa.
In a traditional Bantu village, a family member who, like these black dreamers, was suffering assault in the night would be of concern to the entire clan. He or she would go to an nganga , who would discern the source of the trouble. That person would be publicly accused and, ideally, after confessing, be forgiven and re-embraced by the community. The nganga would then perform appropriate rituals of soul retrieval to reconstitute his patient’s sense of self.
The discernment of spirits, the enlivening of a defeated soul and the participation of the community in the act of healing have survived the diaspora of black people and have been sheltered under the auspices of black churches and reinvented in non-Christian forms. These old ways of seeing, healing and protection carry tremendous power and intelligence but were designed for a situation in which the bandoki were members of one’s own community. African American folklore and dreams suggest that in addition to the presence of God and the support of the sacred community (living and dead), a certain psychological agility and native wit are also required to keep the black soul intact against everything that might besiege it.
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This dream was given to me by a 27-year-old friend, a fervent Pentecostal who aspires some day to become a minister. “Nelson Mandela was elected leader over black affairs in the United States, but an evil white dictator was coming to take over. On a hill near my house in Venice, I saw these two white men with guns chasing black people. They were somehow connected with this dictator. Even though I was at a distance, they saw me and started to chase me. The police also got involved. Most of the dream was about getting away from them. It was exciting--it was like I was sonic or something. There were some close calls, but they still couldn’t catch me.”
The theme of running is so common in black people’s dreams about white people and such a recurring theme in African American folklore that it must be accounted for. Quick on his feet and quick of tongue, Br’er Rabbit and other tricksters are probably the most obvious folk tale survivals from Africa. Henry Louis Gates, who teaches African American studies at Harvard, uses the stories of the Signifyin’ Monkey, who dances verbal circles around his literal-minded foil, the Lion, to demonstrate how African American literature and street culture preserve the soul in a racist society.
The motif of running and escaping, especially when it is coupled with sheer joy, is clearly about keeping the body and soul alive and free when it is threatened. For any black stranded in somebody else’s dream--the tangled net of “their” agenda, definitions, fantasies--the person with the quick feet, the quick tongue and the quick mind is the one who would lithely slip through the net. It is to this end, I think, that the African trickster stories have been preserved and retold--and apparently reinvented in the dream life of black Americans.
A Bantu village in the Congo basin may seem a long way from Compton or South-Central, and the psychosexual madness of the master’s house may seem a long way from the suburbs. But in the dreams that underlie our waking lives, these domains, and others, strangely border one another.
Martin Luther King Jr. often wrote of the ways in which racism mutilates the possibilities of both the racist and the victim of racism. The white man with racialized fear binding the roots of his sexuality, the black man awaking at night in his cell to yet another nightmare of pursuit and capture--both are variations on a theme of lost freedom. The further I delve into these dreams, the more I see that there is no underestimating how profoundly and inextricably Americans of European and African descent are implicated in each other’s psyches--down to the most primal concerns of identity, sexuality, security and the sustenance of meaning and community. The naked, inescapable, harsh or blessed truth is that we bear the seeds of each other’s redemption--or destruction.