I wasn't fully him. I wasn't fully not him. It was a shared-body sort of dream. Half-first person, half-movie.
I was a native American Indian living simply with my family somewhere in the west. White people came. Cowboys. They were more powerful; they made us feel inferior in some odd sort of way. We tried to be friends, but they were tricky underneath their condescension.
They killed my people. They took our land. I barely escaped.
For a while, I wandered through the wilderness, full of rage. Rage against this new white machine, this unspeakably arrogant power invading our lives. I spent some time trying to get revenge, to kill cowboys who enslaved Indians.
There were nice cowboys too, though. One village I came across was full of Indians and cowboys living together in peace and friendship. I even met a few cowboys—nice ones. Not condescending, not tricky; ones that didn't treat me as a poor savage. We became friends.
I walked back to my village where there were a few survivors enslaved by the cowboys. It was night. The cowboys were rounding them up for some reason. I slipped in.
I cleared my throat, held out my gun upside down, set it down, and said that it was time to be friends. The cowboys lost it; they started screaming and pointing their guns at me.
Then I woke up.
