"...all that time, in my dreams and visions," she said, "I seemed to see a line, and on the other side of that line were green fields, and lovely flowers, and beautiful white ladies, who stretched out their arms to me over the line, but I couldn't reach them nohow. I always fell before I got to the line."

[As reported by Sarah Bradford in Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman, 1869]

...before her escape from slavery, she used to dream of flying over fields and towns, and rivers and mountains, looking down upon them "like a bird," and reaching at last a great fence, or sometimes a river, over which she would try to fly, "but it appeared like I wouldn't have the strength, and just as I was sinking down, there would be ladies all dressed in white over there, and they would put our their arms and pull me across."

There is nothing strange in this, perhaps, but she declares that when she came North she remembered those very places as those she had seen in her dreams, and many of the ladies who befriended her were those she had been helped by in her visions.

[As reported by Franklin B. Sanborn in "Harriet Tubman", article in Boston Commonwealth, 1863, no page specified.]

SOURCE: Harriet Tubman: the Life and the Life Stories by Jean Humez, pp.213-14.

EDITOR'S NOTE

For Tubman, unlike Freud, such dreams were no mere expression of a (legally) forbidden wish, not psychological, but practical survival tips--shamanic. Those who Tubman led to freedom attested that she used dreams and visions to choose which routes and people to trust; for a decade she evaded execution, while her friend John Brown, white, idealistic and direct, lasted a single day. In sheltered times and lives, over-psychologizing dreams (or ignoring them; effectively the same!) is merely foolish, not fatal. But in murderous times, dreams matter.

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