As I was video chatting with my R-town amigo CyberDave, I felt a fatigue creeping over me. The chat was going nowhere, as neither of us had news of any significance. So I decided I would lie down for a while in the hope that a short nap would leave me in a less enervated state.
I lay down upon my bed, but my restless mind would not allow sleep to come. I grabbed my tablet computer and played a few hands of Solitaire. Then I closed the Solitaire program and summoned the News to appear on my tablet’s screen. And so it did.
At the top of the news page was an article about an unfortunate and surprising event that happened today in Charlottesville, Virginia. A group of white nationalists, KKK members, Nazis, and members of the alt-right movement had gathered in a park for a rally to “take back America.” The rally was called “Unite the Right.” They want everyone to know that America’s Caucasians are getting a bad deal. Many protesters waved Confederate flags, which have become the unfortunate emblem for haters. Of course they were opposed by counter-protesters, and it didn’t take long for the rally to turn violent. Punches were thrown and chemicals were sprayed. In the midst of this, a car plowed into a crowd of counter-protesters in a pedestrian mall. The car hit twenty people, killing one and injuring nineteen. Five are in critical condition. Another fourteen people were taken to the hospital after suffering injuries from street fighting.
The police did what they could to quell the riot in the park, but the fighting continued on side streets. Many, if not most, of the white nationalists were from out of state. The driver of the hit-and-run car was from Ohio.
I said it was a surprising event because Charlottesville is a university town, home to the University of Virginia. University towns are usually bastions of tolerance, and Charlottesville is no different. In fact, the event that triggered the white nationalist rally was a decision by the Charlottesville city council to remove a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee.
Having fed all of this sad news into my brain, I put my tablet down and rolled over and went to sleep. I napped for about 90 minutes and I dreamed a long dream. When I awakened, I could only remember the very end of the dream.
In this part of my dream, there was a large group of people and each person was holding up some kind of thing similar in shape to a medication capsule but much bigger. Some of these things were white, while some were red, and some were blue with a white star. The people held these things close to their bodies – close to their hearts – as they meandered about in the crowd.
My dreaming self was momentarily puzzled and wondered, “What are these people doing?” Then I realized what I was looking at: red, white, blue, and white stars. Each person held a bit of the American flag and they were trying to come together to make the flag complete. But at this point, they couldn’t find their places. They didn’t know where to go, where to stand, but they were trying. And there the dream ended.
What did the dream mean, if it meant anything at all? I can’t tell you. It’s like a Rorschach test – only you can decide what those inkblots mean.
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