For Wilshire Baptist Church
I’ve been writing down my dreams lately because they’ve become so strange. I don’t know if that’s the result of age or medication or simply an overactive imagination. Whatever the reason, I’ve started a log — a late-night diary of sorts.
I’ve always had vivid dreams. My first published writing was in a Richardson ISD anthology of student stories and poems titled “Imagination ’67.” Written directly from a dream, my story told about getting pulled down the bathroom sink drain by the Devil and ending up as the main ingredient in a boiling pot of soup. I was in the second grade and the dream was not so much a nightmare as a Dr. Seuss tale of my own making.
I’ve always been a dreamer. When I was younger, I might have nightmares about such things as being chased by a tornado and trying to run from it but in slow motion. My favorite dreams are about being able to fly, where I just stretch out my arms and push down with my hands and begin to float upward.
I don’t have nightmares now, but I have dreams that are almost always weird and often have tension and stress. When I was younger I’d have school-based dreams, like the classic dream about it being the end of the semester and suddenly realizing there’s a class I went to once or twice and then forgot all about and now it’s time for finals. Or putting my books on a desk in a classroom and then going to the water fountain but not being able to find my way back, with every turn in the hallway taking me further away with the bell about to ring.
Now my dreams are mostly in business or home settings where something is amiss or “off kilter” as my grandfather would say. And because I’ve been an usher and deacon at Wilshire for many years, the setting often is at church where I’m responsible for collecting the offering or serving communion and something is missing or not right and it’s time to get started. An example: I turn a corner and suddenly the familiar sanctuary has been replaced by a seemingly endless auditorium with thousands of people and the other servers are missing.
Some of my dreams have people I’ve known and loved who have passed on, such as my father. It’s not like they’ve returned to this life and I’m shocked and overwhelmed or even overjoyed. The feeling is always very familiar; they are right where they’ve always been. But, because they’re in my dream, they’re players in one of my stories where things are not what they should be.
It’s just been in the past year that my dreams have come in such a steady stream from one night to the next. It’s usually one dream per night, but sometimes I’ll awaken and shake my head, then go back to sleep and the dream resumes. Sometimes the dream is so jarring or confusing that I get out of bed to break the spell and put an end to it.
If I wake up in the morning and remember a dream, I try to write it down right away because dreams evaporate quickly. I don’t know what I’ll do with this late-night diary because reading back through the entries, I hardly recognize some of them. They seem like the ramblings of a total stranger, and a lunatic at that.
There is no consensus in the scientific community on the purpose of dreams. Some of the possibilities include memory consolidation, emotional regulation, cognitive simulation and unconscious expression. What science can tell us is how and when we dream. We sleep in different stages during the night, and our most vivid and intense dreams occur during REM sleep, a stage of sleep characterized by increased brain activity and rapid eye movements. I learned from a sleep researcher at Baylor that during REM sleep our body goes into a sort of paralysis that protects us from acting out our dreams. That’s good to know; it keeps us from flailing about and injuring ourselves or our sleep partner. Sleepwalking, by the way, occurs during non-REM sleep.
Still, with no consensus on the purpose of dreams, there are plenty of so-called experts and resources to help you interpret dreams. Some have backgrounds in psychology and some in theology. There also are online do-it-yourself resources with dream dictionaries and AI functions where you load in your dream and you get a response. I loaded one of my dream descriptions into a program and got the same kind of open-ended, non-specific stuff you might get from a psychic reader in a strip center on a rainy Saturday night.
Like the Old Testament kings, I wish I could call a prophet to my room to tell me what my dreams are about. I read one source that said ever since the Bible was pulled together and made available to humanity, God no longer needs to speak to us in dreams. Others say dreams are still a way God communicates with us, but we must know the language and the codes of dreams or seek counsel from someone with those gifts. Again, there are plenty of online videos and webinars to explore.
I’m too lazy or busy — or probably just too skeptical — to dive into any of that. I’m content to keep wondering about my dreams in the context of the human brain – and the mind and memories it holds – being God’s greatest creation and one we’ll never be able to fully understand or replicate ourselves.