"Those with the Greatest Awareness Have the Greatest Nightmares" -Ghandi

What do you do when all your dreams are bound up in solving real nightmares?

I've been literally wrangling with this idea lately, in sleep and in wakefulness. I'm not a peaceful sleeper these days. I toss and turn and sweat and talk and sometimes even walk and eat in my sleep. I'll wake up brushing my teeth in the middle of the night, and sometimes have entire telephone conversations while sleeping.

I think this all comes down to the fact that I'm not really all that peaceful in wakefulness either. I had lunch with my aunt last week, and she told me that she can't wait until my masters is done, and I won't be so intense anymore. I've always been intense. But now it's come to a new level.

It's my work. I know it is. But I cannot stop doing it. It's important stuff, at least to me, and for some reason I've been chosen to take part in this particular dream. I came to the project almost a year ago, looking for an internship. I found humanity instead. And at that point I'd almost forgotten that I had dreams for humanity.

I was so bound up in my own life, and drowning, really, in terms of my academics. And then I met this woman who reminded me that the work that I choose to do matters, and can matter in real time, for people who are told daily that they do not matter at all. I began to forget about my self and remember my dreams. And those dreams have always been attached to the horror I feel about what we do to each other as human beings.

What he does to her, for example, and then what she does in response, turns my stomach. I am uncomfortable with and discomforted by, all the people like me who have an incredibly charmed life and still manage to support and celebrate the despicable status quo. I know a man who owns two companies, votes democrat, buys cards for his closest friends for no reason at all, and still thinks it is a viable rite of passage for a teenage boy in America to visit a 'hooker' in Atlantic City. It makes me sick to know that such a good man in every other area can live so much on the surface to accept and perpetrate a reality such as that.

Here's what I want to say as I shake some sense into you: She is someone's daughter. Did you just tell me that you want a daughter one day? Do you think as a child she was playing with her Barbies and decided "I'd like to sell sex for a living?" Maybe she wanted to be a lawyer, just like you, but it wasn't in the cards for her. Did you ever think of that?

Like I said, my dreams are bound up in the possibility that these nightmares don't have to exist. The very fact that my job exists at all is a testament to our vast and massive failure as a nation and as a human race, to stand against the ugliness of oppression, instead of volleying when the ball of social mobility finally bounces over the net and into our court (God knows we've all waited for it). We are so good at pointing the finger when the tractor beam of blame falls upon us that we forget, as the saying goes, about the three fingers pointing back in our direction. Even if it means giving up a bit of power, swallowing our pride and sharing our wealth, wouldn't that be better than holding each other down? Instead of supporting progress towards a level playing field, we cite the American dream to discount claims such as mine, that not everyone has access to hope. The American dream exists only for the exceptionally idealistic and the wealthy.

Fact: for a great number of people in this nation, dreams are an unaffordable luxury.

I'm not depressed and I'm not getting derailed.

I wake up each day invigorated by what it may bring, despite the nightmares I have in REM. But the truth is, my nightmares are the daylight realities of many, and that's the thing that rattles me. This is the truth that I cannot escape, even in the moment when I wake up relieved that the fear I feel in sleep is not 'real'. My relief is a sign of my privilege. My dismay in the following instant, is newer. It is the remembrance that not all women (or men) are like me, not all have been given a real shot (and many of them have much greater talents than I ever will possess).

I cannot in good conscience walk away from this. When an informant tells me about being raped by her brother in the kitchen of her childhood home, when she expresses the cyclical pattern of abuse she's experienced at the hands of all the men she's ever encountered (father, brother, boyfriend, pimp and finally dope dealer...in that order), my resolve is renewed. But my nightmares continue.

There's this quote that is posted on my bulletin board at work: "If you have come to help me, then you are wasting your time. But if you are here because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together."

I've been told that I have to find a way to detach, but how can I do that, when this work is so intensely personal? The connection is what heals us, it is precisely what bridges the gap between power and oppression; I believe that it is what will yield a better way. That connection is my only hope for this life.

My sons will grow up to respect women precisely because of that connection (isA) and because their father, like me, will refuse to detach (isA), so I guess it's my job to pray and cope and not let this eat me alive.

Over the last two nights, though, I've woken up from horrendous night dreams, thankful only that they do not belong to my reality, but my fingernails still dig into my hands.

My only reconciliation is that justice does exist somewhere, when all is said and done.

For those of you who have read this to the end and are not put off by my radicalism or my proselytizing, I want you to know that at the very core of what I believe is a heartfelt sentiment that there is a better way, and that it is absolutely achievable in this lifetime, if we can endure our nightmares and still seek something better and something greater, for ourselves and for our children. And I hope then I'll be able to lay my head softly on a pillow and remember what it feels like to dream sweetly.