I come to the semi consciousness of dreaming, only occasionally, and even then, I recall only snippets and fragments. They’re all connected though. It’s always dark. There are corridors running through buildings with barred windows casting criss-cross shadows on the opposite wall. I’ve got to get somewhere at the other end of this increasingly forbidding passageway, but I don’t know where. It’s important. Sometimes at the end of the darkness and constriction of the corridors, there is a broad open area lit by high masted flood lights set against a black, starless sky. People are running toward something, away from something, possibly aimlessly. They seem panicked and frightened. I can hear shots fired in the background, the crack of rifles, muffled by the damp air.
There is a buzzing sound that’s trying to push into my consciousness. Out in the open, I can see the outlines of large buildings with crenelated roof lines and turreted gates at the midpoint. Along the roof, there are shapes passing along in the shadows. I often stop at the base and look up with a sense of recognition. I’ve seen this building before. These lines and angles bring memories up out of the recesses of my mind, out of the hidden and locked places.
For a period of about a year, many years ago, I had the same experience every night I remembered. I would awaken inside of the dream and notice a difficulty breathing. When I got up to investigate, I’d find a thick orange smoke pouring into a vent. Turning to the back window, I would both see and hear a large black car, a sort of old Lincoln Continental, parked right outside the building, gunning the engine, spewing out a poisonous looking exhaust aimed right at the external ventilation intake. The room was rapidly filling with the same orange menace, causing me to choke and cough. Before waking, I would be kicking on the door trying to get someone’s attention, to no avail.
More recently, the dreams start with me looking out to the little window in the door because I’ve heard an ominous crash or booming ring out in the building. I’m struggling to identify what it is I’ve heard. No one else is out in the day room, and the lights are suspiciously dark. The noise continues, growing in intensity to a pounding, breaking sound. I can hear screams underneath the noise, like people trapped under rubble trying to get someone’s attention. All of this is happening outside of my circle of vision.
Very rarely, once every couple of years, I’m walking in a field in the broad daylight, grand blue skies above, the sound of birds wafting in on the cool breezes at my back. I feel lost, but not frightened about it. I’m walking to be walking. I have nowhere to go, no place to be. At some point, it becomes obvious to me there is a border at the edge of the field, and there is a tall fence. As I get close, I can make out the coiled ugliness of razor wire crowning the chain link. The trouble is, for me, after 35 years in prison, I cannot dream my way out. I try to recall all those years and lifetimes back to the beginning of this sentence; try to remember if I could escape in my sleep then. But memory fails me. I cannot recall a single dream that wasn’t about prison, that wasn’t set in a prison for as far back as memory serves.
Therein is my nightmare, this inability to soar past the confines of prison. I’m in riots and uprisings. I’m poisoned and crushed, and I’m left for forgotten here in the bottom of this well of suffering. In those rarest of dreams, the ones where it feels possible that I’m somehow out, the realization that I’m not is devastating; the cry of recognition, the sigh of resignation. It’s so all encompassing, so soul shuddering. It wakes me out of sleep into the confines of my prison cell. That’s the end. This is Kenneth E. Hartman, executive director of The Other Death Penalty Project, from inside California’s prison system.
These commentaries are recorded by Noelle Hanrahan of Prison Radio.
