The Newer Black

[simont]

In other black-related news, last night I dreamed that a friend of mine was black.

Well, actually what happened was that my dream somehow merged a friend of mine at work with another friend outside work. The dream person's personality seemed to end up as a reasonable half-way point between the two real people's personalities, but the visual effects department didn't seem to have as much effort available, because the dream person looked exactly like the non-work friend but with the work friend's skin colour: a deep rich dark brown that makes me think of plain chocolate and black coffee.

This all seemed perfectly natural at the time (as dreams do), but when I woke up and realised what I'd dreamed I was suddenly extremely startled and went ‘warrgh!’. I think this must be because people can't conveniently change their skin colour in the real world. Dyeing hair is so easy and commonplace that I barely bat an eyelid when someone I know is unexpectedly blonde instead of black-haired, or vice versa, or green or purple. But although cheap and nasty fake-tan products are available, the technology to conveniently adopt a totally different (or a natural-looking) skin colour is not; so if a white friend of mine was black the next time I saw them, then it would indeed be very startling, if only on grounds of ‘good grief, is that even possible?’

(She looked fantastic like that, though. I almost wish the technology was conveniently available.)

Comments

[vyvyan.livejournal.com]

I've occasionally dreamt that I was black.

[simont]

That sounds possibly even more startling. How did you know, OOI? Did you look in mirrors during the dream, or look down at your hands, or did you just know as one tends to in dreams?

[vyvyan.livejournal.com]

Mainly I just knew. But I also occasionally saw myself from the outside - my dreams often switch repeatedly from first-person to third-person perspective, as if I move from watching a film of the events, or playing a game, or reading a book - to actually being a part of them. One time I was a black woman, rather older than I am now, in a long-term relationship with an Asian woman; another time I was a small black boy, about 7 or 8. But I was always still me inside.

[j4.livejournal.com]

good grief, is that even possible?

You should read Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin. It's a non-fiction account from the 1960s of a white Texan journalist who has medical treatment to make himself look black (convincingly enough to 'pass') and then travels through racially-segregated bits of America. (The Wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Like_Me) about the book tells you a bit about how they did the skin-colour change, but the book's definitely worth reading for its own sake!) Definitely not a convenient thing to do, though.

In Second Life you can be any skin colour you want (white! black! blue! green!), but I felt that it would somehow be 'wrong' to pretend to be a different 'real' skin-colour -- that 'playing' at it for fun, just for the look of it, would be trivialising it in some way. Which is, on reflection, a bit weird, because a) I wouldn't have seen anything odd or wrong about pretending to be male or to have wings or whatever, and b) I don't think skin-colour should have to be an identity, and c) I am now extremely confused about what my subconscious is thinking, and will have to go away and poke it with sticks.

[simont]

I felt that it would somehow be 'wrong' to pretend to be a different 'real' skin-colour

I did idly wonder whether feelings like this might have helped discourage people from putting any serious R&D effort into developing convenient methods of skin-dyeing, on the basis that they reckoned changing between black and white would be too much of a Politically Charged Statement and so there wouldn't be enough market for it.

(Not that that ought to stop anyone turning their skin blue, on the other hand, if that were conveniently available. And it would confuse the hell out of racists, who wouldn't be able to work out whether they should be looking down on you or not. Though I suppose they'd probably play it safe and do so anyway.)

[pseudomonas.livejournal.com]

Woad is probably a political statement too.

[simont]

In 50 BC, maybe!

[ex-lark-asc.livejournal.com]

Amusingly I'm actually playing a blue-skinned religious fanatic in Ryzom (http://www.ryzom.com/) at the moment :)

[marnanel.livejournal.com]

I did idly wonder whether feelings like this might have helped discourage people from putting any serious R&D effort into developing convenient methods of skin-dyeing

Well, perhaps not in the UK. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-9tcXpW1DE)

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

Eek, scary. (But it is ayurvedic toxic bleach!)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Woo! Death to cold people!

black like me

[mtbc100.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the pointer! It looks promising.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

Oh wow, I've never had that before. I have people who look like one friend but are another sometimes, but the personality and body are completely one or the other, not bits from each!

[simont]

I'm kind of hoping this might indicate that I'm moving into one of my occasional months-long phases of having weird, vivid and interesting dreams. They're always fun, and it's been too long since I last had one :-)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Don't you set a random alarm clock to get weird dreams?

[simont]

Er, huh? Is that a standard strategy? How does it help? (Surely it would just interrupt the dreams at inconvenient moments?)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I was given to understand that you only remember dreams you do wake up in the middle of. But come to think of it, I may have been misled.

[(Anonymous)]

For lucid dreaming it's often recommended you have some external stimuli to wake your consciousness enough that you realise your're dreaming and take control of said dream but don't wake up entirely.