I’ve been living like a shining star and I’ve been sleeping like garbage. Seriously. My waking hours are full of awesomeness coming at me from everywhere. I’m loving everything and I’m really improving my ability to schedule work time and free time much better than I ever have.
But I’ve also been helping my 13 year old son catch the bus for detasseling every morning which requires a 4:45am wake up call. Detasseling is field work typically done by junior high and high school kids for about 3 weeks in the summer here in the rural midwest. It’s a rite of passage. It’s pre-dawn wake ups, a weird outfit, a sack lunch and a jug of water and mud everywhere. They stumble home around 1-2pm, lay motionless for the rest of the day before doing it again the next day. At least that’s pretty much how it goes over here.
So I’m limited in sleeping time. I’m also not able to turn my brain off and it is getting crazy. Very little sleep from night to night. The set up is that a couple nights ago I invited some dreamers over to talk about big ideas and how we can start bringing ourselves more peace, more inspiration, more love into our lives.
And then I had this dream.
The dream starts with my laying in bed after having bid my guests farewell. I had changed into my pajamas and was beside Jon thinking we’d have a little time to talk before going to sleep and then there was a knock at the door.
Jon gets up to open the door, then comes back to tell me there are people here for a meeting. I think, “Didn’t the meeting just get over? But time had jumped to the next evening, I had no recollection of time passing and a whole new group of people were here for another meeting I had forgotten I had planned. And people just kept streaming in. Kids with sleeping bags, people I didn’t know, so many people and so I just went with it. In a mounting chaos I try to lead this meeting on dreams and goals but we’re not all in the same room and I’m trying to walk around and be heard by all these people. THere’s music playing, there’s a window unit AC that’s blowing air and it’s so hard to cut through either. Then, in the next room, after the meeting has been going on and I’m losing ground, a musical theatre group is performing a big scene and asking me to give them feedback and, once again, I’m trying frantically to come up with thoughts in the midst of total confusion and not prepared at all.
The musical group is performing and I’m standing in the dark by the back door when Prince comes in at the side door and leans over to me to tell me he wants to watch the performance but doesn’t want to draw attention to himself. Which is crazy. He and I are standing so close to one another but we don’t talk, but it feels special until someone does notice him and there's a buzz that he’s there and he senses it’s about to get a little nuts so he bolts out the door.
I’m back to managing this weird low hum of people everywhere in my house when I notice there’s a little tiny frog in a water filter as I’m filling it up, like a Brita. There’s a girl in a swimsuit who has been hanging out with other kids who are around and I ask her to take the filter outside, tip it over and let the frog go free.
From inside I see her doing precisely that, but when she tips the thing over and shakes the frog out, the frog is suddenly much bigger than we both thought it was and when she tips it over the frog crashes down onto the ground in a way that he’s hurt really bad. And all of a sudden this injured frog is flipping out and writhing in pain and the little girl is stunned that she has unintentionally inflicted pain on this creature and she’s starting to flip out and cry uncontrollably. Which makes me feel horrible that I set into motion these terrible things. And so from where I’m at in a sea of randos in my vicinity I start searching for a man who looks like a farmer or laborer in order to plead with him to go and kill the frog to put it out of its misery because I can’t do it myself.
Then I’m out on a dirt road and the cops are there and I can see Prince running into the wetlands with a couple of guys trying to escape the police. I sense the police are coming for me also and so I have to get away. There is a river beside the road with a good current and I decide in that moment to jump in. The river takes me into the current and I round the bend away from the police and I’m floating in the river until I come up to a dam/hydro-electric substation looking thing. I climb out of the river using a metal ladder that puts me onto a platform of the substation. I see a manhole (like a hole from an upper level to a lower level like what a firemen’s pole might have) and beneath me is a room where there looks to be a house church gathering of people worshipping.
When I climb down into the room I see a group of very diverse people- diverse in age, culture and ethnicity being lead by a woman in priestly garb who is guiding them in a worship liturgy and helping them remove all the God and Jesus language to praise and worship human and earthly things.
And that was my dream and I was shaken by pretty much all of it. High anxiety, high emotion, high bewilderment.
I don’t dream- or at least I never remember them. This one feels seared into my brain. This one feels like there’s a message in it. Does that make me crazy? Maybe. Perhaps the message is: you should get more sleep. Or “You’re not telling yourself the truth about how very frightened you are.”
Let the dream interpretation begin. Someone get Old Testament Daniel on the phone. Love, Hope