Oneiric Experience and Rhetoric in Obama’s Dreams from My Father

Introduction

The title of Barack Obama’s 1995 memoir not only introduces the story’s main character—his deceased father—but also signals his intention to use an emotionally evocative language of dreams in describing his relationship with that character. More than just a literary device (though it serves that purpose well), the phenomenology of dreaming provides Obama with a powerful touchstone for his probing reflections on the nature of identity,

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the inescapable influence of family history, and the fears and hopes engendered by rapid cultural change. He shares two of his own dreams, both appearing at key points in the story and both testifying to his deep struggle with the morally and spiritually ambiguous legacy of his father. He also describes several experiences of reverie, hypnogogia, and empathetic fantasy, all of which indicate his comfort with a wider range of conscious awareness than is usually expressed in mainstream American political discourse.

In this essay I will analyze Obama’s dreams as a means of illuminating the central hopes, fears, and conflicts that have driven his personal quest for a more authentic kind of self-understanding. Obama uses metaphorical and literal dream references in his memoir to create a psychological space in which he can honestly face, and begin the hard work of reconciling, the profound polarities shaping the course of his life. For a presidential candidate whose campaign is dedicated to the broader cause of overcoming partisan divisions and revitalizing the hopefulness and creativity of the American people, his language of dreaming gives important clues as to how he will try to meet those formidable political challenges.

A Methodological Caution

Before proceeding, a word should be said about the process of interpreting dreams (either metaphorical or literal) in texts such as this. First and foremost, we can never be sure if the dreams reported in a memoir are real or not. The author may have edited, altered, or embellished them; indeed, we can’t rule out the possibility that the author has completely fabricated them. Readers should approach such reports with a healthy dose of skepticism, setting aside a vain pursuit for the “real” dream and focusing instead on two questions. One, how does the author use the (alleged) dreams for literary effect? And two, do the dreams plausibly reflect actual types of dreaming experience, the types studied and analyzed by contemporary researchers? (For more on this methodological approach, see my Dreaming in the World’s Religions [2008]). My working hypothesis is that the most effective literary dream references are grounded in the most vivid, impactful, and widely shared types of dreams. For example, when Homer in the Iliad says, “As in a dream a man is not able to follow one who runs from him, nor can the runner escape, nor the other pursue him, so he [Achilles] could not run him [Hektor] down in his speed, nor the other get clear (pp. 22.199-201),” the simile works because it refers to the actual and very widespread experience of chasing dreams (see below for a good example). In Dreams from My Father Barack Obama displays just as much familiarity with the broad contours of human dream experience. We do not have to accept the veracity of any particular dream report to acknowledge Obama’s authentic understanding of the dreaming imagination.

Obama’s References to Dreams

The memoir’s metaphorical references to dreams cluster around a handful of themes. Innocence is one, as in his “peaceful dreams” of childhood” (p. 10) and his wistful feelings about earlier life in Hawaii, which “lay behind me like a childhood dream” (p. 115). Naivety is another, as in his acknowledgment of the ill-fated “dreams of reformers” who built the Chicago housing projects

(p. 165) and his anxiety about people dismissing him as “a fool chasing pipe dreams” (p. 230). He recognizes the darker aspects of dreaming, too, using nightmare language to describe his reaction to the black radicalism he encountered in college at Columbia (“it was like a bad dream” (p. 140) and his awareness of the hateful, dominating presence of white racism in the African-American psyche (“that ghostly figure that haunted black dreams” (p. 195).

Most frequently, Obama speaks of dreams as synonymous with plans, aspirations, and deeply cherished hopes. He refers to this aspect of dreaming in familiar contexts, as when he first meets his paternal grandmother and she “says she has dreamed about this day, when she would finally meet this son of her son” (p. 374). But in other places he speaks of dreams in ways that are more unexpected, and more psychologically profound. A good instance of this comes in the final line of chapter 1, where he sums up the brief marriage of his parents by saying, “I occupied the place where their dreams had been” (p. 27). This observation honestly acknowledges the improbability of his

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very existence while affirming a strong sense of spiritual purpose and moral obligation.

