My Dreams Are More Than Dreams: That what it seems

 

MY DREAMS ARE MORE THAN DREAMS:  That’s what it seems

by

Anthonystjoseph

     As long as my memory is and since I was a child my dreams have always been very profound, lucid, colorful, fun, exciting, unforgettable, and most of all, illuminating.  There are also times when my dreams are quite foretelling as in yes, telling me the future.  The most startling thing about my dreams is that I never actually know that I am dreaming.  My dreams are like my real life and my real life is like my dreams, they both seem real and seem to have larger meaning.

     I was over thirty years old when my mother told me that most people dreamed in black and white.  I looked at my mother when she told me of the black and white dreaming phenomenon that most people endure and openly and directly accused her of lying.  I told her straight to her face that she was lying.  I could not believe something so ludicrous as people dreaming in black and white.  I myself have never had a black and white dream.  I told my mother in an almost violent tone, “That’s just stupid! If I ever dreamed in black and white then I would know I was dreaming!”  For I could never tell and never realized in any of my dreams that I was actually dreaming.  Even in the dream that I levitated in, I actually felt as though it was a true experience that I was going through.

     I guess I should talk about the foundation of my dreams or as some would call, the settings.  One of the most startling things about my dream life is that there are several locations and places that I go to in my dreams since I was a child that I have never been to in this lifetime.  There is the school that I go to often in my dreams.  There is also the Oceanside cliffs with the paths and trees that I have visited several times, it is one of my favorite places.  There are also people that visit me and I visit with that I have never met in this lifetime that visit me again and again in my dreams.  I feel as though I am being instructed by these various people in my dreams who seem very concerned with my development.  I love the reality of my dream world and my dream world seems to love me.  There is a psychic strain that runs in my maternal family and a spiritual stream that runs in my paternal family and I feel it may have doubled something in my genetic combination and this is my world.

     I had an apartment in Tucson, Arizona and one night I dreamed the apartment next door to mine burned down.  A week later I came home and my apartment window was wide open and so was my door.  I couldn’t believe someone had opened or broke into my apartment and just left everything wide open.  I ran around and checked on some of my important belongings and valuables and all were there.  Then I noticed that my door had actually been bashed open and the door frame was hanging off of the wall.  Then I realized I smelled smoke.  I walked back outside and my other neighbor on the opposite side told me that the neighbor next door to me had indeed burned down her apartment.  Apparently her kids had set her apartment on fire and the Fire Department had broken down my door to make sure my apartment wasn’t on fire.  I had previously told some of my friends at work about the dream of the apartment next door burning down a week before and they were in awe that I had predicted it.

     There is an old myth, legend, or wives tale about dreams that I would like to factually debunk.  The tale, as it is commonly told tells us that if you are falling in a dream and you hit the ground that you actually die in real life.  This is not true.  I had a dream were I was standing on a cliff in a violent rain storm.  Suddenly in the dream I fell off of the cliff and was plummeting to my inevitable death.  At first I was flailing my limbs and trying to reach for anything and nothing in the sky to save me from my fall.  During the fall and my screams I suddenly realized something.  The dream happened in my early twenties when life seemed impossible.  It was a time in my life when I was realizing that ‘happily ever after’ was not available to me in this lifetime.  It was at this moment and during that particular revelatory thought while plummeting to my death in the dream that I realized, when I hit the ground, all the pain of my life would be over.   I was instantly relieved and relaxed and waited for death when I hit the ground, for as I stated, I never know I am dreaming and my dreams seem real.  As I relaxed in the fall and let a smile come over my face in relief of leaving this life I suddenly hit the ground of a school gym and found myself landing on a bunch of school chairs.  I was instantly upset that I was still alive.  I was pissed off.  I stood up in the empty gym and looked around and then suddenly woke up and still upset that I was still in this existence…  I thought I was finally moving on.

     Something amazing, spiritual, and seemingly special is going on with me and my life and I’m not quite sure what it is.  I know there are so called family, associates, and tons of outsiders who feel they are contributing to what is happening to me but there are spiritual factors that most do not know of.  My faith and understanding of what I am going through wavers from hate to love and from joy to disdain.  Sometimes I feel like I never want to believe in God again and that my belief in God is what has destroyed my life and that I have been bamboozled.  And then sometimes I feel I have been given the greatest gift of all to know that I am here to learn things and to understand that this life is more than ‘this’ life and it is what comes after that we are to understand and I am on the road to understanding THAT. 

