I Had a Dream...

How a vision/dream acted as evidence of the multidimensionality of my Black experience.

Black people read dreams and have for a long time. In this blog, I invite you to recount this dream with me in order to both frame and reflect on theories that account for the multidimensional Black experience (Twoness and The Triple Quandary).

Of Twoness and The Triple Quandary

I want to take a look at some readings surrounding the concept of Twoness and The Triple Quandary concepts theorized by W. E. B. DuBois and A. Wade Boykin respectively.

“One feels his two-ness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” (DuBois 1897)

This excerpt summarizes the heart of the message in “Strivings of the Negro People.” In this article, DuBois shines a light on the veil of separation between the “American and the Negro”.  After over 100 years of knowledge and collective anecdotes, this theory of twoness was expanded to name a third realm of existence, the “Black Experience” which is described as the unique Black culture that exists with its ties to ancestral traditions passed on through knowing and practice.

“The conflicts created by these three realms of negotiation create a triple quandary for Afro-Americans. They are incompletely socialized to the EuroAmerican cultural system; they are victimized by racial and economic oppression; they participate in a culture that is sharply at odds with mainstream ideology.“ (Boykin 1986)

These concepts work together to shed light on the many dimensions that Black people exist in. In a world connected to Jim Crow and Apartheid we are all told to uphold human rights while Black peoples humanity is consistently denied. To be Black is to live in this dissonance. There is different coding applied to any given situation that produces different outcomes depending on the context of the environment. 

The Dream

The dream that I want to recount/read started in the waking world with learning about the Double Slit Experiment in a college physics class. In this experiment, it was discovered that atoms behave differently when under observation. The act of observing the behaviors of an atom fundamentally changed the way the atom behaved. I was taken aback at the idea of atoms behaving differently under observation; the connotations of that made me pause. I spent time awake trying to wrap my mind around the idea of cognizant atoms then, eventually, I fell asleep and had a dream that would stick with me for over a decade.

I opened my eyes to find myself in a hospital, or a psych ward. It was not quite clear, but that’s where I came to. I feel as if I’d become lucid in phase 3 (or 2) of a dream sequence. I noticed that I was in a white room and felt like I was being held captive. I laid in my cot looking at the ceiling, and I found myself pondering the question, “is it two or is it three?”. I was thinking about cell groups and the natural order. It was a simple question but one that was very loaded. “2 or 3?”, is the natural behavior that is observed or what is happening in the shadows.

“2 or 3”

I pondered in circles until I realized both answers do nothing to release me from being confined in a white room. My objective instantly changed from solving a quantum mystery to being free of captivity. A surprising end to the great debate.

I then brace myself for escape and in the blink of an eye (or the start of a new dreamscape) I find myself in a wheelchair being carted off to delivery, still confined by the white walls and the rules of the system that surrounds me. Free from the room but captive still. In a sedated state, I was being rushed through a commotion-filled hall with unfaced beings. Panic sets in, it’s time to escape, and just as I am about to be carted off into another room I crash. I quite literally crash into a new existence, like I had been there before, prior to all this, as if I was in an incepted dream. 

I awake in a car crash, in full clown makeup, no explanation given. Not a happy clown, a sad, crying clown. I realized that I’d been a clown this entire time. I was a clown in a crash before the hospital, and now that I have crashed, I was a clown on my way back to the white room I teleported from, stuck in a loop. At that moment, it was clear to me, with the rain pouring from the sky onto my head, I still don’t know if it’s two or three… I was stuck in a layered infinite loop. In pure despair and with runny clown tears, I look up into the sky and cry for mercy. Who knows how long I stayed in that dream loop?

Being a clown and stuck in a loop with a looming question was enough to stay with me for a lifetime. It was a dream that I recalled sporadically in life, a haunting of sorts, but that wasn’t the end of the dream. No, there was another part that I’d forgotten. In fact, this practice of recounting this dream allowed me to remember how it really ended. After I cried as a perpetually doomed clown, I remember pulling away from the sad scene like a slowly widening drone shot, looking down on a sobbing clown getting pulled away by another force by a new dream. I awoke again in a new existence. 

