I, an incredibly white male, managed to dreadlock my wavy, brown hair by the method of patiently back-combing and waxing my hair, roughly one and a half months ago.
The dreads got many an odd look in my home of good old Alabama (where I was during Christmas break), but upon returning to Berkeley in California, I received some of the weirdest looks and comments. This I attribute to the fact that people are not used to seeing dreadlocks in Alabama, so it is a spectacle of perplexing proportions; however, when in Berkeley, there are many people with dreads already, it's no surprise. In fact, these people with dreads in Berkeley have well groomed and nice looking dreads, whereas I resembled a mixture between Cthulhu and Medusa. So I got many crude comments, such as my favorite, shouted by a stranger: "black imitator!"
The real point of this rant, however, is not personal travesty, but advise.
The advise is that if you have dreadlocks in for more than one month, do not try to disentangle your hair- for the love of
Zeus, cut it off!
I managed to rip all the dreads apart and burn out all the wax in a two hours long steaming shower, but the pain from this was incomparable. If I had to quantize this burning pain, I would equate it to giving birth to triplets...of Satan...made out of acid...boiling acid.