By

Anthonystjoseph

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I Am An Unreasonable Man

 

I AM AN UNREASONABLE MAN

by

Anthonystjoseph

     My Central Nervous System does not respond well to stupid so I try to avoid it.  My Nervous System actually locks up to the point where my sphincter reacts and therefore I have to respond in order to unlock my bowels.  Try as I might, I just can’t avoid stupid on this planet, no matter where I am it bumps into me daily.  I don’t know if it comes from my high IQ or a spiritual celestial curse but some of these folks walking around just aren’t properly equipped.

     George Bernard Shaw says, ‘Reasonable men adapt themselves to the world around them.  The unreasonable man expects the world to adapt to him, therefore all progress is made by unreasonable men’.

     I am an unreasonable man.

By

Anthonystjoseph

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The Racist Rant of John J Hargrove: Author of 'Beneath The Surface'

 

THE RACIST RANT OF JOHN J HARGROVE:

Author of ‘Beneath The Surface

by

Anthonystjoseph

     I am so sickened and appalled at the trend of certain members in the human race to not hold someone accountable for their actions just because they belong to the same race.  We recently witnessed a police officer shoot an unarmed teenager and not be held accountable for it.  Members of his race came out and said it was justified twenty minutes after the homicide occurred.  Now they will tell you that he has been cleared by a Grand Jury and ‘they’ were right.  I will just point out the new video of the officer caught on film killing an African American man by shooting him in the back while he was running away and then going up and planting evidence, an event that occurs often as most of us African Americans know.  It’s called a ‘throw away’ weapon that many officers carry to make homicides ‘justifiable’.  We as African Americans have seen this thousands of times in our lifetime.  Yes, I said thousands.  That’s how easy it is for a police officer to shoot and kill an African American, or for that matter, an impoverished American, because many Caucasians have also found themselves on the other side of an unscrupulous officer’s handgun.  But the recent event that has me so upset is the release of a video showing how John J. Hargrove, a former trainer at SeaWorld and author of a new book titled ‘Beneath the Surface’ truthfully feels about members of my race.  We are sub human to him and apparently sub whale.  He cares about the whales but he doesn’t care for or about members of the African race as this video absolutely conveys in his use of disparaging words and labels of my kind.  He laughingly berates and condemns my race continually in his self-felt comical tirade against my race over behavior of a few.  He thinks of us as a disparaging moniker.

     Now what upsets me most about this event and this video is NOT what he says in the video or the fact that he is a through and through racist bigot.  The fact that he doesn’t care for my race of people and thinks of us as less than whales does not upset me at all because I am aware of people like John J. Hargrove.  I know that people like John J. Hargrove exist.  I have lived a very long life and I would have to be insane or a complete idiot if I wasn’t aware of people like John J. Hargrove.  I like when people like John J. Hargrove expose themselves as racist because then I know where they stand and I know to not go to their house for dinner or invite them to mine.  What upsets me most is how many Caucasian people are coming out to support John J Hargrove and saying that what he did and said was okay.  Some are saying that he was drunk in the video and so since he was drunk his behavior was and is excusable.  Now I don’t know what color the sky is in your world, but the sky in my world is blue and everybody in my ‘blue sky’ world knows that a DRUNK speaks their true thoughts.  People are coming out of the woodwork to support him and say that this is a smear campaign by SeaWorld.  SeaWorld didn’t get this man drunk.  Although his twelve or thirteen years of working for them and adding to and profiting off of the mistreatment of whales may have paid for the liquor that loosened his tongue, SeaWorld did not get him drunk and suggest that he comically disparage my race or display his true feelings and emotions towards my race.  SeaWorld did say they would have fired him if they had known about this video sooner since he was wearing a SeaWorld shirt in the video.  SeaWorld did not make these statements.  John J. Hargrove did!  SeaWorld also holds whales in captivity in horrible conditions and tears whale families apart in their effort to achieve financial gain, BUT this is not about SeaWorld!  This is about John J. Hargrove and who he is as a person and what he feels about my race.

     I just find it intolerable that people are saying his actions are okay.  So, no, John J. Hargrove, you did not upset me.  All Mister Hargrove did was illuminate me as to who he was as a person and what he thought of MY people.  So don’t try to sell me a book John J. Hargrove.  Don’t try to sell me anything.  Go to your corner and I’ll stay in mine.  I care for the plight of the whales so deeply that I will even appreciate YOU spreading the word to your racist supporters and even care deeply enough for the whales that I will accept and even appreciate THEIR help in this endeavor but as I said, don’t invite me to dinner and I won’t invite you.  It’s a big world.

