Simple Things/ Lang Kenneth Haynes

         Dreams
    Have you ever had the kind of dream that was so real you thought it actually happened? When I was a child I had several such dreams. One in
particular stays with me. I dreamed of a toy gun that I wanted with all my heart. It was silver with a bluish tint to the metal. It had a handle of white
pearl. It was a revolver that did not require cocking to fire. No double-action. State of the art. My dream of the gun was so real that I looked through
our apartment for it when I woke up the next morning. I looked in the place I had last played with it in the dream. It wasn’t there.
    I knew that guns killed people but that didn’t bother me particularly because I thought that all killing was make believe. The murdered person
would show up on another television show the next week. My friends and I routinely killed each other while playing cowboys and Indians then jumped
up to have lunch and play some more. When we couldn’t afford caps for our toy guns, we’d just make sounds like guns being fired. We didn’t know
that hundreds of thousands of Indians were killed for real or the motives behind killing them. We didn’t know about the slave trade and how human
beings were regarded as disposable property. We only knew of very select human atrocities that were performed in the name of something or other.
Some of the atrocities were said to be justified as in World Wars and Korea – at least the newsreels said so. Others were thought to be bad like the
millions who died in concentration camps during WWII. Interesting. We didn’t learn about concentration camps in this country — like Heart Mountain
in Wyoming — during the same war where Japanese-Americans were interned. The perishing of untold numbers of Africans during the Middle-
Passage was somehow not considered an atrocity either — or I slept through the outrage and sadness that accompanied that bleak, caustic, cruel
and outrageously evil period of American history.
    Our sense of right and wrong was heavily colored by propaganda newsreels that showed at movie theaters throughout the land right before the
main feature that in many instances was only more propaganda to garner support for mass murder somewhere on the globe. It was during the days
when shows like Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone filled the screens of black and white televisions that had, at most, four channels that had to be
changed by actually getting up from the couch and turning the knob. No remote controls. No automatic doors. No coffee pots that you could
program at night to have your coffee ready at a specific time the following morning. A paucity of labor saving devices because somehow underneath
the promises of future conveniences touted in Weekly Reader magazines – there would be huge prices to pay. That we would, as a composite
culture, lose something invaluable when we no longer had to hold the door open for the person behind us. When we could rely on an electronic eye
to extend the common courtesy of opening the door for the stranger or neighbor who was coming behind us. The irony being that the neighbor soon
became the stranger in this scenario.
    Maybe these were the days when dreams seemed to be more vivid because we were forced to use our imaginations more, forced to create our
own parallel universes because they were not provided by 250 television channels on the cusp of all becoming high-definition.
I had an HD dream a few hours ago. My father was the central figure and he was as real and alive as he was before he died a few years ago.  I’ve
heard that some Aboriginal cultures consider the dream world to be “real” and the waking world to be the “dream.” Who knows? Maybe our
perceptions of reality are largely based on habit. No words were spoken in the dream I had about my father. We were in a modest-sized house. It had
a first and second floor and a small yard. Some of the furnishings were familiar – the same couch and small dining room table that I grew up with in
our small apartment in the projects in New York City. The dream was remarkable for several reasons – the biggest of which was that the house was
ours. No small thing. While growing up I only knew of two Black families who had actually owned homes. One was my godmother Julia and her
family who had moved from housing projects in Harlem, with rooms scarcely larger than jail cells, to a home in Queens, Long Island with a back yard
and stairs that led to a second floor. I remember how proud her husband Paul was of a lopsided brick fireplace he had built in the back yard for
weekend grilling. The other family was my cousin Elaine and her grandparents who owned a home in Englewood, New Jersey. Their house had a
second floor too. I imagine that I would consider the house small if I was to go there today, but it seemed like the Taj Mahal during the days when I
visited there.
    A home was at the center of this particular dream about my father. The thing that sticks in my mind is the look of disappointment he had on his
face as he packed up the things in the house – the house that he had dreamed of. The house that he had worked and saved years and years to be
able to buy. And now it was all about to vanish. The dream did not contain any specifics with regard to foreclosure or massive layoffs or any of the
other things that dominate today’s newspapers. But the essential flavor was that something he had earned 10 times over was mysteriously being taken
away. The dream was pretty much about the expression on his face. A kind of muted rage blended with an unsurprised countenance. Like something
essential was “given” to him by some faceless figure while his pockets were picked clean at the same time.
    What the dream clearly lacked was hope. How dare anybody say that hope is a vague notion without substance? People for whom hope is inhaled
with every breath do not have the right to make comments regarding the relative unimportance of hope. Don’t mess with my dreams. They are my
most prized asset.