The Post-Gazette asked five local residents to share their dreams over a two-week period in September. Here is one volunteer:

	Martha Rial, Post-Gazette Jean-Jacques Sene and his 10-month-old daughter Danielle in their South Side garden. Click photo for larger image. Related stories Dreams: From falling to failing, it's the same old stories The 12 universal dreams How to keep a dream journal Insights from a decade-long dream journal Dream Journal: Tara Deringor

Jean-Jacques Sene, 38, grew up in the French-speaking West African country of Senegal, but has lived in Japan, France and the Netherlands. He's one of nine children.

He's a visiting professor of history at La Roche College and lives on the South Side with his wife, Valerie, and daughters, Melissa, 7, and Danielle, 10 months. Among other interests, he's a passionate book collector.

As a Christian and an African, he has always considered his dreams and their meanings an important part of his life, "as a matter of fact, one of the most delicious pieces of food for my thoughts."

The Bible, he says, treats dreams and revelations as practically identical.

He grew up in Dakar, Senegal, where people are fascinated with the significance of their dreams. There are signs of sacrifices everywhere (eggs, kola nuts or sugar scattered at street corners) where people have attempted to placate the spirits that haunt them during the night. People also visit fortune tellers, who are common sights at the marketplace, to discuss any powerful or important dreams they may have.

A summary of entries from his journal

My wife, my two daughters and I went for a walk in a remote public land field around 5 p.m. one day. After we parked the car some 50 feet from a trash dumpster, there were two men digging for...(food?) in the mountains of trash. I was holding Danielle against my chest.

The four of us walked toward the green metallic dumpster which was our destination. We were there to search the container and were pretty happy, looking forward to having a good time there. One of the two dirty, hungry-looking men with menacing faces jumped down from the top of the heap of trash, and started hurrying toward our car with a grim smile. I noticed and understood that he was going to the car and would (I thought) drive away. I ran to cut off his way to the car, he started speeding up to the car. I ran faster holding Danielle with only one arm now. When I reached him, I swung at him; he hit me first. The impact woke me up.

Physiologically and mentally, I had literally been in a fistfight. The tension lasted 10 minutes in the middle of the night. I had insomnia for the rest of the night.

Sene said he has been shocked at the imbalance of wealth between Senegal and Japan, France and the United States -- a contrast that is particularly apparent in what residents in these countries throw away. He often combs through trash bins here, salvaging many usable items that he gives to charity, to his students or stores in his basement.

Sene had bought the car just a week before the dream. He said the two men in the field were known as "fakhemen"; a term used in Dakar for drifters-pickpockets. Sene has had many encounters with them.

I was in Senegal. I bought a horse and went for a wild ride in the countryside with no harness on the horse. The horse went crazy, galloping much too frantically for me to hold my grip on its neck and mane. I was brutally thrown on the ground and there was for while a cloud of dust around me. I stood up, my body stiff.

I was riding the horse in the Senegalese countryside, but after falling down, I was in Pittsburgh and my first reaction was to look for quarters in my pocket and a public phone to call my house. I met a man in the street, and he gave me a small-size book. I have been keeping the very same book in my house for a long time. However, my first copy was a much bigger size edition of the same book.

The horse, nervous and untamed, was still galloping in wide circles around me, I could see it intermittently. It was braying very loudly to me as if it was taunting me for daring to take him to the field with no harness. I somehow got home [in the South Side] after a long walk through a dry Senegalese countryside and a large crowd of family and friends were waiting for me in the back yard.

Throughout his childhood, Sene lived in a neighborhood that was "haunted" by a 3-legged horse with rabbit ears called Leuk-Daour. Everybody knew of the legend. His existence was so "real" that people could hear him trotting around on Thursday nights. According to legend, if a person had the misfortune of seeing him, a strong wind would slap him, and his mouth would turn to the side of his face and would remain forever on one of his cheeks. A few people in the city had that condition and evidently we believed that it resulted from an encounter with that horse.