Dreams often arise synchronistically at the time of significant events. The day after I learned that my father was gravely ill in the hospital, ten weeks before he passed away, I dreamed:
I’m with my wife, Diana, digging next to our house. I unearthed a black skull, with prominent jaw and teeth. It could have been the skull of a wolf or wolverine.
The skull of death emerged within my unconscious. The skull reminded me of a mask, like the carved and painted masks that filled my father’s study, and heightened my awareness that he would soon be joining the world of the beloved ancestors.
The skull’s prominent jaw and teeth alluded to biting aggression and anger, fierce oral craving, and the way Diana and I, like many couples, sometimes argue. It was unclear in the dream whether this was a fossilized skull, or whether it was carved in stone, a carved stone skull mask. It occurred to me that the skull was a philosopher’s stone, comprising the union of opposites of love and hate. This dream image evoked the insight that a loving relationship with Diana also sometimes awakens fiery aggression.
The prominent teeth also reminded me of going to see B.B. King at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem when I was thirteen years old. I went with Ruth McGhee, my beloved black nanny. Ruth was the person who first sug gested I learn to play the guitar. That night I was the only white kid in the audience, which mainly consisted of African Americans, and I remember how warmly welcomed I felt. I recall that while he played his solos, B.B’s face lit up in a beautiful smile with the bright spotlight reflecting off his sparkling white teeth. Because Ruth was an old friend of B.B. King (she was the sister of Brownie McGhee, another great Blues musician), we got to go backstage where I saw Big Mama Thornton (author of “Ball and Chain” and other Blues hits) stumbling around backstage with her bottle of whiskey. Frisky-looking women in tight dresses were fussing over their makeup. One of B.B.’s managers walked into the room and opened up an enormous briefcase stuffed with pornographic magazines. He made a point of showing them to me. The whole scene was dreamlike and surreal. Then I met the warm and gracious B.B. in the flesh, shook his hand, and he let me hold his guitar, Lucille. This actually happened! I’m not blowing steam here.
I also remember that while I held B.B. King’s guitar backstage at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem, I was wearing a cast on my arm, because I had broken a finger playing basketball. It was a Thursday night in February 1971, and my mother took me to the Emergency Room of Roosevelt Hospital. I had been in the hospital before, but that was the first time I saw people with serious injuries and illnesses, gunshots and stab wounds. I saw the cuts and bruises of a man who’d been beaten up in a bar room brawl, as I sat waiting for the doctor to wind a plaster cast onto my hand. It was the night of a New Moon in Pisces, astrological sign of hospitals, disabilities, and the universality of suffering. My feeling of compassion for humanity was awakened. I felt the same concern when I walked around in Harlem among people who were visibly poorer than people in my neighborhood. The memory of these interconnected events is resonant with emotional meaning and depth for me. And memories of the hospital and suffering humanity were united with awareness of my father lying poised between life and death in a hospital bed at that moment. All of this was contained in the condensed symbolism of the black skull. All of this varied emotional content was joined, sealed, and unified in an ecstatic moment, brought together by my black skull dream as a “uniting fact,” a symbol of wholeness. ∞
