For four Wednesdays during Black August, a small group of us gathered to dream in public.

We came together carrying questions, memories, unfinished ideas, private longings, and the fragments of futures we had not yet found language for. Over four weeks, we moved through the Dikenga—the BaKongo cosmogram—and allowed its movements to guide our study: Musoni, Kala, Tukula, and Luvemba. I called the series Dreaming in Public, but it was not really about making our dreams visible for public consumption. It was not an invitation to perform our hopes, polish them until they became presentable, or turn them into another list of goals to accomplish. It was an invitation to dream in the presence of witnesses.

When we talk about study, we often imagine that the object of study exists somewhere outside of us. We read the book. We examine the theory. We listen to the lecture. We gather information and try to understand what someone else has written, built, remembered, or discovered. But what happens when we understand ourselves as worthy of that same careful attention? What happens when the life we have lived becomes part of the archive? When our questions become texts? When our desires, contradictions, griefs, pleasures, and recurring dreams become material through which we might think?

Dreaming in Public was a four-week self-study. Not self-improvement. Not a project organized around repairing ourselves, because Black people have been handed quite enough projects built upon the assumption that there is something fundamentally wrong with us. This was study rooted in curiosity. Study as listening. Study as remembrance. Study as a way of noticing what has been trying to emerge. The Dikenga gave us a way to move through that work.

In Musoni, we entered the unseen—the place of possibility, ancestral memory, gestation, and what has not yet taken form. We considered the things moving beneath the surface of our lives, including the dreams we had buried because they seemed too large, too impractical, or simply too late. In Kala, we considered emergence. What is asking to be born? What have we begun to name? What becomes possible once an idea crosses the threshold between the unseen and the known? In Tukula, we moved toward the fullness of the sun. We considered visibility, embodiment, and what it means to stand inside the life or work we say we desire. Dreaming is one thing. Allowing the dream to rearrange us is another matter entirely. And then we arrived at Luvemba: the place of descent, release, transformation, and return. We asked what must be surrendered—not because it was meaningless, but because it had completed its work. We made room for endings that are not failures. We considered the wisdom of letting something become compost.

Black August felt like the necessary container for this work. Black August asks us to remember struggle, resistance, discipline, and those who have imagined freedom under conditions designed to make freedom appear impossible. But remembrance cannot be the only work. We must also ask what our remembering makes possible now.

What are we building with what we know?

What are we practicing?

What are we willing to imagine beyond survival?

For me, Afrofuturism has never been only about speculative worlds, futuristic clothing, or technology as spectacle. It is a practice. It is a way of using memory, imagination, and what is available to us in the present to build toward another way of living. Sometimes that work looks enormous. Sometimes it looks like political struggle, institution-building, art, or collective organizing. And sometimes it begins with a small group of people meeting on Wednesday evenings and telling the truth about what they want.

Over these four weeks, people showed up with generosity. They listened to one another. They took the questions seriously. They sat with the travel documents, the music, the writing, and the silences. They allowed themselves to consider that dreaming could be rigorous—that imagination could be a discipline rather than an escape. The series has ended, but I do not think the work is finished. I am still sitting with what emerged in that space. I am thinking about what it means to create containers where people can study themselves without being isolated, witnessed without being exposed, and challenged without being diminished.

I am also thinking about what may come next.

Several people have already asked whether I will offer Dreaming in Public again, or whether there will be a second part. The honest answer is: I do not know yet. I want to resist the impulse to immediately turn a meaningful experience into the next product, the next program, the next thing clamoring for an announcement graphic. Some work needs time underground. Musoni taught us that.

But I know that I want to continue creating spaces for this kind of study—spaces grounded in Black intellectual traditions, spiritual technologies, imagination, memory, and the practical work of making our lives more closely resemble the futures we claim to desire.

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For now, I am grateful. Grateful for everyone who trusted me enough to enter this experiment. Grateful for the people who came ready to think, make, remember, question, and dream. Grateful for the ideas that surfaced and for the ones still making their way toward us.

We dreamed in public.

Now we get to decide what those dreams require of us.