Peculiar dream. . .
Jul. 27th, 2002 10:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynAmerica, sometime during an era of very satisfied prosperity. Sometime when it was accepted as a given that the pastor had as much authority on pretty much any political or scientific subject as any expert in that field. (Sometime in the past, thank you - I am cynical enough to know how much of America this applies to even as we speak.) Might've been between the World Wars, during one of the more prosperous patches... might've been prior to the Great War. I'm not sure.
There were superheroes beginning to emerge in it. Or, rather, supers; they were just starting to make the news, and people were talking about them, but none of them had been able to exert their powers often enough in public to be viewed as anything like a hero. Part of the problem may have been the attitudes of the folks involved. See, the folks in the dream were none too sure what to think of the powered folk - there were different words for 'em in different parts of the country, and the one I was in called 'em novas. (Yes. I know. White Wolf's Aberrant. I haven't read that in over a year.)
There were discussions about 'em in town, which looked like a nice shiny prosperous 'this is what Middle America is supposed to look like' town. Nobody was quite sure what to think, as the whole idea was freaky. Then came the big burst of news. . . somehow in this time frame someone managed to orchestrate what I can only really call a media blitz. Lots of scientists, doctors, political figures, and preachers on the radio and on whistle-stop speechmaking tours, talking about the powered ones. Showing up to make the speeches in person seemed to be the absolute biggest way of spreading the message; radio was sort of secondary; there may have been a hint of newsreels, but I wasn't sure. It's worth noting that it was in a time frame when people actually trusted their political figures and looked up to them, so that kind of narrows the time frame a bit. (Yeah, I know. To never. It was a dream, okay?) And the speeches. . . they were all bad. As in scary. As in doctors calmly using 'Darwin's theory of evolution' to somehow indicate that these people were freaks and very, very dangerous to the population as a whole, that the ordinary people were the chosen people and the ones who would survive and be the best and the future of humanity, etc. The politicians were in 'I Care About You' mode towards their constituents, and the preachers. . . they were mostly preaching that it wasn't a sin to carry these novas off, that it was right and good for our leaders to protect their people by having the powered ones taken away to places they would never be able to hurt anyone ever again. This, despite a lack of evidence anywhere in the dream that the powered ones were hurting people at all yet - the impression was that most of them were adults who were horribly bewildered by their own capabilities and too frightened or confused to do much more than the initial spurts of the power. The government was very brisk and businesslike about getting hold of them before they could do more than that. No one ever said what happened to the novas after the government got hold of them, but the preachers were throwing around serious sermons implying that the powered ones deserved to be carried off because they were bad, sinful people. Not that their powers made them bad - that they were each individually bad people and it was okay to let them be taken away, because the people of these prosperous towns weren't bad, that they were protecting themselves from sin/badness.
In the dream I was some assistant or junior pastor or something, and I think the dream-character may have been male. If the dream-character wasn't a pastor, then he was at least one of the fine upstanding pillars of the community. The pastor in one of the churches had just concluded a speech about all this. Not really a sermon, but a speech. A gathering of townsfolk after hours, outside of the usual cycle of worship; I guess it was to supplement the politicians. I'm not sure. All I know is that people were nodding in satisfaction and starting to leave, and the pastor had gotten down from the pulpit and left. . . and I just couldn't deal with it any more. Maybe the part I was supposed to be playing in the dream was supposed to stay quiet or something, but I couldn't deal with it any more. I stood up and walked up into that pulpit - there had been a terrible urge to stay quiet and suss things out from among the people before acting at first, but I couldn't deal with it any more. Got up there and looked at the folks who remained, and, um, I remember thinking in the dream that I was invoking Charlton Heston even as the words came out.
"Damn you," I bellowed at the top of my lungs, "damn you all to hell...
"There is nothing wrong with them, and you know it. I will not stand by any more and listen to this, one more word of smug self satisfaction." They were very few left in the church hall at this point, but the ones who were there were starting to look uncomfortable at this point. "You know this is wrong. I won't hear any more of this! Not about-" and I remember this being the hard part and adding in a little extra volume here- "my people- yes, my people - who are NOT mad, or-" Here I started to lose the bellowing voice of the dream-character, and could only hear myself- but the audience could hear me too, and the important thing was to finish the sentence. "-or bad," I managed to get out, "or even dangerous."
They were shaking, although more from the force of the words than from actual fear, and I remember turning and walking away; then I woke up. In the dream I had no powers, I only knew that I shared blood or genetics with these people and that it had to be said, because no one knew what I was and if I said it, that would blow their conceptions out of the water. Because I was someone they saw as good in the dream, and they couldn't treat me as one of the Bad People - not if their world-view was going to stay whole.
I wish I had that kind of guts in real life. Writing letters to congressbeings and foreign leaders on behalf of Amnesty isn't the same. I wish I had someone or some group I shared a link with that no one knew about, so that I could somehow eventually be in a position where I could haul that link out and beat the idiots senseless with it - by saying 'look, you have said I am a good person and that these people cannot be good - well, guess what...'. I don't know if it'll ever happen, but if it does, I can only hope that I'll have as much guts in the real world as I did when I was only dreaming.
