“Dust Tracks on a Road” (autobiography) by Zora Neale Hurston (post 2): Visions given to host personality by alternate personality while host is asleep

The best-known way for an alternate personality to communicate with the regular, host personality, is to speak as a voice in the host’s head. Another way is for the alter to put images in the host’s mind, either when the host is awake or asleep.

As an alternate personality once said, “I show her [the host personality] images a lot, even while she’s awake, of memories and things I feel and want to do. But she sees them best if I show them to her while she’s dreaming” (1, p. 77).

“Visions”

Here is how Zora Neale Hurston distinguished between her regular dreams and her “visions”: “I do not know when the visions began. Certainly I was not more than seven years old…There was no continuity as in an average dream. Just disconnected scene after scene with blank spaces in between…These visions would return at irregular intervals. Sometimes two or three nights running. Sometimes weeks and months apart. I had no warning. I went to bed and they came…I never told anyone around me about these strange things. It was too different. They would laugh me off as a story-teller…Oh, how I cried out to be just like everybody else! But the voice said no” (2, pp. 41-43).

1. Deirdre Barrett. “Dreams in Multiple Personality Disorder,” pages 68-81 in Trauma and Dreams, edited by Deirdre Barrett. Harvard University Press, 1996.

2. Zora Neale Hurston. Dust Tracks on a Road. New York, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 1942, 2006.