A State of Dreaming: National Myths, Sacrifice, and Tangible Dreams

By James Freyland

Your body enters a peculiar state about 70 minutes into your sleep cycle. Brain waves begin to pulse faster, your eyes move as if following visual stimuli, and your body becomes nearly completely paralyzed. You have officially entered REM sleep, the stage of the sleep cycle where you spend around 20% of your sleep and, most importantly, have the majority of your dreams. In a state physiologically akin to being awake, you are at your most detached from the physical world and instead inhabit a dream world of your creation. Bound by an individual’s experiences while awake but unbeholden to strict recreation of reality, dreaming creates endless possibilities for how the world could look and function. The paradoxes that constitute dreams have attracted the interests of academia and the general population, resulting in attempts to find meaning in the switch from perceiving a disembodied reality to creating embodied simulations. Despite dreams being a universal human experience and a source of public fascination, many mysteries still permeate this daily experience. 

Nations find inspiration in the endless possibilities and mysteries dreams represent, creating national myths premised on embodied simulations rather than reality. This phenomenon is explored by South African artist Mary Sibande through photographs and sculptures of Sophie, a black mannequin depicted with perpetually closed eyes and elaborate costumes. In her exhibits Long Live the Dead Queen (2009–2013), The Purple Shall Govern (2013–2017), and I Came Apart at the Seams (2019–present), Sibande tracks gradual disillusionment with South Africa’s national myth of the Rainbow Nation, a dream of South Africa as “a rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world.” Despite all depicting Sophie’s dreams, changes in Sibande’s palette, setting, and types of clothing between exhibits reflect distinct realities. As dreams are merely a cerebral recasting of lived experiences, profoundly different realities must entail profoundly different dreams.   

The unique characteristics of each of Sibande’s exhibits reflect the evolution of a dream in response to imposed national myths. The first of these exhibits is Long Live the Dead Queen, which featured Sophie dressed up in lavish blue dresses bursting with excess fabric. Set in the time of Apartheid, one cannot escape the sadness pervasive in this series, as even the limitless possibilities of dreaming do not result in a dream where Sophie is free of the white apron and scarf, exposing her as a domestic worker. Sophie’s blue phase dreams of societal advancement evolve with the fall of Apartheid and promises of a realized Rainbow Nation. Peeks of a purple underskirt in sculptures such as The Reign foretell Sibande’s next exhibit, The Purple Shall Govern, and a time jump to a post-Apartheid South Africa. 

Sophie flexes the newly returned freedom afforded Black people post-Apartheid by trading in lavish blue dresses for otherworldly purple ones. It reflects purple’s history as a color for royalty and the powerful. In place of donning the garb of a domestic worker, Sophie grows vines, granting herself self-sufficiency and the power to settle down. Hope runs strongly throughout this exhibit as a dream once bound by Apartheid’s racist subjugation of non-white South Africans meets a reality now promising opportunity for all. It is not long before Sophie’s purple phase and dreams of self-actualization evolve again, and red begins to peek out from behind the purple fabric in Ascension of the Purple Figure. Disillusioned with the promise of a Rainbow Nation that is nowhere near becoming a reality, Sophie enters the most volatile phase of all, the red phase.

In her most recent exhibit, I Came Apart at the Seams, Sibande shows us what happens when dreams lose their emotional bases of sadness and hope, and instead become based on anger. Sophie’s dreams turn profoundly violent. She now wears bright red outfits befitting her rage coupled with militaristic details in the vestments designs. The certainty of her earlier phases culminating in the red becomes apparent in The Domba Dance. In the center of the photo sits a red phase Sophie with the severed arms of her earlier dreams above her. Reaching out to each other, the arms morph from blue to purple to red, leading to the seated Sophie as she feeds pieces of a heart to rabid dogs. Sacrifice is essential to this new Sophie’s reality, as the unrealized dreams of her predecessors serve as sustenance for this new Sophie’s anger. In her ever-changing dreams, Sophie shows that “dreams are different from one generation to another,” and that dreams impact the real world just as much as the real world impacts dreams.

South African poet Koleka Putuma analyzes the ties between sacrifice and materializing dreams in her poem Black Women/White Babies. Following Sibande’s depiction of Sophie through three distinct generations’ dreams united by femininity and Blackness comes Putuma’s description of three generations of a South African family: a grandmother, a mother, and children. The grandmother is not mentioned in the poem. However, her effect on the mother’s life is outsized, as she teaches the mother how to care for children, a task undertaken through physical labor. The mother’s life is characterized by trifurcation as she plays the role of mother to her children in the morning, caretaker to white children for most of the day, and absent mother to her children at night. By exposing herself to physical exhaustion and degrading treatment, the mother dreams of a better life for her children, where physical labor is not the only way to earn a living. In sacrificing her well-being to ensure her children can succeed, the mother does not pass on her own mother’s teachings. Despite this, the mother is shocked when, returning home from work, she discovers her children “have washed and hung their shirts/ironed the uniform for the morning/bathed and fed themselves.” The children are proud to have helped their mother. Still, instead of feeling thankful, she “cannot name the thing… [she] feel[s].” She “can only feel it on…[her] back,” as she watches her sacrifice end up being in vain and her children pick up the physical labor she tried to prevent them from undertaking. 

With Sibande’s and Putuma’s works haunting me, I cannot help but draw similarities between our national myth of the American Dream and its many similarities to South Africa’s Rainbow Nation. Both promise that hard work will ultimately be rewarded and that future generations can do better than the preceding ones. As a first-generation American, my life will forever be intertwined with a particular vision of the American Dream imparted by matriarchal sacrifice. From a grandmother leaving her deep-seated roots and family for the dream of stability and opportunity for her children, to a mother working sixteen-hour shifts for her own progenies’ futures, we see the loss of dream’s intangibility. Instead of reflecting endless possibilities, dreams become pure reflections of reality, as possibility is reduced to paths resulting in higher incomes and dreams become grounded in money. 

Through hard work, the firstborns that preceded me expected to create a new reality from the realm of possibilities only existing in dreams. The culmination of generations of physical toil is me, the first expected to be something different and make generations of sacrifice worth it. Following the path preordained for me, I found something unexpected—disillusionment in the American Dream held dear by past generations. Finding solace in the unrealized futures of Sibande’s next Sophie exhibit, the unnamed children in Putuma’s poem, and my upcoming graduation, I dream of a future where money is not required to reach happiness. In the greatest sacrifice of all, my mother told me she “just wants me to be happy.” For the first time in a long time, I think I can be, as my generation chases dreams reflective of our own experiences and reality.