Caiman Raptor Elk has told me he thinks it would be 'disconcerting' to find yourself dreaming as someone else, but I do that a lot. Like last night. I often don't know who I am until somebody asks. Right in the middle of this dream, somebody asked my character a question and I found myself saying, 'Well, I'm Jewish.' Which startled me, even in the dream, because, well, I'm not.

Not that I minded, because then I felt I could enjoy the dream and stop worrying about what it was supposed to mean. You see, I was offering some kind of ghostbusting service – that is, my Jewish persona was. Maybe the fact that he was Jewish implied some sort of kabbalistic expertise, I don't know. Anyway, this service basically consisted of vacuuming an old house with a special, magic vacuum cleaner that revealed ghosts and then sucked them up.

I was merrily cleaning up a vintage living room, spotting ghostly dust bunnies, old documents, and the occasional mouse, when I stirred up a ghost kitty. The kitty meowed plaintively at me and dug its claws into my jumper. Clearly, it was reluctant to be inhaled by my ghostbusting hoover (yes, I suppose it was a nighthoover, don't start). So instead of aiming the suction at it, I held the cat, stroking it gently, until it started purring. Then I woke up.

I have dreams like that all the time. I don't really mind them. Personally, I don't feel that the world of daytime has dibs on my unconscious and its existence out there on the Akashic. I kind of like the fact that I don't feel pinned down by identity politics.

I have no idea why my unconscious was hoovering ghosts – feel free to speculate – but the incognito dream reminded me of a time in my life when had every marketing profiler in the world completely flummoxed. It was about thirty years ago when I was teaching languages and literature in a small Benedictine-run college. What with one thing and another, I managed to get on everybody's mailing list.

At one point, the Southern Baptists had hired me to write lesson plans for a Sunday School quarterly. This I had done very willingly and to the best of my ability. Unfortunately, the Sunday School Board had a long turnaround. In between when I flew over to Nashville to get the assignment and when the little book actually came out, they'd managed to have a religious revolution. The 'liberals' were out, and the 'conservatives' were in. The new regime's solution to the problem was to rewrite the content according to their own ideas, leave my name on them to pretend I'd written them, and send me a cheque for $650. I shrugged, took the money, and lost their phone number. But I stayed on Baptist mailing lists.

Since I worked at an institution where half my colleagues were monks, I managed to get on their mailing lists, too. My mailbox was full of lovely little votive tokens from the Little Sisters of This-n-That, thanking me for my (modest) donation to their school. I started getting letters from various causes that began, 'Dear Concerned Catholic. . . '

At that time, the Holocaust Memorial Museum was being built. I gladly contributed because it was important. I also sent away for their lesson plans to use during the Days of Remembrance. The high school German class I taught appreciated. Soon I was getting letters from politicians that started, 'Dear Concerned Jew. . . ' This also caused me to end up on the mailing lists for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Southern Poverty Law Center.

I am not making this up. I sent away for some materials on Native Americans. The list-compilers decided I must be Native American. They even accidentally got one right and labelled me Irish. My mailbox was the envy of the college. It also caused chuckles. I had a fascinating collection of tchotchkes and bumper stickers.

What intrigued me was the apparent inability of the mass-marketing crowd to entertain the idea that it was possible to be interested in other people's concerns without necessarily belonging to that demographic. Whatever happened to 'no man is an island'? Oh, I know what happened: cable tv. That's when they started niche-marketing us to death. Men watched the Oxygen channel (remember that one?) and women watched Lifetime. If you were a scifi fan, you ended up with UPN and trying to dodge the wrestling shows, or Fox before it turned rightward¹. My mom sat and enjoyed the nostalgic old movies the nice man introduced on TCM. I'd sometimes watch with her and learn something.

Nothing wrong with a few niches and mailing lists. But beware of too much niche-marketing. The next step is 'divide and conquer,' and boy, have we been dividing. Just who decided that you can't be friends with your neighbour if you have a different religion, or taste in music, or job category, or ancestry? Variety is the spice of life when it comes to humans. The reason I liked being a foreigner in Europe was being surrounded by all the other foreigners: in Germany we'd sometimes have 6-7 different nationalities at a party. . . in a one-room apartment. And nobody got mad at anybody else. I have studied Yiddish on two continents, only to find out the Jews in Greece didn't speak it. So I learned a little Djudaismo.

Now, I'm not saying you need to slip in and out of different demographics in your dreams, any more than I'm advocating vacuuming the floor for ectoplasm. But maybe, just maybe, we need to do a different kind of sweeping, and eliminate whatever dust bunnies have crept in with fuzzy notions that somehow, we have to pick a niche and stick with it, rather than appreciating the whole spectrum of what it is to be human. Then we might be able to get a clearer perspective on how to solve our mutual problems.

Dmitri Gheorgheni

31.03.25 Front Page

Back Issue Page