Gliding, dreaming about dreaming, a new baby, a racist.

I have a sort of glider that I am using. It is shaped like a big flat crescent roll and I hold it under my arms like an empty lunch tray with my arms over the top of it. It allows me to ride the wind, and I am practicing in my grandmother's front yard. She has very tall trees that I can grab onto if I feel like I am unsafe. I am very high up and I am gliding from the front yard to the side yard to the back. Hanging onto tall tree branches as I go. I decide that this is the method I will use to visit my mother in Indiana, rather than catch a plane or a bus, I will glide there. I am practicing going from tree to tree. I leave my over the shoulder pack wrapped around a tree branch on the ground, all ready for travel, and I go to swim practice.

In the locker room, I get into an argument with another swimmer over diet, and reject accusations that I am bragging about my gliding ability. I contend that I only have flown around my grandmother's yard from tree to tree three different times, and that I never claimed to be a great expert. Somebody pulls some granola bars out of a cabinet and lays them down and sarcastically challenges the person I am arguing with to eat them. In my mind I imagine myself as Michael Phelps, and I am swimming faster than him the whole practice despite devouring candy right beforehand. In my mind, in this hypothetical situation, I am mocking him after every lap, but eventually my bad diet catches up to me and I get very tired.

I am back at my grandma's practicing gliding. The argument has made me approach it much more carefully. My over the shoulder pack is still at the tree. I didn't think anybody would take it. I am holding on to the trees much more tightly, afraid that I will fall down now, my inability to glide well having recently been pointed out. It is frustrating because I know I have done this very well before, so well, in fact, that I made plans to fly to my mother in Indiana all the way from Michigan rather than taking a bus or a plane. I swoop down and pick up my pack, to practicing gliding with it. I ride the wind back up to the tall tree tops, clinging to them. I cling to one and climb it, and I think about how the green goblin had a glider, so it's good for me too. There is a large spider web at this tree top, and one brown thickly knit sock and a cloth knit the same way. I note to myself that my sister must have made these and somehow hung them way up here. I let one drop to the ground, and then start to have a small panic over the spider web I am touching, because I do not want a large spider on me. I imagine the spider, large and yellow, and it frightens me greatly.

I glide away from the tree and down to the ground. I meet my old girlfriend, Melody, who is driving her small white car. She is pregnant with our baby, but is going to raise it with our friend Stu. We are supposed to drive together instead of glide, because now when I imagine gliding, the amount of stopping I would do to explain things to curious children seems like it would be too time consuming. Melody is moody due to her pregnancy. I deal with her outbursts by remaining calm and rational.

We decide that we are going to spend the night on a grassy field near my old junior high school. There are many people with sleeping bags in this field. They are all put together on the edge of the grassy field, next to a large corn field. I am sleeping, with my eye carefully pointed at the road, suspicious of cars that drive by. Some of them drive right out to our field, but always end up being more people sleeping in the field. In the middle of the night, Melody leaves in a huff, and I watch her leave carefully, hoping our baby is okay, but not wanting to intrude because I will not be the one raising it. I watch her care drive off, and continue to watch the other cars, just in case there is an intruder.

Melody comes back and she is breathing hard. She is naked. I ask her what is wrong and she points to her tummy and I think she might be going into labor. In my mind I imagine how emotional and teary eyed happy I will be when I first see our baby, but I don't want to get to emotional because I will not be the one to raise it and I don't want things to be awkward. She starts to breath hard, and is indignant with me. She does not want me there but she needs somebody. She starts to roughly massage her genitals to prepare for birthing and it is making a violent wet sound. She glares at me angrily, blaming me for her predicament. She does this again.

I have a false awakening, and start to reflect on the dreams I was having. In my mind, I think about how I will say "I note to myself that my sister must have made these and somehow hung them way up here" when I write down that portion of the dream later. I walk onto the back porch of my grandmother's house, and I hear my cat Gus Gus meowing and growling angrily. This back porch is also the same place where I had the sleepover in my dream, somehow. And there is a picnic table where some sleeping bags used to be. There is a field of corn on the other side of a glass wall, and there is a pug puppy yipping on the other side. Gus Gus is growling at this. I tell him to be quiet. I see Louie, the pug my family actually has in real life, and he is scratching at the glass. I am happy to see Louie.

Then, I receive a text message, it is a picture message and when I look at it, it is a scanned picture of three dead black men hung on a fence with bent up wire hangers. On them is a sign that says "kill all n******" scrawled on to card board. (There were no asterisks in the dream.) I am horrified at this, and I know it was sent from my aunt, who is the only one with access to those types of pictures, which used to belong to my grandfather. I start to pick up dolls of historic black heroes off the picnic table. There is a doll for Fredrick Douglas, Harriet Tubman, W.E.B. DuBois, and Martin Luther King. I am horrified but now even more determined to work for my task for the day, which is to get a candidate elected who happens to be black. My plan is to show these dolls to anybody who says bad things about black people, to show them that greatness knows no color. I am carrying them out of the room, when suddenly I look around and see that there are white crosses everywhere, and our family portraits have been replaced with big paintings of men in white hoods, and other racist images. I realize that people have broken into my grandmother's house and sabotaged it with racist things in order to keep me from working that day.

The enormity of their hatred and ignorance terrifies me and I fall to my knees and a small scream escapes me. Since they broke in I feel so scared an vulnerable. That means they could break in and hurt us instead of merely terrifying us with racist images. I am paralyzed with fear that makes my solar plexus feel weak and shaking, and my elbows and knees suddenly can't handle their own weight due to extreme fear.

Then I woke up, clinging hard to the edge of my bed, my jaw clenched, my eyes wide open, I did not move for at least a minute.