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On October 20th, Stephen Peterson '12 had a dream that he fears may, in fact, be racist. "At first, I didn't think anything of it," said Peterson. "But then I thought about it some more and I'm really worried that Mel Gibson riding a giant, flying, mythological lizard beast with the head of Harriet Tubman that shoots fireballs out of its mouth at a downtrodden group of Seminole Indians as they walk along the Trail of Tears might be totally Un-PC. Honestly, I don't know where these things come from. I'm not a racist; I interned with the ACLU last summer."
"Stephen's a real stand up guy, a real community activist," said Jeffrey Ball '12, Peterson's roommate. "He volunteers at the homeless shelter once a week, he organized a rally for the rights of illegal aliens, and he just happens to have violent night terrors about the pollution of the master race. When he's awake he's like Mother Theresa but when he goes to sleep, he's a regular Eichmann."
"I just don't know how I feel about Stephen anymore," said Mia Valance '13, Peterson's currently pissed off politically correct girlfriend. "He's such a sweet boyfriend when he's awake but whenever we snuggle, he starts blabbering about Governor George Wallace using the emancipation proclamation as toilet paper while serving as supreme overlord of Whitetopia. There's this whole other side to him I never knew about. He's like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde the Jews because the SS is coming."
"I can't control what I dream about. I wish I could, but I can't. I feel absolutely horrible. But maybe these dreams aren't necessarily racist. I mean there's so many ways to interpret Kramer rapping Straight Outta Compton while Andrew Jackson and Strom Thurmond sing the chorus all while wearing cloth diapers," claimed Peterson. "That's just ambiguous. Right?"
Peterson's problem has even begun to manifest itself in the form of somnambulant actions. The morning after one particularly long night of working in a soup kitchen, Peterson nodded off in his history class, "The South during Reconstruction". He promptly engaged in what other students in the class referred to as "sleep-lynching".
"I've never seen anything like it," said history professor Jason Pearce. "On the one hand, it was terribly inappropriate but on the other, it was an incredibly detailed, historically accurate mock recreation of an actual lynching. The class learned a lot that day."
"I don't even remember what that dream was about," claims Peterson. Upon further inspection of Peterson's dream journal, that dream "had something to do with lynching. Oh God. I'm so sorry. I'm a monster."
"I know I have these dreams but I swear I'm not a bigot. There's just something wrong with my subconscious. I mean you paint one picture; you're not an artist. You bake one cake; you're not a baker. But if you burn one cross in front of the all black fraternity in your sleep, you're automatically a racist. I worked at the ACLU damn it," said Peterson.
Sources close to Peterson indicate that these dreams have had a profound effect on his psyche. "I'm distraught. No one feels worse about this than I do," said Peterson. "Not the LGBQT. Not the Asian-American Students Association. Not that group of kindly Italian-American students whom I apparently referred to as 'skinny Gandolfinis'. Me. I bear this burden. And the hardest part to reconcile about all this is I'm actually half-black, half-Jewish. I am not looking forward to sleeping at home this Thanksgiving."
