Space to Dream

I love to dream. But I didn’t always like to dream. There were times in my life that I found it almost impossible. There were times in my life that I couldn’t take a break, or even rest for a moment, and in those times, it was almost impossible for me to dream. Do you know what I’m talking about? Those times were scary because dreaming is a very important part of who we are.

Do you love to dream? What are your favorite things to dream about? Night dreaming or day dreaming. Do you like to dream about happy things you like to do? Or things you like to eat? What are your favorite things to dream about?

Don’t be afraid to share your dreams with people. A dream can always be shared, but it can never be stolen. It can be broken, but never erased. And I don’t think we will actually ever have the same dreams. Because my dreams will always look special to me. And even though you shared your dreams with me, the ones in your mind, in your heart, will always look special to you.

At this point, while I was practicing and rehearsing my sermon, one child interrupted me. Wait, a minute, she said to me. Are you talking about the dreams you have at night? Or do you mean, like, what do you want to be when you grow up, kind of thing?

Well, I suppose I mean both. We use the word to mean both the thing that happens to us at night, and the thing we do during the day to help us look forward to the future. And anyway, as far as our brains are concerned, there really is not much of a difference. Both our subconscious hallucinations and our innermost wishes and hopes are connected to our selfhood, our humanity. Both are windows into what I will call our inner world.

Part of what makes dreams so difficult is that they have a frustrating quality that makes them hard to study. They are subjective. That means, they are based on the individual, and they are influenced by the person that is dreaming. I can’t look in your mind and see dreams like you see them, and you can’t look in my mind to see mine. Your dreams will always be yours, in some fundamental way.

And believe it or not that’s where it starts to get complicated. See, some people say that they don’t really have dreams. Some people think maybe they do dream but never remember it. Some people have a hard time dreaming in the daytime - imagination can be tricky for some folks. Depression and anxiety both affect the brain in ways that make it hard to conceptualize the future, to believe in any future at all. I’ve heard people describe this dreamless existence like being trapped inside your own body, with the windows closed.

Furthermore, there is a word called aphantasia, that the word for it’s hard for someone to imagine things, or see what things look like in your mind. It’s not common, but people with Aphantasia have a hard time with thinking about pictures at all, let alone dreaming when they are not asleep.

But aside from these rare situations, whether we think we do or not, dreaming is a basic human activity that can be thwarted and undermined by various factors, something we do without thinking about it, and it is essential for full happy productive lives. Aside from these rare situations, we should be dreaming all the time. I don’t know about you but it feels to me like dreaming these days has gotten harder and harder.

I don’t know what’s gotten into us that makes it so hard to dream. I’m afraid we are losing our ability to dream. I’m afraid that we just aren’t that good at dreaming anymore.

“Now hold on, Br. Zachary,” you might say, “I had a nice little dream just last night, and I like thinking about the future. Br, Zachary you’re starting to make wild accusations, and I’m not like that. You must not be talking about me.” Well, maybe. But I suspect your dreams are not as good as they could be. You could dream bigger. To learn how to dream, and get better at dreaming, I think it’s best if we describe what we’re talking about. If most of us have dreams, then, what is a dream, anyway? Why do we dream?

Doctors and researches don’t agree with themselves all the way, about what is a dream and what isnt. Some doctors noticed that when people have a certain part of the forebrain damaged or injured, this part right here, people stopped reporting dreaming at night, but had no trouble imagining things. Likewise, damage to the nerve centers in the spinal cortex, back here, affect REM sleep states, which seems to directly limit our capacity for dreams.

There is a tight connection between the deep part of sleep where our eyes are moving fast, called REM sleep or Rapid eye movement sleep, (which I will call REM sleep), and dreaming at night. Medically, during Rem sleep, we know that two naturally produced chemicals interact in a way that explains some of the experience of dreaming, just not how much, or in what way. Acetylcholine (which maintains brain activation) is more prominent, as is dopamine (which some researchers link to hallucinations). Dopamine may help give dreams their surreal quality. This can create a surreal, hallucinatory experience of waking brain activity, without actual sensory data or experiential input from the body.

And here’s why dreams are so hard to pin down. The thing is, each of you sitting here listening to me also have a fair amount of Acetylcholine and Dopamine going on up there already. It’s part of the chemical interaction that allows me to say to you, picture a purple unicorn - and then you almost have no choice but to do it. We are all dreaming all day. It’s hard to put a finger on what exactly a dream is. That’s as close as we can get to knowing scientifically what is happening in our inner life.

It might be more productive for us to consider what dreams aren't. Dreams are not reality - this thing we are all a part of right now, here in this church breathing air and sitting with each other, is not a dream, but a reality. This is real. In case you need a reminder, yes, You are really here, and this is really happening. I’m pretty sure… Yes. This is not a dream.

Reality is objective. We can talk about the real world and agree about the things in it because of this objective quality. The world is not simply based on what we think about, but on what we all collectively experience and interpret through our senses. I can talk about the real world just fine. It’s not so easy to talk about my inner world. The subjective quality of our interior life gets in the way, and the tools that help us ascribe meaning, boundaries, rules, to the real world, they don’t work very well in our inner worlds.