By

Anthonystjoseph

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Regret vs Faith

             

REGRET VS FAITH

by

Anthonystjoseph

     I have been going through a big transformation lately which has been mired in struggle and regret.  I am deeply troubled at the current time because of a huge sense of loss and regret.  A few months ago I got a wild bug up my ass in New Stanton, Pennsylvania and decided to cut all of my hair off for a change.  Immediately after taking a pair of sewing scissors and cutting my hair off in a hotel room I felt no regret.  I was comforted in the fact that I took such a momentous step of relieving myself of something I had cherished and coveted for so long.  Eventually, we all must say goodbye to everything.  It wasn’t until I woke up at three am in the morning and walked to the bathroom and saw myself in the mirror that I felt the first sense of loss, and a tremendous sense of loss it was.  I had immediately lost ten years of life and my youth.  Delilah herself had guided my scissors and thoughts and stolen my powers of holding off the inevitable friend and foe called time.

     As I saw myself in the mirror I realized in a quick and great sense of horror that I had aged ten years.  It was as if I was looking at my uncle himself for I looked exactly like my uncle with all the lines of age on my face clearly present.  I immediately realized that my hair that was four feet long in its twenty years of growth had been holding my face back in its ponytail and preventing the lines of wisdom and age from showing.  My hair and its weight had been providing a natural face lift that was now gone.  I had always wondered why I wasn’t aging as my fellow high school classmates.  When I looked at their photos on social media I felt as though they looked like my parents instead of my classmates.  Now in the second that I had looked in the hotel bathroom mirror at three o’clock in the morning I had joined them.  I immediately felt an extreme sense of loss and started to panic.  My youth had been stolen by my own idiotic hair stealing hands.  There was no turning back.  All these thoughts came in a few seconds as I walked closer and closer to the mirror hoping I was wrong and my vision was off.  No, I had clearly aged ten years as I slept.  My youthful face which was clear of any lines of age and time was gone.  As I took two more steps towards the hotel mirror I walked right past it and went into the inner bathroom and urinated and let the urine and the loss I felt leave my body at the same time.  There was nothing I could do to change back time as any scholar or living being would tell you was impossible.  I laughed it off and went to bed forbidding myself to let regret take hold.  For I knew that when I took the scissors in hand to take away the four foot long mane of hair that had caused many to admire and comment away that if I ever let regret in it would take me to my knees in loss.  I went back to bed and decided I would just find a heavy moisturizer and hope for the best.

     Now, a few months later, the regret is trying to grab hold with an iron fist that Samson himself would yield before Delilah got ahold of his mane of hair.  I am now allowed to walk in public without anyone noticing me or any of the many admirers that would be complete strangers walking up to me and declaring their admiration of my hair.  Little old ladies and young girls alike would ask to feel it and touch it on a daily basis.  Occasionally I would even have to defend and state that it was all my own hair that I had grown naturally.  Now I walk past people in a store and no one cares to even look in my direction.  My natural form of celebrity disguised as a four foot long mane of hair is gone.  Visually, I am now a commoner, a peasant. 

     By the way, someone did happen to stare at me in the store the other day like the days gone past and seem to not be able to take their eyes off me.  I basked in the feeling of being admired again.  I guess it was the clear marks of obvious wisdom that my new age lines revealed.  Or maybe it was as the lovely clerk in Sally’s Beauty Supply said, as I bought new hair products for my new afro, “You’re still attractive”.  As she said the words I slightly mocked regret with a look of terror on my face and replied to her encouragement at my obvious sense of loss, “You think so!?!”

     As the sense of regret tries to take hold on a daily and sometimes hourly basis I continually fight it off with my sense of faith and hoping that everything happens for a reason.  I go back and forth from what I want to do to with my new loss of hair length and celebrity and waiver in new hair styles and trends but I know it really doesn’t matter because God knows my hair is not me.  I needed to concentrate on other endeavors as well so ces la vie.  With my new afro which is growing as fast as my dreadlocks did, I tell myself that I traded my mane of hair for a crown of hair.  I must have faith that I am still me and truth be told, thinking clearly, that doesn’t even require faith, I am still me.

By

Anthonystjoseph

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