This time I was in a rodeo by the outgate, with nowhere to go but front and center. This place was nothing like a rodeo you've ever seen, though; it was a physical contradiction. In this large open field of blood-red-orange dirt I was both alone but surrounded. I was surrounded by things and beings, and all of them were closing in to the point where this open space felt small.

There were different colored grocery store plastic bags floating toward the sky. They were in the shape of roasted chickens. The bags floated with such ease and drifted so slowly, and the sight of them in contrast to the dirt and the white gate was visually calming. This was not a relaxing dream, though. This beautiful sight was accompanied by ominous stares. I was alone in the rodeo, but there were stares and looks coming from people in 1780 British officer attire. They were just staring in anticipation of imminent doom, a truly chilling sight.

I remember the dream ending in a continuation of me both running in fear and stopping to take in the beauty of the colorful plastic bag chickens. 

The Waking World

I have had that dream in my head and in my heart for ages. I remember waking up and saying to myself, “That was a movie!”. The dream was vivid and cinematic. It was an inspiration. I wanted to be able to replay what I just saw. I wanted a budget and a camera. It was an anthology. Three seemingly unconnected shorts, but what was it about? It was a horror story about something I feared but didn’t fully understand.

Eerily, recounting this dream connects me to some real-life experiences I’ve had recently. Recounting this dream shows me similarities between being in that white room and being hospitalized for a week prior to being rushed to a hall in a sedated state off to delivery. I recall watching the series Baskets and finding myself relating to a clown in a rodeo. However, the most recent connection I had to this dream and the reason for my writing this is this continued debate of the idea of 2’s and 3’s. Of all that chaos, the 2’s and 3’s stuck with me most because I never fully understood where the question came from. For some time, the 2’s and 3’s represented my misunderstanding of the observer effect and how it relates to physics. However, more recently I have come full circle as to what the 2’s and 3’s represented. It is of Twoness and the Triple Quandary. This dream was a catalyst for my understanding of my Black experience. 

Earlier this year I was in the audience at the 2023 Culturally Responsive Evaluation and Assessment Conference listening to the brilliant Dr. Jennifer Randall explain Boykins's theory on the Triple Quandary. This was my first introduction to this theory and it stood out to me because I had just heard the incomparable dr. monique liston explain DuBois’s concept of Twoness. I had found myself physically sitting in the long-dreaded question: is it two or three? The pieces began to fall into place, the question finally started to make sense. “2 or 3” was not about the atoms, “2 or 3” has always been about me.

The Reading

Through my experience as Black child, I grew up understanding that there was more than one world I lived in. There was the world as it is on paper, the world as it is for Black people, and the world that exists where everyone knows “you thought like Lit”.  For those who aren’t familiar with the legend of Lit it goes like this: “you thought like Lit, thought you farted when you shit.” For example, for years I thought “2 or 3” was about how atoms behaved but when I looked into the Double Slit experiment it was clear to me that I “thought like Lit”.

Perhaps in my subconscious mind, I had already internalized the idea of twoness and the triple quandary. Maybe learning about how observation affects something as miniscule as an atom allowed me to finally understand the fuel behind this fragmented existence.

I see now how the white walls of the hospital were representative of me living captive in whiteness unable to escape that confinement—feeling like a helpless clown trying to teleport to a world that is not framed in whiteness, doomed to return. 

I see now how the rodeo was a representation of the white gaze, that comes with the dehumanizing pressure to perform or be performed on.

I see now how this great debate of 2 or 3 is really a question of what does it mean to be constantly observed as a human made up of atoms.

I see now how this great debate of “2 or 3” was a simple Black math solution, and it is  “Who all finna be there?”.

Blackness, in all its beauty and glory, is a contradicting existence. The reality is that the experience of Blackness, like the atoms, varies depending on who is looking.