Lately, I’ve been having “recurring” dreams. It isn’t a verbatim scenario each time, but the energy runs kindred. They are dreams of disunion and usually surround politics. A few weeks ago I dreamt I was a five-year-old girl who had to pose in front of the White House with Donald Trump. My hair was the color of Cheetos (symbolic?) and I wore the black and white dress of a maid (also symbolic?). This five-year-old girl-self was angry. I did not want to be there with him smiling down at me. Waking up, the dream felt absurdist in the dictionary sense of the definition. Though humorous, it also left me a bit squeamish.
This past week I started re-reading Parable of the Sower. It takes place between 2024 and 2025, so it seemed fitting time. It features a teenage girl navigating the growing wealth gap in America, wildfires that ravage the state of California, and a corrupt president who promises to “Make America Great Again.” That’s a quote from the book, a book which was published in 1993. As I round out the first seventy-some pages and reach the end of Lauren Olamina’s March 2025 journal entries, I’m one of many folks chilled by the similarities at play in our reality. The New Yorker published a whole article on it back in 2017. Adrienne Marie Brown and Toshi Reagon have a whole podcast on it titled Octavia’s Parables. So I won’t elaborate much more on the phenomenon. Other people are doing that better.
What I am curious about is Butler’s wisdom. Some folks have deemed her a prophet, saying she predicted Donald Trump’s election as well as the February 2025 wildfires in California. But she resisted this title in her lifetime. In her essay “A Few Rules for Predicting the Future,” she says “I didn’t make up the problems.” Instead, Octavia explained, “All I did was look around at the problems we’re neglecting now and give them about 30 years to grow into full-fledged disasters.” In essence, she studied her history, she studied her present. From there, she was able to forecast the future.
There’s a lot of panic going on about the now. And, yeah, the now is troubling. But I wonder if this panic is keeping me (us?) from the necessary studies. I wonder what it means to look around at the now and the moments that led to the now. And I wonder what I could gather about the future if I looked hard at these realities. Luckily, there are people who are already doing this work, who are eager to have others join them.
I’m thinking of those who are dreaming up better realities. Who see the seeds of now and imagine how we could grow if we choose wisdom and care. In the Monk and Robot series, Becky Chambers offers a future propelled by monks who travel the world by bike offering citizens free tea, alongside a population who has parted ways with industrialism. What if 30 years from now we could claim Chambers as a prophet? That’s a future I’d like very much.
That being said, we also need the warnings of writers like Butler. In the spirit of parables, I’m thinking of the one that speaks of a wide gate to hell versus the narrow to heaven. Butler shows us the wide gate, the path we’ve already started down. You’re going down the wrong road, her writings warn.
I wonder what this means for my recurring dreams. Is my subconscious sending out its own warnings, hoping they’ll break through into my daily life? Is it just my anxieties that were spurned by the prior day’s news coming to haunt me in dreamland? More likely, it’s a combination of both. These dreams feel weighty, important, but I can’t help but wish they were occasionally offset with something more utopic. I want to be visited by apparitions of a healing planet and people made kindred through care.
Last week, I attended the Hands Off 2025 protest in my city. There I was able to see hundreds of faces, members of my community, who care for the injustices in my city. I learned that my county is one of the lowest ranking in terms of economic mobility. In one of the protest speaker’s words, “If you’re born poor here, you’re going to die poor here.” That’s what the statistics tell us. I also learned that our civic leaders elected to hold County Commissioner meetings at 2:00 p.m. when many citizens are unavailable to give commit. This was voted to remain so, even after 150 citizens gathered at a rare 6:00 p.m. meeting. In case you’re wondering, country commissioners are the folks who:
Create, change, abolish, and consolidate county government
Change the composition and manner of selection boards, commissions, and agencies.
Promote orderly and efficient administration of county affairs.
In more straight forward words: they decide budgets, tax rates, and land usage. Important decisions happen in their meetings, but many folks in the community can’t give public comment unless they take a day off of work. Not a luxury everyone has.
I learned all of this at a protest. If you’ve ever wondered what the point of protests are… part of it is learning the needs of your community and finding resources to mobilize yourself.
In the next few weeks I’ll be hosting a letter writing party to local and state government leaders. I’m telling you all this, so I can’t back out of my plans. Honestly, I didn’t know that I was going to be sharing about political matters on Mackerel Skies, but as the saying goes, “If you don’t do politics, politics will do you.” Maybe utopic action starts at the county level.