But is it so hard to see your inner world as an actual ‘world’? It might not be the real world here, that we are all a part of, but our dreams do have a sort of internal coherence, don’t they? Our dreams, whether we remember them or not, whether we honor them or not, wether we share them or not, say something important about who we are, and what is important to us. Whether we know it or not, whether we cultivate it or not, the capacity to dream belongs to nearly each and every one of us, and with it our own, personal, subjective world that belongs to us, and only us.

Understanding this interior life is very important - it is where we find meaning and belonging. The interior life was important to a man named Saint Augustine in the 3rd century as well. In his written works, Augustine thought and wrote about what a person is, deeply concerned with this subjective, inner world that belonged only to the individual. Augustine once mused, “[people] go abroad to wonder at the heights of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motions of the stars, and they pass by themselves without wondering.”

Elsewhere, Saint Augustine asks, “Don't you believe that there is in [people] a deep so profound as to be hidden even to [the person] in whom it [exists]?” (repeat). This is a rhetorical question, and in trying to answer it, Saint Augustine seems to draw the conclusion that yes, this depth does truly exist, if not in everyone, then in a great many of us. To come to this conclusion, Augustine probed his inner reality with selfless abandon, and the riches he found filled books. He probed his own internal reality with a depth and conviction that I greatly admire.

By the way, what color was he? Yes, Saint Augustine. What did he look like? Do you know where he was from? With a name like Saint Augustine, I imagine that what comes up in your mind is a lot like what comes up in my mind. But let’s seriously think - if he were around today, with the racialized language of our time, what would we call Saint Augustine? White? Black?

Saint Augustine was black. Tia Noel Pratt says it best in her piece from US Catholic, published April 28 2023:

“…[Augustine’s] African identity was usually muted in favor of describing him as a North African citizen of the Roman Empire with a distinct emphasis on “North” and “Empire.” Currently, the United States Census classifies individuals of Middle East and North African (MENA) descent as white. Consequently, emphasizing that St. Augustine was North African allows him, especially in the United States, to be racially coded as white. At the very least, it allows for deemphasizing his Amazigh origins—the endonymic term for the people of North Africa.”

Pratt’s contextualization for me lays bare what’s at stake in this recoloring of Augustine when she writes, “For generations, Africa was continually robbed of its greatest treasures—its people—through the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade while the continent’s natural resources were confiscated or decimated by colonial powers. Yet, throughout all of that time and into the present-day, the church and scholars of theology, philosophy, and literature alike have considered the works of St. Augustine—an African man—as some of the greatest writings ever produced.” Hows that for robbing Africa of it’s greatest treasures?

We know more about race than we’d like to admit about these ancient church fathers, like the time Saint Augustine described a row of processing bishops as “Cyprian the African, Ilarius the Gaul, Ambrose the Italian, and Gregory the Greek.” Those terms were not so much about place - they were racialized words, conveying ethnicity, or phenotype, in the ancient world.

That first name on the list, Cyprian, of course, is the Black African Catholic Bishop who led the African churches in the 3rd century through intense persecution and slaughter at the hands of Rome. But you all knew about that right? No? You never heard of Cyprian’s African resistance?

Maybe that’s because Cyprian is described as ‘North African’ in history books, as well as his reputation as a great scholar of latin emphasized. In this way, a leader of black Christianity is casually coded white. Investigating not african-ness, that is North African versus Berber or Amazigh, etc., but looking for evidence of blackness, that is the modern racialized category that denigrates those who are darker, a category that still functioned in the ancient world, we turn up a number of saints that we (and by we I mean the dominant cultural narrative) have labelled white incorrectly.

I’m talking about people like Tertulian, who gave Christian tradition the language of trinity, and founded trinitarian theology, himself Berber and dark skinned; and Athanasius, the 4th century bishop that popularized a new testament canon of the 27 books now recognized by the catholic church, and whose writing we often cited in the reformation. Athanasius had his coptic lineage and bilingual and lower-class history conveniently ignored by most of his biographies, in favor of being a, you guessed it, “North-African” and scholar of Alexandria. Funny how our racist assumption that scholars in history were white, then helps us ignore the existence of black scholars throughout history.

There are figures in the Bible like the Ethiopian Eunuch, whose blackness cannot be read away, But characters like Simon of Cyrene (which is actually in modern day Libya), or Apollos, who with a greek name and Alexandrian origins, the folks get read as white. But for these two in particular, there are subtle reasons to think they were actually dark skinned.

But this brings me back to my point. Because we live in the real world. This world is shared, we have inherited it, and it is ours to shape. It is our only world, and it has been warped and twisted into a scary violent place. White supremacy was a dream that caught fire, and that dream created entire disciplines of racist science called phrenology and eugenics, the dream created the slave trade and still forms the basis of our global capitalist economy. Your dreams are circumscribed and coded by those evil dreams.

