MLK Dream

I find myself dreaming differently when I spend the nights in new places, and this is as true as ever in Portland, at my Uncle Merle's home. Here is a snippet of one particular dream:

There was an art exhibition in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. and several art students and teachers had set up a display on a stage to honor the man. There were about seven pieces, and they were arranged in the shape of a curving snake, growing progressively larger from the tail to the head. Most of them were made out of stone, and it was cool because each of them seemed to have a different international style. The smallest one was a tear drop carved out of rock, divided to symbolize the balance of yin and yang. There was also a 3 dimensional picture of different poses of MLK, and then the final, and largest piece was an oriental tree that crawled up vertically rather than stretching along across the stage. The tree seemed to be an extension of the the previous 3-d picture, but it blended MLK's silhouettes with the tarnished, noble bark of the tree, frozen in rock. As each artist described the piece that they were representing, a couple of them pushed each other out of the way so that they could say something about a particular piece, which was totally inappropriate for the demonstration. On girl's hand was red when she slapped a stone trying to knock it away from another student. I was positioned at the end, in front of the grand tree, and I described it as: "All of these memorabilia are connected as they represent MLK and his love for peace, and his perseverance for connecting human-kind. The art is just as important as the space between the figures, and this rings true growing into the ancient tree, the bark blooming between the faces, and acting as time and space, bringing together the different poses and ideals of MLK so we as a people can position our thoughts in between these cracks. Room for us is room to roam, and to see how we relate together as a whole, wise words for one community and humanity." Not exactly verbatim, I guess, but I really liked the dream