"My Life Just Hung By A Thread"

On July 28th, 2015 at 1:28 am I awoke from a dream that took me to another time, another reality.

What follows are the notes I wrote immediately after that dream ended. It felt as if I had made a spiritual journey and now I was back in bed next to my wife Anne.

I had been transported back in time to U.S. slavery in the Deep South. I was a 16 year old black girl for sale in a slave auction.

Everything felt real and it was a horrible, degrading and frightful experience.

"My life just hung by a thread" [They could have killed or maimed me at any time, with no earthly consequences. I had no control]

"No longer a nigger, no longer stupid, no longer worth only what a bidder would pay." [This had been my perception of the marketplace view of me as I came out of that dream. But in that dream I had been rescued]

"As the gavel was about to swing down onto the base, and 'deal' declared, he yelled 'stop.' " [But my notes don't reveal who rescued me]

"I had been transported, though who knows how, and my body replaced. The slave girl of 16 years, the age I was, and everybody knew it." [For a brief time, I was that 16 year old girl]

[This dream was so vivid, I may have relived an experience from a prior life, and I felt Post Traumatic Stress Disorder]

[As I write this, I can envision the brutality, the chains, the stench, the sense of having no rights, no protections, my life worth only what was paid for me, and only what they could get out of me.]

Dick