Sometimes I dream about silly things, meaningless combinations of people and daily routines and journeys to nowhere.  It’s like my brain can’t handle all the data and throws it together in perverted ways, going shopping for shoes while eating broccoli and meeting my husband for drinks without wearing pants.

Occasionally there is a peace that washes over my soul like blue waves.  I wake up softly, like on the shores of Maine, and flip over on the pillow with a sigh.  I thank God for coffee and warmth and softness, and it’s these moments I reach for him, lying beside me, to feel his touch.  These dreams are rich in color.  Green soothes my tattered nerves and Red rises up live lava from the underbelly of some great unknown.  Yellow bursts from clouds and Dark Violet erupts from the blackest of darkness.   Color is opera and it flows through my subconscious like a rich aria, and all I can do is be present in it, wallowing inside, basking in the glory.

And then the nightmares come.  Images that stain and bleed and cut so deeply I wake up gasping for breath.  I can’t shed the pictures and I end up churning and weeping and praying for my brain to un-pixilate the data.  It’s after these restless nights I wake alone in an empty bed with a dusty heart.  I want to shake these dreams free, angry at myself for conjuring up unwelcome images.  And yet they are all part of me, the waking and the sleeping and the living and the dead.  The sweet and the wholesome and the angry burning fire that consumes.

They all have their place, really.  The silly and the rich and the dark are all woven together to show what our minds are thinking while our bodies rest.  I had a dream once that a bomb landed in our home but didn’t detonate, and I went to the attic and clung to what I loved the most.  The very next day my life totally changed.  The bomb went off.  Pieces scattered.  I saw it coming.

I often lay in bed at night, wanting to find truth.  I pray and I read and mull over the day.  But truth is never evident in the twilight.  It’s only revealed after my subconscious repeats the day’s pattern a few thousand times.  When my body stops moving long enough to let God in.  And in the morning, things are clearer.  Not always more beautiful, mind you, but clearer.  Like a direction has been forged.

I don’t like the terror: I want to cling to the aria.  And yet we don’t get to choose these things.  We dream what we need to see in order to process life around us, and this is one thing we can’t control.  It’s a lesson to pay more attention to what your internal soul is trying to say.  To allow God a venue.  To hear the hard stuff.  Because it’s through the hard stuff that you grow, and change, and become stronger.

Dreams are not always rose-colored glasses.  Sometimes the rose turns dead and glasses break and we wake up hurting.  And yet there is hope that someday in the future we’ll wake up in Maine again.  That love will be there to hold onto.  That in time, the colors will return in waves, and we’ll smile in the knowledge that our souls are happy.  That we listened to truth.  And we’ll all dream about going to dinner without any pants while eating asparagus ice cream.

Oh my dear soul.  Let the silly come. 

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