...Forgotten, Like A Dream...

My nights are currently filled with dreams. Some are snapshots and some are movie length during which I can hit the pause button, and when I go back to sleep and hit the play button, the dream picks up where it left off. Of course, by mornings, try as I might, I cannot recall any of it. EXCEPT sometimes my dreams are interspersed with actual memories, and these half-awake episodes, if not always coherent, are occasionally recoverable.

Let me illustrate. A young woman came in a dream asking me to help her sort through a problem she was having. While I had never seen her before, she looked familiar. There was something about her speech pattern that reminded me of a parishioner in the small rural church I served during my seminary education. So in this dream I told her about a man who had arrived in her community carrying a large bag of wheat seeds he had brought from Russia or somewhere, seeking to plant them in Northern Oklahoma.

“I know who that was” she said. “It was Hiram Spalding, my great-grandfather. He told my that story a dozen times.” I remembered such a person and could easily recall his face and his story. And I knew exactly where his farm was located. While at my nearby college for a series of lectures, I visited this farming community where I had been pastor. It was gone! I mean the whole town had dried up in the Oklahoma hot winds. But that is another story.

But back to my extended dream. It continued in a funeral service I was leading for the community’s aged matriarch. In the middle of my sermon, a tiny baby started to cry. The embarrassed mother got up to carry the baby out, and I stopped what I was saying and said to her, “Please leave the baby here and let us listen to her soft cry. It will be a message from above. “Generations come and generations go, but the word of the Lord endures forever.” I was not sure any such verse appeared in Scripture, but it just seemed right for that moment. Here is the strange thing. While this was part of my dream, it was a verbatim duplication of an actual funeral I had conducted in that community.

Some of my readers may wonder why this column and what it has to do with anything I have been chewing on. I do not know that much about dreams, except they tend to reflect on something that has been churning during our wide-awake hours.

I have recently been chewing on just who might be the right Presidential candidate. Perhaps the dream was telling me that our marvelous aging candidates must give way to a new generation of leaders. Perhaps it reflects Tennyson’s conclusion that it is time for the old order to give way to the new, “lest one good custom should corrupt the world.” So perhaps our two outstanding senior men and the same age woman need to make way, if not for a crying infant, to someone from a new generation.

Perhaps the dream had nothing to do with that, but only was a way for me to connect with part of my history—or was it just recalling my great-grandfather, or what is even more likely, was I trying to come to terms with the fact that I am now a great-grandfather and need to pay more attention to precious little ones? And perhaps writing about it was the best way to deal with whatever it might say. The dream is gone and only the memories remain.