Dream Diary for Last Night, recorded May 30, 2018

The Black Jeep

This is a really brief entry, not much to describe. I dreamed that I needed to rent a black Jeep to drive around, and I had parked it in the sort-of recurrent big parking lot that serves as both a residential space and an overflow lot for where I used to work. I dreamed of leaving it there, and then I needed to go back for it, so I made sure I had the electronic key fob and knew the approximate area where I'd parked. I finally tapped the button that would make the head and tail lights come on, and therefore found the Jeep. But when I opened it, I saw that it was just a shell of the vehicle, basically the wheels and outer covering. Someone had made away with the seats and motor. This was distressing to the point of waking me up, at which point I realized to my relief that it was not a real worry.

Waiting for Patricia

I had a more lengthy-seeming dream after taking the dogs to go potty early this morning that basically I was in a place that partially but only slightly resembled my family's old Smith house in Rico, and we were doing various puttering-around things while waiting for my best friend from Georgia College to come by for a visit. The dream kind of rambled on and involved events such as my trying to get a wall control in the house to work to run the thermostat and the laundry to work correctly. I finally got a setting put right so that the entire display lit up, but a number code and either a beep or a voice sounded: an error. I went into the laundry room/kitchen combination, and the washing machine, atop the driver, was just finishing sending a spout of water into the air to land near where I stood. And after all of that, Patricia still had not shown up, though other people in flowered attire could be seen from time to time through the screen door. We had a family with kids out on some sort of screened-in patio near the door, but no sign of my friend.

A Current Rant of Mine, from Facebook Comments

Look who have prospered most by promoting [ideas that some lives matter less] - by paying certain kinds of people less, or by owning them outright and making them work; by identifying others as savages and driving them from the lands of their birth, then taking ownership of those lands and resources; by imprisoning people disproportionately according to their race and getting free labor thanks to the loophole in the 13th Amendment; by discriminatory housing practices and health care practices and educational practices and corporate practices that put most of the money in the pockets of people "like us." These prosperous and shrewd people don't have to be racists at all. They prosper because they are able to manipulate just enough of the REST of us to be racist, and to manipulate just enough of the rest of us to be silent and okay with it, or maybe to sit and simply argue it on social media all day. If these people and their centuries-long legacy and America's dependence on their messages was removed, who knows how life and news and entertainment and society would move forward? We don't know that. They've made us dependent on the worldview they've manipulated some of us to have. And now it's reduced to its absurdity and they still won't budge. It seems like a nightmare to us, but maybe now we're seeing how horribly they've manipulated so many of us: not because we're evil, not because we're stupid, but because human beings and their organizations can strongly influence even smart, well-intentioned people that way. And some of them have done so, I hate to say, in the name of religion. Even our religion. I was taught to think that God put protections against that in the very fabric of what we all believed ... but I was taught that by some of the people who were teaching everyone what practically amounted to "just shut up and let us keep on manipulating you."