DREAM LESSONS
First published in Belladonna’s inaugural print newsletter, July 2024.
“Our lives dream us so we may exist.”[1]
“I dreamed that i was dressing you, putting your clothes on… You’re coming home.”[2]
“I’m learning how to fly, to levitate myself. No one is teaching me. I’m just learning on my own, little by little, dream lesson by dream lesson”[3]
“We will enter from here.”[4]
DREAM LESSONS
I have been thinking about dreams. Not just the work of ideology, but also our literal sleeping dreams. The dreams of our sleep serve as ordinary instances of premonition, in which seemingly impossible shifts in our material conditions become possible. This kind of divination is common in two senses of the word—it exists in our every day, and it survives beyond the authority of any single oracle.
I think of The Dream (1987), a documentary by Syrian filmmaker Mohammad Malas, who interviews Palestinians living in refugee camps established to the south of Beirut in Lebanon, after the 1948 Nakba. In the documentary, men, women, children, and elders recount their dreams from the previous night. They recount dreams of return—return not as something bestowed by a fraudulent external authority figure like the U.N., but struggled for over and over, dream after dream, life after life.
While running stitches through the soles of a boot, one man recalls a dream in which he joins the pan-Arab nationalist and Egyptian anti-colonial leader Gamal Abdel Nasser to fight in Palestine: “We arrived together at Nabatiyeh. [Nasser] pointed towards Palestine and said, ‘We will enter from here.’”
Dreams are the wishes that others deliver to us. Some of the most beautiful dreams are very simple at the core: The clarity of struggle. The feeling of courage. The feeling of the sun. Of home. Of safety, love, and care. Less than a decade back, Lula Hill visits her granddaughter Assata Shakur at the Clinton Correctional Facility in New Jersey, where Assata has been held hostage by the state for years. Mrs. Hill recounts: “I dreamed we were in our old house in Jamaica… I dreamed that i was dressing you, putting your clothes on… You’re coming home.”
You’re coming home. We will enter from here. The boots are complete. After her grandmother’s visit, Assata returns to her cell. Just months later, members of the BLA and M19CO will break her out from prison. But in this moment, Assata cannot but stake her life on the dream. The prison guards think she is crazy as she begins to dance and sing in her cell: Feet, don’t fail me now.
From the bootmaker’s dream about fighting in Palestine to Mrs. Hill’s dream about Assata’s homecoming, these are dreams of flight in conditions of exile, carcerality, and fugitivity. It’s no mistake Octavia Butler opens Parable of the Sower with our narrator Lauren Olamina’s recurring dream of flying: I’m learning how to fly, to levitate myself. No one is teaching me. I’m just learning on my own, little by little, dream lesson by dream lesson.
Parable of the Sower was published in 1993 and opens in our year, 2024. Octavia Butler’s fictional world is a world very much like ours: a world run by an unholy union between the military state and corporate elites, who orchestrate and make a killing from organized abandonment. Our narrator Lauren must survive this world. No, not just survive. Lauren undertakes the impossible of building and sustaining a life with others, transforming a social order that has only death and disposability spelled out for those marked as superfluous.
I am thinking about the imperative mood that characterizes these dreams of liberation: You’re coming home. Little by little, dream lesson after dream lesson. We will enter from here. These are not pipedreams, but dreams of certainty. Dreams of repetition, which evolve into resolute commitment. Dreams that serve as whetstones–sharpening our focus as we work against and shift, bit by bit, the murderous conditions of our everyday lives. Dreams that act as mirrors, concentrating sunlight into one beam and casting it into fire. Dreams that make demands of our selves: What do I need to do to make the impossible possible? What of myself must I give?
We often talk about dreams—our wish to make something happen—as the opposite of our reality—the material conditions that determine whether or how this wish comes true. When in fact, dream logic mirrors the will of Capital. (Marx: Capital is a delusional cosmology.) Both dream logic and Capital take from and rearrange our relationships to people, objects, and conditions of our everyday lives. The difference is that Capital requires a persistent and pervasive state of alienation. Whereas these dreams of liberation reveal the revolutionary possibility that emerges when we sustain unity between our immaterial and material labor–a unity that metabolizes a transformation of our social relations.
Dreams are uncanny because they don’t really belong to us. Jackie Wang: “Our lives dream us so we may exist.” I had a dream last night, or did the dream have me? Did I dream or was I dreamed? There are these instances where dreams overtake the material, become vital, shifting the way we navigate the field of power. I am drawing a map of these dreams, from Lebanon to Egypt to Palestine, from the Amerikkan carceral archipelago to Jamaica to Cuba, from California to the heavens.
Let the circulation of these dreams be a cooperative practice, one that returns us to the future that is not yet here. We belong to this future, even as it does not yet belong to us.
Assata Shakur says her grandmother dreamt dreams of prophecy all her life: “She did her part. The rest was up to us. We had to make it real.”
[1] Jackie Wang, “The Mosquito Is a Problem and Nothing Else.”
[2] Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography, 260-262
[3] Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower, 4.
[4] Mohammad Malas, The Dream
i.h. is a writer and researcher based in Brooklyn and the Bay Area. They are working on a chapbook about islands, salt, and soil—a poetics that dismembers the u.s. war machine. At CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities, they build narrative strategy to fight real estate propaganda and grow the narrative power of the immigrant and working class tenant movement. Their writings and conversations are homed in the Asian American Writers' Workshop, Wendy's Subway, Brooklyn Rail, among others—more at irnhs.tumblr.com.
