I Dreamed About the Breakup of the United States
For as long as I can remember, I’ve had dreams that were prescient. They are all images of what’s going on in my life during particular moments or what’s going on in America. For example, I used to have a recurring nightmare about trying to get back into the house I grew up in during a terrible thunderstorm. I would run back, bang on the capacious front door, pull on it with all my might. But it was to no avail, and there I stood, stranded in the rain. One night I dreamed that I ran back, banged on the door and it flew open. There was nothing or no one there.
From that moment on, a cloud in my life had lifted. I was no longer locked out of my past and felt no need to break in. It was just there. Another time, during a fraught relationship, I dreamed that I was swimming in a shipping channel. There was a giant cruise ship right next to me and there was great danger in the deep waters. A whale surfaced and we gazed at each other, eye to eye, with its large orb looking directly at me. And then it submerged. Later some feelings I had long buried emerged and became a buoy, dispelling confusion in my life. I was safe, they told me, but I was in deep waters. Proceed with caution.
Years ago, I dreamed that the states on a 3-D topological map of America were flying off their bearings, one by one. In other words, the country was physically coming apart at the seams. I could see the geological layers of each state as they broke off the map and flew away into oblivion. Let me be more specific, for the details of this dream have remained with me to this day and are no less unsettling; in fact, right now, they are even more so.
Picture a map of the United States like a sideways view of a cake that’s sliced open as if you were in an elementary school class. The upper layer is topography and roads and animals and landmarks with each state outlined and labelled as you would see on a giant map; next up is geology – meaning rocks and fissures and sedimentary strata in a range of colors, and fires and magma and gushing streams and various subterranean wonders underneath that.
Suddenly the map starts to break apart and the states begin spinning off of it, into the ethers and oblivion. I woke up from this dream and felt queasy, unsettled, not unlike the feeling I’ve had when awakened during an earthquake. But this was worse because it was about a different kind of foundation – the one we grew up on and learned about and said the names of the states in alphabetical order when quizzed by teachers and when I spotted them on license plates during family road trips long ago.
“There’s Florida!” I would call out. “There’s Iowa! Look there’s Missouri!” We would keep count of who saw the most states and marvel about why cars with license plates from faraway states were in our vicinity and it was a way of learning about America; it gave us a sense of place and it made me feel connected to a land that was vast and had so much to offer. What did it mean that Michigan was “The Land of 11,000 Lakes”? When could I go to Montana and see “The Big Sky State”? And oh how I wanted to visit New Mexico, “The Land of Enchantment.” (I’m sure that I was imprinted with that particular slogan at an early age, for it later became my home during college and one that has played a seminal role in my life).
One thing in particular that I really loved to do on these road trips was buying chimes at souvenir shops on the Pennsylvania turnpike. Its slogan, “The Keystone State,” was boring but I had to purchase a strip of bells on a rope whenever we were there and then sound them in the tunnels that we’d drive through on the way through the state from Ohio en route to New York. I’m not sure exactly why; maybe it was because they were a marker of where we were – to me at least; it was a personal tradition – it meant Pennsylvania(!) and another state and road trips and moving fast through time and space and sounding the experience for all of us to hear.
Soon after my dream of the breakup of the United States, the Soviet Union broke up into several countries including Russia and I took note in terms of my dream (had my subconscious mixed up the superpowers?) Dreams are funny that way. They can spell things out but not really, leaving you with a sense of things and sometimes it’s only years later you understand what they are telling you. My dreams don’t always speak of something that happens right after I wake up or even in the following days. Sometimes they are metaphors for what’s unfolding in the present. But often they predict or warn. And now I’m thinking of that breakup dream again.
So how to characterize this visitation about the breakup of the United States? I take it as a sounding from the depths about something that could happen, may in fact be happening – is America coming to an end? - and one that I’ve carried and thought about for years. In terms of my personal areas of concern, this dream was not an anomaly. I consider myself a patriot. I’m one of those people who carries a pocket Constitution in their purse. “But officer, how come the other guy didn’t get a ticket?” is something I have sometimes said when pulled over for speeding. I’m keenly aware of my rights and I like to talk about them and I understand why such discussion is a hallmark of the American personality.
Every single one of my books has been about how to repair the cracks in America, why it’s necessary to cherish and celebrate what we have – our purple mountains majesty above the fruited plain, the need to reconcile with indigenous of the land and why the failure to fully do so is endangering our grand experiment, and why we must stop burning our own house down because the fires – meaning the laying waste to the environment, the land, the seas, the air – are about to engulf us.
Right now the states are literally flying off the map. That does not mean secession Civil War-style is at hand – in a Constitutional sense, although some would like to see that happen. It does mean that the divisions among us are fraying the fabric of America, the flag, the national soul. For the states as well as for individuals, it’s now every man for himself – the shadow credo of the country – now front and center as if a demon has overtaken the land.
And now I fear that the party may be over. Fireworks will explode tomorrow and across the weekend, not everywhere because July 4th celebrations have been cancelled in some places because of fear of arrests during possible ICE raids. This is actually a reprieve for animals, wild and domestic, as the fireworks are a disturbance to many of them (even some coastal towns no longer set off the explosions as they disrupt the maritime patterns of whales and dolphins) and many dog and cat owners can attest to having to hide their charges from the annual birthday outbursts.
But go off they will as America hurtles into a new zone, with the states flying off of our map and into uncharted territory. “I’m a Yankee doodle dandy,” Jimmy Cagney famously sang and danced in the movie “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” about the songwriter George M. Cohan, the renowned Broadway composer and showman who at this point is a visitor from another dimension. The movie was a rousing celebration of America that nowadays is not even camp; few would watch it because it’s goofy and unabashedly patriotic (Cohan was born on July 4th) and the main character does an Irish jig as he happily croons away about being born on the same day as America. As we head into our 250th anniversary celebrations next year, the Union is dissolving in spirit before our very eyes.
Sometimes I still play “the license plate game – “Wow there’s South Dakota!” and “Hey, there’s Utah!” - taking note of cars with license plates from farflung states as I travel our highways – that glorious network that connects all of us, or used to, in a way that no longer seems to exist, except in our imagination, and our dreams.
Deanne Stillman is the author of American Confidential: Uncovering the Bizarre Story of Lee Harvey Oswald and His Mother, Blood Brothers: The Story of the Strange Friendship Between Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill, Desert Reckoning: A Town Sheriff, a Mojave Hermit, and the Biggest Manhunt in Modern California History and 29 Palms: A True Story of Murder, Marines, and the Mojave, among other books. These are available at Deanne’s page on the Journal’s Bookshop.org shelf, or, of course, at the Bezos wedding fund.
Artwork by Jaun Quick-to-See Smith, artist and educator, an enrolled citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. From the Whitney Museum of American Art.
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