And to think most of the time I can’t even remember my dreams…
September 14, 2009 by Tellie
Filed under My Inner Kindlings
Last night I had a dream about an actual incident that really happened to me when I was about 6 or 7 years old. I have never shared this story with anyone. That is, until now. I’m guessing the message I am trying to convey with this story is to be aware and careful of what you say to children because, even at a young age, it can have an impact for the rest of their life. And even though this particular incident had no permanent ill effects on me, it did have an effect on me, after all, it did bother me enough to dream about it over a decade later:
From the time I was 4 months old until almost 9 year of age, I lived in England. Just like in America, Blacks are a minority in the UK. And the fact that I am Black and Native American made me even more of a minority. I am not sure how common this is today (as I no longer live in the UK), but when I started school at age 4, I was the only non-white person in my entire elementary school. Since I was reading at age 2, I was assigned to read books that older kids were reading. Typically a child would start off with a book with no words (simply telling a story about what was going on in the pictures), and then progress to a book with a few words, and then to a book with more and bigger words, and so on and so forth. In the British school system, each student reads individually with the teacher for so many minutes out of the week.
One day the teacher was absent and we had a substitute. It was my reading time and she called me back to read with her privately out in the hall. I reached for the books that were suitable for my level and began to read. The substitute gasped in shock: “You can’t read that!” And she handed me a book with no words and stated that “This is the kind of book people like you should be reading.”
What types of dreams have you had lately? Do you dream about past incidences?