There were superheroes beginning to emerge in it. Or, rather, supers; they were just starting to make the news, and people were talking about them, but none of them had been able to exert their powers often enough in public to be viewed as anything like a hero. Part of the problem may have been the attitudes of the folks involved. See, the folks in the dream were none too sure what to think of the powered folk - there were different words for 'em in different parts of the country, and the one I was in called 'em novas. (Yes. I know. White Wolf's Aberrant. I haven't read that in over a year.)
There were discussions about 'em in town, which looked like a nice shiny prosperous 'this is what Middle America is supposed to look like' town. Nobody was quite sure what to think, as the whole idea was freaky. Then came the big burst of news. . . somehow in this time frame someone managed to orchestrate what I can only really call a media blitz. Lots of scientists, doctors, political figures, and preachers on the radio and on whistle-stop speechmaking tours, talking about the powered ones. Showing up to make the speeches in person seemed to be the absolute biggest way of spreading the message; radio was sort of secondary; there may have been a hint of newsreels, but I wasn't sure. It's worth noting that it was in a time frame when people actually trusted their political figures and looked up to them, so that kind of narrows the time frame a bit. (Yeah, I know. To never. It was a dream, okay?) And the speeches. . . they were all bad. As in scary. As in doctors calmly using 'Darwin's theory of evolution' to somehow indicate that these people were freaks and very, very dangerous to the population as a whole, that the ordinary people were the chosen people and the ones who would survive and be the best and the future of humanity, etc. The politicians were in 'I Care About You' mode towards their constituents, and the preachers. . . they were mostly preaching that it wasn't a sin to carry these novas off, that it was right and good for our leaders to protect their people by having the powered ones taken away to places they would never be able to hurt anyone ever again. This, despite a lack of evidence anywhere in the dream that the powered ones were hurting people at all yet - the impression was that most of them were adults who were horribly bewildered by their own capabilities and too frightened or confused to do much more than the initial spurts of the power. The government was very brisk and businesslike about getting hold of them before they could do more than that. No one ever said what happened to the novas after the government got hold of them, but the preachers were throwing around serious sermons implying that the powered ones deserved to be carried off because they were bad, sinful people. Not that their powers made them bad - that they were each individually bad people and it was okay to let them be taken away, because the people of these prosperous towns weren't bad, that they were protecting themselves from sin/badness.
In the dream I was some assistant or junior pastor or something, and I think the dream-character may have been male. If the dream-character wasn't a pastor, then he was at least one of the fine upstanding pillars of the community. The pastor in one of the churches had just concluded a speech about all this. Not really a sermon, but a speech. A gathering of townsfolk after hours, outside of the usual cycle of worship; I guess it was to supplement the politicians. I'm not sure. All I know is that people were nodding in satisfaction and starting to leave, and the pastor had gotten down from the pulpit and left. . . and I just couldn't deal with it any more. Maybe the part I was supposed to be playing in the dream was supposed to stay quiet or something, but I couldn't deal with it any more. I stood up and walked up into that pulpit - there had been a terrible urge to stay quiet and suss things out from among the people before acting at first, but I couldn't deal with it any more. Got up there and looked at the folks who remained, and, um, I remember thinking in the dream that I was invoking Charlton Heston even as the words came out.
"Damn you," I bellowed at the top of my lungs, "damn you all to hell...
"There is nothing wrong with them, and you know it. I will not stand by any more and listen to this, one more word of smug self satisfaction." They were very few left in the church hall at this point, but the ones who were there were starting to look uncomfortable at this point. "You know this is wrong. I won't hear any more of this! Not about-" and I remember this being the hard part and adding in a little extra volume here- "my people- yes, my people - who are NOT mad, or-" Here I started to lose the bellowing voice of the dream-character, and could only hear myself- but the audience could hear me too, and the important thing was to finish the sentence. "-or bad," I managed to get out, "or even dangerous."
They were shaking, although more from the force of the words than from actual fear, and I remember turning and walking away; then I woke up. In the dream I had no powers, I only knew that I shared blood or genetics with these people and that it had to be said, because no one knew what I was and if I said it, that would blow their conceptions out of the water. Because I was someone they saw as good in the dream, and they couldn't treat me as one of the Bad People - not if their world-view was going to stay whole.
I wish I had that kind of guts in real life. Writing letters to congressbeings and foreign leaders on behalf of Amnesty isn't the same. I wish I had someone or some group I shared a link with that no one knew about, so that I could somehow eventually be in a position where I could haul that link out and beat the idiots senseless with it - by saying 'look, you have said I am a good person and that these people cannot be good - well, guess what...'. I don't know if it'll ever happen, but if it does, I can only hope that I'll have as much guts in the real world as I did when I was only dreaming.