Throughout the story Obama displays a sober awareness of the fragility of dreaming. Even though America may be “the land of dreams,” he can never forget that his father left the U.S. “a divided man, his plans, his dreams, soon turned to dust….” (p. 227). Obama worries that conventional American middle-class ideals can lead to a “fear and lack of imagination [that] choke your dreams” (p. 15). Inspired by the daring idealism of Martin Luther King, Jr. and other participants in the civil rights movement, he decided that battling those dream-killing forces would become the central premise of his self-defined vocation as a community organizer: “Communities had to be created, fought for, tended like gardens. They expanded or contracted with the dreams of men—and in the civil rights movement those dreams had been large” (p. 134). The irony was that he could not truly fulfill this lofty calling without confronting the dark presence haunting his own nocturnal imagination.

Obama’s First Reported Dream of His Father

These metaphorical references create a favorable rhetorical context for the presentation of his two actual dreams. The first occurs when he is twenty-two years old, a senior at Columbia, a year after receiving the news of his father’s death. It is a long one (more than 500 words), and it expresses the grief he says he had not yet openly felt in waking life. The dream starts with Obama on a spectral bus trip with a non-descript group of people. A book in the hands of the old white man sitting nearby informs him that “our treatment of the old tested our souls” (p. 128). The bus stops at a grand old hotel, and the old man becomes mentally deficient somehow and then morphs into a small black girl who begins to play the piano. A Hispanic waitress frowns ambiguously at them. The bus trip continues, Obama dozes, then awakens (still in the dream) alone. He gets off the bus outside a rough stone building in which a lawyer and judge discuss Obama’s father, held in a jail cell. The judge is willing to release the old man, but the lawyer argues against it on the basis of “the need to maintain order” (p. 128).

At this point Obama appears inside the building in front of the door to his father’s cell. He unlocks it and confronts the thin, pale man, with “only a cloth wrapped around his waist” (p. 128). Despite his withered appearance, Obama’s father smiles at the appearance of his son and says, “‘Barack, I always wanted to tell you how much I love you,’ he said. He seemed small in my arms now, the size of a boy” (p. 129). Then a sadness overcomes the old man, which Obama tries and fails to alleviate with a joke. Obama invites his father to leave with him, but his father declines and tells his son he should go. The dream ends here, and Obama says, “I awoke still weeping, my first real tears for him—and for me, his jailor, his judge, his son” (p. 129).

The immediate impact of the dream was to prompt a new awareness of his father’s enduring influence in his life: “I realized, perhaps for the first time, how even in his absence his strong image had given me some bulwark on which to grow up, an image to live up to, or disappoint” (p. 129).

Again, we cannot be sure this is a genuine dream, but it certainly bears many of the key features of highly impactful dreams as studied by contemporary researchers (such as Harry Hunt, Don Kuiken, Stanley Krippner, Kate Adams, and Roger Knudson). To dream of encountering a deceased loved one is a cross-cultural phenomenon reported throughout history. Such “visitation dreams” frequently bear an intense emotional charge that carries over into waking consciousness. The journey motif regularly characterizes such dreams, reflecting uncanny movements between the realm of the living and that of the dead. The metamorphoses of character (the old man into the little black girl, his father into a small boy) are actually quite rare in general dreaming experience, and so is the detail of sleeping-and-waking within the dream. Both elements enhance the sense that the ordinary boundaries of life are becoming unstable, fluid, porous. Nothing is fixed or eternal; dramatic change is always possible.

When Obama enters the stone building the dream develops into a psychological parable, an oedipal drama of moral conflict and existential judgment. The initial scene with the old man on the bus serves as a prelude to this drama, and his spontaneous comment that “our treatment of the old tested our souls” could be taken as the dream’s title. To his credit, Obama recognizes his personal

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involvement in the legal debate over his father’s fate. Just as Gestalt analysts interpret all elements of a dream as embodiments of some aspect of the dreamer’s own psyche, Obama knows he is both the judge and the lawyer, both the jail and the promise of freedom.

Even though his father is dead, the dream shows it’s not too late to create a more authentic relationship with him. Obama shares the dream in the final pages of the story’s first part, titled “Origins.” It is the end of the beginning, the initiation of his journey back to his ancestral roots so he can more forward into a more self-aware future.

