Not Quite Paradise

Before going to bed last night (which was weird enough anyway, since I had a sudden mild illness that has now disappeared, happily), I read a few pages of Toni Morrison's Paradise, which I have to read and write a response paper on for class next week. I find that reading novels before bed is way more successful than reading books about say, brain chemistry, or legal definitions of race.

I have read Paradise before, but, probably because we were going through all of Morrison's novels at breakneck speed, I remember almost nothing about it. The first few pages, in which women at a convent (but not nuns, I don't think) were being pursued and shot by men, reminded me a little. And then I fell asleep.

After a brief dream in which I went back to my old high school for a class with all my old classmates, I segued into a dream that was explicitly about the book. That is, in my dream, I was re-reading the book as I had been in real life, but my re-reading took the form of explicitly experiencing the things in the book, with a sort of fuzzy consciousness reminding me that I knew what would happen and that it will be all right.

In my dream, I was simultaneously a little girl and a grown woman caring for the little girl, and most of the time we were black. I remember looking at my skin with some fascination. But I think other times we might have briefly been white, almost like my brain forgot to make the switch. Anyway, there was this man coming after us, also mostly black, and he had seen a flyer that offered a reward if you killed women and children that were unaccompanied by men. He was someone we knew, but the woman knew he was going to try to kill them, and the little girl didn't. So the woman had to quiet the little girl and get her to hide. In my memory of the book, I had an image of the man sort of beating the top of a tree with a baseball bat while the woman and the girl hid below. This translated into us hiding in a sort of wooden structure below the floor of the the house we were in, and hearing the man crashing around with his bat. I think he was drunk, too. It was terrifying.

Then my perspective switched and I was outside, looking at the house and the man, although part of my consciousness was still with the girl and the woman. And I saw in an upper window that there was a doll house, and that the woman had convinced the girl to reach up through the floor of the doll house and manipulate the dolls inside, so the man would think we were playing there and come attack it. And I was shocked by this plan, even though I knew it had to work. The man saw the dolls moving and started to head for that part of the house. I knew he was going to smash up the doll house, but I didn't know how we were going to escape after that. I had images of us crawling out the bottom of the house somehow while he was occupied on top, but it was just such a terrifying idea, that we would have to lie there while he broke everything around us, that I guess I couldn't stay in it anymore, because I woke up.

Bizarre and scary, and I will be somewhat curious to see what it has to do with Paradise in reality. Hopefully not too much, but the novel already seems chilling and bleak.