This world is broken. The brutality of capitalism and racism and militarism, these three above all, have stolen liberty and hope from our world. To say nothing of the epidemic of loneliness, worthlessness, and emptiness that is driving statistics of suicide higher and higher. 2018 had the most suicides on record, and the numbers have barely fallen. Mental illness has reached epidemic proportions as well, fueling crises in our healthcare establishments and exacerbating the complexity of homelessness. Our imaginations are held captive by our broken world.

If you look around at this world and listen the the stories we tell about it, I think you’d have good reason to lose hope. If you are living through intense physical and emotional struggle, I see you, and I understand why you may want to give up. If you are a young person trying to make a way, and all you see are headwinds and difficulties, problems and obstacles, with no end in sight or promise of prosperity of comfort, I can understand why you may not even want to try. If you are watching the news and find yourself increasingly on edge, tense, consumed by a non-specific feeling of doom or dread, then that is anxiety, and you are not alone in your fear or hopelessness. You are not wrong to feel scared or alone, to suffer without the words to describe the intense alienation and despondency this life seems to demand of us.

The pain is real. The fear is real. The isolation is real. This world is real - and this is the only one we have. And yet, it is not the only world we have. Inside of us, each and every one of us, is a whole world. An interior world that contains these fears and pains, that contains this suffering, and yet is more and deeper than it. We have in ourselves the capacity to remake the world around us, to dream a new world into existence. We owe it to our friends to share our dreams, to tell them out loud, and in so doing remake the landscape of ideas in our image, for the sake of our futures!

I stand on the shoulder’s of a true giant of homiletics, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., when I say that I have a dream now, of a beloved community, where our children and elders dance and paint and sing and bang drums and talk about our deepest fears, our greatest dreams, and where we know we all are welcome and we all belong. We owe it to future generations to speak these dreams out loud, to share them so that they might grow into reality.

After all, they dreamed this world into existence! You know, They, that they who built the transatlantic slave trade - they crafted a world that dehumanizes not only the non-white bodies that serve and are destroyed, but also dehumanizes white bodies, severing white legacies of resistance and creativity, and crafting false stories and narratives of acquiescence and conformity to justify continued brutalization. Here in the real world, real people’s bodies are the cost of that white dream.

It is for this reason church that we must dream new dreams, and we must share those dreams with one another. You can’t teach a person to dream, you need only get out of the way, and we will do it without thinking. Dreaming is natural. It’s a reflex. Dreaming can not be taught, only experienced. The only prerequisite is rest.

This world will have you believing that you have no space to rest. There is no escape, there is no other world. I weep for the people who have no place to rest - nowhere to go to escape the machine. I weep because I know from my own experience, what it feels like to have nowhere to rest, no place to go to escape the machine. I know what it’s like to feel hopeless in the world, to wonder at the audacity of life despite our suffering. This is real, church. We have to look directly at it.

The way forward isn’t to force yourself to dream, but instead, learn to rest. It is a lesson I’m still learning. Rest is not filling your calendar with social engagements instead of work functions. Rest is not sitting at home spiraling through anxiety patterns until you pass out, exhausted from just thinking all day. Rest is not forcing yourself to have fun or to “relax” so you can check it off your self-care to-do list. Rest is listening to yourself, your body, your needs. Rest, and the dreams will come.

It’s not wrong to be broken, to need help and healing. This world does not make it easy to dream. Dreaming isn’t easy in poverty. Dreaming isn’t easy when you are caring for young children. Dreaming isn’t easy with a cancer diagnosis, or a sick partner, or chronic pain. Dreaming isn’t easy no matter your color, no matter your struggle. Dreaming isn’t easy.

Rest is the first step. Rest, and the dreams will come.

It is through rest that we find dreams, and through dreams that we find our story, our selves, our purpose, our meaning, our destiny, our selves. Afrofuturists are dreaming ourselves into the future because the future others dreamed up didn’t include us. So we had to dream for ourselves, and share those dreams with the world.

If you choose to share your dreams with the world, you can change it, both the real world, and the inner worlds of other people. You can light the light, and pass it on. But dream either way, because your inner world is yours and it is there. Friends, if you see yourself in these images, if you hear yourself in these words, then I forgive you for forgetting how to dream. For losing track in the pain or suffering that they told you you could never fix, so you never tried. I forgive you for believing the stories that they made up. I believed them too.

But church know this - I’m still learning things I thought I already knew. It’s never to late to turn back. Get your dreams back, church. The first step is rest.

I’ll end today by coming back to our opening quote, fom Ytasha L. Womack:

“It’s one thing when black people aren’t discussed in world history. Fortunately, teams of dedicated historians and culture advocates have chipped away at the propaganda often functioning as history for the world’s students to eradicate that glaring error. But when, even in the imaginary future—a space where the mind can stretch beyond the Milky Way to envision routine space travel, cuddly space animals, talking apes, and time machines—people can’t fathom a person of non-Euro descent a hundred years into the future, a cosmic foot has to be put down.”

Rest is that cosmic foot. Education is that cosmic foot. Dream sharing is that cosmic foot. Rest, church, and dream yourself into the future. It is through actual rest that we find space to be ourself, to imagine ourself, our future, into existence. It is here that we find our true dreams. Amen.