Obama’s Second Dream

The second dream comes during the last leg of that journey, on the train to “Home Squared,” his family’s natal village in rural Kenya. Obama and his half-sister Auma are traveling to the village together. During the long train ride they share family stories, and just before he goes to sleep Auma tells him about their father’s father, whose harsh moralism and rigid self-righteousness led him to slaughter a neighbor’s goat for a trivial property infraction. She concludes the story by saying, “I swear, sometimes I think that the problems in this family all started with him” (p. 371). When Obama retires to sleep in his train compartment, he dreams this:

“I was walking along a village road. Children, dressed only in strings of beads, played in front of the round huts, and several old men waved to me as I passed. But as I went farther along, I began to notice that people were looking behind me fearfully, rushing into their huts as I passed. I heard the growl of a leopard and started to run into the forest, tripping over roots and stumps and vines, until at last I couldn’t run any longer and fell to my knees in the middle of a bright clearing. Panting for breath, I turned around to see the day turned night, and a giant figure looming as tall as the trees, wearing only a loincloth and a ghostly mask. The lifeless eyes bored into me, and I heard a thunderous voice saying only that it was time, and my entire body began to shake violently with the sound, as if I were breaking apart.” (p. 372).

Here is a classic chasing nightmare, a vividly rendered and physically arousing fight/flight scenario filled with misfortune, vulnerability, and dread. Obama’s pursuer merges the fearsome growling of a predatory animal with the horrifying appearance of a fiendish monster. The detail of the loincloth appears again, suggesting that the giant figure’s tremendous size reflects a doubling of generational influence, the combined impact of his father’s and grandfather’s moral demands. If one of the functions of nightmares involves the expression of unconscious conflicts between different parts of the psyche (a view held by Gestalt and Jungian analysts), then Obama’s nightmare can be seen as an urgent call to greater awareness of shadow elements from his past personal qualities he deplores in his paternal ancestors yet fears may dwell within his own psyche. In a more Freudian vein, Obama appears to be struggling with the ego threatening power of a massive superego. He speaks of his father as “full of high-blown ideals and quick to pass judgment” (p. 278), terms very consistent with the psychoanalytic theory of conscience as the internalized voice of paternal authority. The extraordinary sensations of the thunderous voice, the violent shaking, and the impending physical disintegration all correspond to well-studied features of various types of highly memorable dreams, particularly those I call “titanic” dreams. For Obama, the titanic elements add an extra degree of experiential intensity to the basic oedipal conflict. The timing and circumstances of the dream (coming just before the climax of his journey, when he is actually sleeping in a fast-moving vehicle) insure he will be more conscious of how these tensions manifest themselves when he finally arrives for his African homecoming.

Conclusion

In the epilogue Obama notes that his new wife Michelle sees and understands these inner struggles” she worries that, like Gramps and the Old Man, I am something of a dreamer” (p. 439). This statement perfectly summarizes the psychological complexity of Obama’s journey of self-discovery. For better and for worse, he shares many of the defining personality qualities of his father and grandfather. Like them he is intelligent, passionate, courageous, and big-hearted; like them he is impractical, self-righteous, and over-demanding. They are indeed all dreamers, inspired by the highest ideals of truth, justice, and communal integration, yet always struggling to put those

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ideals into practice in a messy and ever-changing world.

A political evaluation of Obama’s presidential campaign is beyond the scope and competence of this essay, but two points are worth making in conclusion. One, the acute sense of moral indebtedness Obama feels toward his ancestors should give comfort to political conservatives who worry about his alleged radicalism and un-American tendencies. Reading his memoir, and particularly his two dreams, gives a clear impression of how much fundamental respect Obama feels for family traditions and the wisdom of his elders (which of course is a key value of American conservatism). Two, it makes perfect sense that Obama has chosen to deliver his nomination acceptance speech at the Democratic national convention on the 40^th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. This felicitous historical confluence will offer him a unique opportunity to bring a new degree of experiential depth to that timeworn phrase “the American Dream.” Unlike any other political figure in recent memory, Obama has shown a willingness to honestly discuss his personal process of psychospiritual development, and he is premising his presidential campaign on the need to generate similar developments in the nation as a whole. He is trying to evoke the dreamer in everyone, lest we become consumed by our collective nightmares.

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