In the dream, I am going to New Orleans and earning an advanced degree at the Martin Luther King School of Spirituality. My dream colleague is an earth scientist and has just returned from Africa with an earth sample.
In the morning I awoke with a crook in my neck, which I blamed Daylight Savings Time and the previous night’s bad television. I had been viewing the devastation of Japan’s earthquake. Then I remembered this dream, of studying at the Martin Luther King School of Spirituality. A smile came to my lips. I almost brushed aside the memory of an individual telling me of his trip to Africa to get an earth sample, but I realized this dream detail was important.
I had been reading Linda Hogan’s Memoir, The Woman Who Watches Over the World. She describes the time her daughter drove to New Mexico in the middle of the night. She drove several hours before turning on a dirt road, not knowing where she was or why she gathered a container of earth and brought it home. Later she found she had gone to Chimayo.
Chimayo, it turns out, is a famous place of healing earth. “There are places that beckon,” Linda Hogan writes, “as iron to magnet, a geology that calls us with its properties, a geography of healing.” Her daughter had gone not to church, but to the source itself–a site deemed sacred by people who have inhabited the land tens of thousands of years.
Certainly earth from Africa serves as a reminder to cherish the heartland from which all humanity evolved. And the location of the dream, New Orleans, evokes a well loved geography which has also suffered catastrophe, and flooding (as Japan did after the tsunami).
The power of Martin Luther King and his representation in the dream offered me hope at a time of real disaster. Martin Luther King had a dream, and he was effective as an agent of increased consciousness. His ability to create lasting change for the good is important to remember at a time when so much of what is in the news can leave one feeling helpless.
The morning after watching news of Japan’s Earthquake and tsunami I awoke with a crook in my neck, and by the afternoon the pain had meaning. I took it as a talisman of a dream healing, a token from my dream study at the Martin Luther King School of Spirituality.
