Dust and Stars

I dreamed of defeat and I dreamed of victory.

The first dream I had was in my town. In the dream, ethnically distinct foreigners had conquered it and settled their people there. The dream was vague about the background other than that. It was even vague about who the foreigners were. Let us say Mexicans for convenience.

We were living as a despised minority. We still had our house but no cars anymore. I didn’t have my job anymore or any regular job at all. I worked very hard scraping a living on the margins of society. My clothes were worn and dusty.

I had been doing a little work at this restaurant we have here in town. I was now in the dirt parking lot mounting my bicycle to peddle the two miles to home. As I aimed for the exit a Mexican guy in his truck whipped in to the lot without looking. I had to jerk out of his way. He reflexively jerked also and came close to hitting but did not hit the other cars in the lot just as he had come very close to hitting but did not hit me. I had fallen over but nothing was damaged and there was nothing I could do about it anyway. Just another thankfully minor indignity. I picked me and my bike up and started brushing off dust.

But the guy was mad. He burst out of his truck yelling at me for not looking where he was going. I stood there passively. Then he saw some kind dent on the side of his truck. He yelled that I owed him for the damage I’d caused.

In my dream I knew that he knew I had nothing to do with the dent. He hadn’t even hit me. But he was really mad at me for being in his way and for being part of the despised Anglo minority, and I was weak, and probably I deserved it somehow.

I tried to plead with him gently. “Sir, I didn’t hit your truck” and “sir, you know I can’t pay to fix your truck.” He kept screaming at me. I started to slowly walk my bike out of the lot.

He then got even angrier. He ran across the street to a little café and told all the Mexican men there that an Anglo had damaged his truck and was trying to leave without paying. The men boiled out of their café and followed him back across the street at the run. They then surrounded me and proceeded to beat me to a bloody pulp. They hit me and kicked me over and over. I was in pain and bleeding. Finally they left and I staggered home.

In a few days I went to one of the men who led the town. He was my Mexican patron of sorts. He knew I was capable and badly undervalued and I did cheap work of various kinds for him in return for some measure of protection. He said he could do nothing for me. He needed my attackers more than he needed me.

I had started thinking about leaving the town—how could we possibly afford it, where would we go, and would they even let us, would we have to treat it more as an escape, and that was the dream.

The most curious aspect of the dream was that it was not a nightmare. I experienced the dream just as something that could happen. Miserable, painful, unfair, but real. I felt helpless, but it wasn’t suffocating dream helplessness. It was just the helplessness that you get online or in politics. Bad stuff happens, you can’t do anything about it.

The second dream was a few nights later. In the dream we had some space habitats and a fair amount of industry and settlement in cislunar space. There was—not a coup, that is much much too strong a word—not even a regime change . . . . There was a crystallization or formalization of existing influence and existing arrangements. Essentially the influential men of these near space colonies had long cooperated with each very closely to such an extent and with such mutual trust and friendship that they were they were basically a fraternal body and at some point they announced that they would be officially combining all their enterprises and settlements into one corpus. I say they, but I really should say me. Because these leading men had appointed me their leader. I was by no means an absolute ruler but I had been in the very heart of their counsels, a great many of their plans were mine, their ideas were often from me, and they trusted me completely and loved me as I trusted them and loved them. This was no nominal headship. I was something like a First Consul for Life, a Lord Protector, or even something like a limited monarch. So I announced to the peoples of the near space and of earth that we were forming something official up and why. Why? Because we had great plans. We wanted to dramatically expand our footprint in the solar system, we wanted to rain wealth down on earth and do all things magnificently and we needed organization and leadership to do it. The announcement was received with a huge outpouring of enthusiasm and everyone was very happy, most of all us, because the things we had the vision to do were really great and genuinely noble. And because we had won a great victory, without bloodshed and even without enemies. The dream faded out there. I felt real pleasure.

The most curious aspect of this dream was that it was not a fantasy. Me being the ruler of mankind and the founder of our greatness as we burst out into the solar system and the galaxy were not the focuses of the dream. It wasn’t about me. It was about something great that I happened to be caught up in. The pleasures of the dream were first the good fortune of mankind; second, the good fortune of my brotherhood; and only lastly my good fortune.

The next morning I was thinking about the curious aspect of this dream when I suddenly realized my dream from a few days before had the same curious aspect. The one had not been a nightmare. The other had not been a wish-fulfillment fantasy. In the one the terror I felt and my other reactions were the sorts of reactions one would have in that real life situation. In the other, the pleasure and happiness I felt were the sorts of pleasure and happiness one would feel in reality. They were sober dreams. They were both dreams about me as I am. In very different circumstances, but still me.

I think that contrast must be the point. I feel I had something like a vision of the range of possibility, and I marvel and wonder.