Her name was once Araminta Ross and she had a way of seeing that could make the world reach its end.
Born first during the 1820s in Dorchester County, Maryland, and then later rebirthing her identity as Harriet Tubman, likely as an homage to her mother, Araminta was a warrior. And as a descendant of Black African people, being connected to the Divine was her birthright. Though she was enslaved, her enslavement could never create a lasting barrier on her gifts.
Harriet was a Seer. A Seer is one with Second Sight, skilled in seeing beyond the physical realm and into the spiritual realm. They are often able to experience the two as inseparable.
When Harriet was a preteen, she came across an overseer beating an enslaved man who had attempted to escape. To protect him, she intervened and the overseer threw a metal weight at the escapee, which hit Harriet over the head instead. The weight was over two pounds and the injury had lifelong impacts. From that moment on, Harriet experienced sleeping spells, or what the West today calls narcolepsy.
The complex and intricate relationship between notions of disability and indigenous concepts of spiritual marking are alive in Harriet’s story.
Those around Harriet were used to her suddenly entering into trance-like sleeping spells and knew that when she returned to consciousness, there’d be new valuable insight. Harriet’s dreams and visions guided her, revealing where her next location was, disclosing enemy identities and whereabouts, and indicating allies. Harriet trusted her Seeing as a gift from God and a liberatory tool, and the folks around her entrusted their life to her gifts.
“She declares that before her escape from slavery, she used to dream of flying over fields and towns, and rivers and mountains, looking down upon them ‘like a bird,’ and reaching at last a great fence, or sometimes a river, over which she would try to fly, ‘but it ‘peard like I wouldn’t hab de strength, and jes as I was sinkin’ down, dare would be ladies all drest in white ober dere, and dey would put out dere arms and pull me ‘cross.’ There is nothing strange in this, perhaps, but she declares that when she came North she remembered these very places as those she had seen in her dreams, and many of the ladies who befriended her were those she had been helped by in her visions.” (Bradford, 1869)
Harriet spoke with God everyday and God spoke right back to her. Her experiences echo the remembrance of African dream psychology. Since early beginnings, Africans have found remedy, freedom, and security in dreaming processes.
We know dreams as sites of interaction with the spiritual world and other realms difficult to see through clouded eyes. Some dreams are prophetic, or metaphorical and poetic in nature, while others are neither. Regardless of its function, one fact remains: we are able to receive information outside of what is considered our own cognition.
“When these turns of somnolency [excess sleepiness] come upon Harriet, she imagines that her ‘spirit’ leaves her body, and visits other scenes and places, not only in this world, but in the world of spirits.” (Bradford, 1869)
Yet what is imagination, but the flow of spirit? Imagination is Seeing, even if you lack the knowledge of where or who you may be channeling from. However, you can have the knowledge of where you channel from, and you should. Inducing and divining with dreams, receiving them from our Ancestors and other spirits, as well as engaging in dream analysis have been dynamic practices of indigenous communities globally.
Dreams can be used intentionally, and dreamworking is its own technology. Dreamtimes are not merely sites to catch dreams, but to intentionally See. Being able to control our own dreamspaces is power and whether we identify as healers or dreamers, dream analysis is critical to our life journeys.
When we embrace dreaming as knowledge we begin to resource and train ourselves and those who come after. The legitimization of African dreamwork lies in the hands of African people. African Diasporans have already put tremendous work into preserving trust in dreams as a whole. Community organizing and liberation work are weak without the integration of traditional and diasporic African cosmologies. We must work with those whose eyes stretch beyond our comprehension.
What does it look like for us to be able to collectively reclaim this as a skill and symbol of reconnecting to our peoples indigeneity? How can we get to a point where dreaming is another channel for receiving knowledge and intentionally connecting with our Ancestors? How can this work be further legitimized in our communities? And what opportunities are opened up when we embrace this truth, be armed in our dreamspaces, and let our dreams arm us in the physical world?
Harriet Tubman was a General and fierce commander to her people, a root doctor, medicine woman, spy, and abolitionist who constantly risked her life for the freedom of our people. She allowed her dreams to guide her and all those she helped to freedom, and we can do the same. We should both uplift and be guided by the legacies embedded with dreams of these Black matriarchal religious powers, such as Harriet Tubman, Rebecca Cox Jackson, and even our own grandmothers.
There are unique dangers in the spirit world as well, but the physical world is packed with threats against Black peoples and organisms we share this world with. We are hunted and tormented by both walking embodiments and literal ghosts of white supremacy.
Dreaming remains a safer way for us to speak on our fugitivity, to plan our escapes, and work with our spirits to plan for new worlds.
We can take dreaming of freedom to entirely transcending levels. We have done it once and we can again. So come, dream with us.
Victory Dreamhouse is a Black online-based school and training base providing a variety of online classes and spaces to study, develop and reclaim technologies indigenous to Africans globally. We are Black people of the African diaspora and continent itself. Many of us are queer and of marginalized genders (MaGes) and specifically operating by spirit-led Black feminist/MaGe-centered frameworks. We specifically identify dreamworking as a strategy itself and method for strategy-building, and utilize it as a Dreamhouse for the sake of our People’s liberation. We dream not only to maintain good connection with the spirit realm, but to train and win war.
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