In the last week I had two dreams about President Barack Obama. In one I’m wheeling a hand truck or dolly across a campus and remember seeing Obama wheeling it when he brought it over to me, and Michelle and their daughters were with him. In the other, he sits on the floor beside me in a crowded cafeteria to eat with me, and brings me a glass of water before posing for pictures with a young girl.
In an election season, it’s not too surprising that I would dream of political figures, but I don’t recall ever dreaming of an American president other than Obama. I’ve had other dreams of him over the years, usually involving brief meetings and rather ordinary circumstances. In addition to the fact that our values line up fairly well, I expect I feel some affinity for him because we are close in age, and it meant a lot to me to have a president who grew up in the same years I did, watching the same TV shows, being the same age when big events happened in the world.
But of course, the Barack Obama who shows up in my dreams is not the real man, whom I’ve never met. The fact that we’ve never met and yet he’s been so much in the spotlight makes it easy to project on him. As a symbolic figure, I see him as an integration of bright and dark shadow. The whole discussion of racism and the archetypal roots of it is something I hope to address in the future, but Jeremy Taylor has done an excellent job of pointing out the mistaken literalism at play in racist attitudes in a blog post for Psychology Today. However, I don’t think you need to understand a lot of theory to see how people with darker skin in our culture have had negative projections thrust upon them by people with lighter skin. When Obama was elected, he became a lightning rod for all the unconscious fears of people who still see their own shadows in other people.
At the same time, Obama carried the bright shadow projection of millions of Americans. Some of us wept with joy that our country had grown up enough to elect someone other than a pale male to the highest office in the land, and we saw in Obama the possibility of diplomacy rather than war, of compassion instead of greed. We saw in him intelligence, a man of lofty ideals grounded in a solid marriage, parenthood, and an unprivileged background. We longed, as he suggested, to bend the arc of history.
Neither of these sets of projections are President Obama, so when he shows up in my dream the figure carries all these projections, both my own personal ones and those of the larger culture. In that sense (and in his parentage) he stands as a symbol for the integration of light and dark. For me, that suggests that when I dream of him, I am meeting that part of myself that has successfully integrated the qualities in myself that I see as good with those I see as bad. He also represents ambition, success, and finding strength in family and compassion. And hard work, when he’s wheeling a hand truck.
Finally, when politicians show up in my dream, I always wonder how much more functional our government would be if dream work were a regular part of politicians’ lives. I’d love to see the arc of history bend that direction!
6 thoughts on “Dreaming of President Obama”
bending in that direction…here we go!
Love your analysis! I suppose a tiny part of it could have been rehearsal for going to hear him speak.
I’m reminded a bit of a dream I had about Matthew Shepard, about a month after he died. I’d been grieving way more than makes sense for a boy I didn’t know at all. Definitely some projection going on there. I dreamed that I was at a huge stadium and he was speaking. In the dream, he was alive, but very badly injured. He could barely speak. He said, “I can’t do it. I can be what all you people want me to be. I’m not strong enough.” So the dream was basically telling me that I was projecting. I woke up and found that the grief had lifted. Though I still felt sad about his murder, it didn’t feel personal anymore.
That’s an intense dream, Karen! Wow. It’s amazing how dreams work sometimes.
I’m sure my second dream was triggered in part by planning to hear him speak, but the first was well before I knew I’d have the opportunity.
Correction: “I can’t be what all you people want…”
I find it interesting that someone near and dear to me frequently has dreams about being menaced by people of other races, particularly black and Latino. I don’t ever remember having a dream like that. My dreams are almost completely peopled by white characters, and the menacing ones are more likely to be big strong white men (or animals; see the wolves of a few days ago).
Part of it is life experience. He spent several years working construction, where he was a minority and where life was pretty rough and tumble. On the other hand, my experience of people of color is almost completely having them as students in my classes, where I’m the person in the position of power, and my relationship with them is pretty much the same as with any other students in the class.
But I sometimes wonder what else could be behind the difference.
I expect life experience plays a big role in this, as well as the level to which the dreamer has worked at understanding and confronting his or her own shadow pieces. The more we delve into them, the more nuanced I think they get. For a man to be menaced by men with darker skin speaks to an archetypal level of shadow. As women, being menaced by men can be about confronting our own masculine power, and animals often represent instinctual energy.