Over the years my dreams have changed, not just my aspirations, but also my night dreams. When I was younger, in my teens and twenties, they often expressed humor, fear or anger. In my thirties and early forties, they most often had to do with my desire to have some impact on the world. Recently, they are most often about observation. I am still the main character in my dreams, but I'm not the protagonist in a traditional sense because the focus of the dream is not on me, but instead those around me. Usually, there is something terrible going on, but because of the outstanding quality of those around me, I have this overwhelming sense of peace not connected to any specific outcome. In the dream, I'm aware that beauty has nothing to do with what is happening. Instead, it has everything to do with how people handle what is happening.
I woke up early this morning from such a dream. It started in a classroom, not a traditional classroom, but a rented space in an almost vacant shopping center in a decaying part of town. The school was in one big classroom, but had two levels. My side of the room was at street level, where you entered from two glass doors. There were a couple of those long metal fold-out tables with particle board and wood-print-paper veneer tops. There were half a dozen with fold-out chairs around them. The floor on my half of the room was worn, yellow linoleum. Four carpeted steps led up to the other classroom that was raised and had a black iron rail separating it from the main floor. It was furnished much the same as mine. It had worn, blue-gray industrial carpet and looked like it once was probably the office area of a food or discount store that must have occupied the rest of the space.
Anyway, I had four or five students I was working with in this big, almost empty space, and another teacher, a Navajo woman, had four or five students she was working with in the raised classroom.
I knew one of my students, an oriental girl about fourteen or fifteen years old, was not doing her best work. She kept giving me excuses, and I was telling her that those excuses were nothing but crap. This made her angry and I was aware her raised voice had drawn the attention of the teacher with the other class. I considered the other teacher my mentor and didn't mind that she was watching somewhat critically. But, I also knew I was handling the student appropriately, that she needed to be pushed so that she could experience the taste of real success--not success from the outside, not empty praise, but success from the inside, that inner voice that says, "That needed to be said, and damn, I said it well." But she was putting up a wall.
Finally, I asked the other teacher if she'd watch my students, and I told the girl I wanted her to take me to see her parents. At first she argued and told me I was crazy, but I said, "if you're so sure what I'm doing is wrong, why not get your parents involved?" I know that would never work in real life--kids may run to parents to intervene in school, but not without controlling the narrative first--but in the dream, it worked. It had to in order to move the narrative to the next scene.
I followed the girl along a ravaged boulevard, the sidewalk littered with broken liquor and beer bottle glass to an old motel that had been converted into apartments. She took me up some outside stairs to the "apartment." Below, I could see the swimming pool had been filled with dirt where a rusted swing set and half-broken teeter-totter now served as the playground.
Inside, the kitchenette room was steamy. There was a couch and a double bed in the main room. An old 1970s TV was mounted on the wall. Off to the side there was a small kitchen where her mother was cooking. An eleven or twelve year old boy sat at the bar between the two rooms, swiveling on a beat up bar stool. On the bar was a gold Buddha. There was also a bedroom that I assume had been another room altogether, for a door had been blasted through, a frame put up, the wall filled in, but they'd failed to paint the remodeled part.
I don't think there was a full conversation in my dream, and if there was, I don't remember it. I do remember her brother, the scrawny twelve-year-old, was excited that his sister was in trouble and kept coming to my defense, which I didn't particularly like. But what I remember most is the love I felt from the mother for her daughter and the appreciation she had towards me for pushing her daughter to excel.
I remember thinking, she is one of the lucky ones about the girl. She has nothing and yet everything. This is what she needs to write. She probably hates it--this small cramped space in a smoldering city-- and that's alright. As she writes it out, she will deal honestly with the bad, but in the process, she will see the good also.
I didn't say that. It would have been an insult to her family. But I now knew how to reach her.
I left the family. Because it was a dream, I never returned to the school. Instead, I went to my house, which was a couple doors down. There was a blast behind me and the sound of air-raid sirens. An old Jewish man, who I knew, was holding a sobbing Cambodian boy.
"His mother works in that direction," he said, pointing towards the smoke, as I came up and stood beside him. Then to the boy he said, "There's lots of buildings down there, you can't just assume it was your mother's office, but I'll tell you what, after the sirens stop, I'll walk down and make sure everything is alright."
The scene cut to the Jewish man's apartment at a later time. It was a small, dark-paneled room with a single bed, a worn-out recliner and this beautiful big old roll-top oak desk, which you could tell was polished on a daily basis, the papers on it immaculately organized.
He sat at the desk, his old 1940s swivel chair turned to face me, the desk behind him. I sat on the edge of the bed.
"If you don't believe in God," I asked, why do you do it?" I was referring to all he did to help relieve the suffering of others in the neighborhood. You see, although Jewish by heritage, he was atheist by belief.
He smiled, looked over his round, clear glasses that had slid down to the end of his nose, and said "Love."
At first I wanted to push him for more, but then I decided not to. I wanted to go back to my own place and write down my thoughts:
I believe in Christianity--Buddhist Christianity, Jewish Christianity, Islam Christianity and Atheist Christianity.
So, I told him so. "I hate to go, but you've inspired me and I've got to get it down on paper."
He smiled--"Glad to be of service"--and swiveled around back to his big, oak desk and returned to writing a letter.
As I walked out the door, the shadow of a bomber moved swiftly down the street and up the side of the motel where my student lived, and then a few blocks beyond there was a flash, the distant wailing of mothers, followed by sirens.
And yet somehow I knew with people like my student's mother and my atheist Jewish neighbor all was well regardless of the outcome, which was incredibly uncertain at best.
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