Dreams are a gift. Without them I cannot function. There have been times in my life when I’ve gone weeks and even months without being able to remember a single dream. I wake up, the memories drift quickly away into the abyss, and the dream is lost. I usually try to grapple on to something, but there is no substance to hold on to. The dreams, if I can recall even the slightest detail, are mundane at best or are too confusing to have even the slightest value.
To put it mildly, these weeks and months of dreamless sleep are crippling.
I rely entirely on my dreams to tell me stories. It’s rare that I create a story out of thin air. Most of the time, there is a vision that drives my thoughts and my ideas. There is a dream from which I steal a premise or see a character born. Often the best dreams are nothing more than a conversation or a single event. When I wake, my mind scrambles to put all of the pieces in place, to fabricate the world in which this fantastical person exists, or to shape the history and future of a single moment in time. Those are the dreams I remember because they suck me into their lives. Sometimes I am only an observer, other times I am a character. I am unable to forget, as if they have arrived in my head with the express purpose of being remembered. They want to be told. They want to be stories.
Some dreams are chaotic. There are a thousand unrelated things, and the dream evolves from ludicrous to absurd and then on to preposterous. Yet even there, there are moments of solidarity. There are moments when the actors in the performance come together in perfect cohesion, as if they had agreed beforehand, “We’ll give him one piece to make him think”, and I’m awakened into wonder. Such moments are such a forceful divorce from the rest of the dream, that they are unmistakable and unforgettable.
Consider a moment in a movie, when all of the sound and chaos of the raging battle dies down. One character grabs another by the shoulders, their eyes meet, and one of them whispers the most stunningly profound line of the entire production. The fray is lost in the distance, and all you hear and see is that moment. Everything hinges on that because it’s the most important piece of the entire story. After the appropriate amount of time, the sounds of war return and chaos again ensues.
My longer, more chaotic dreams, often have just such moments. I may be trying my hardest to lasso a five headed alligator with dental floss when my high school math teacher arrives and says, “Travis, you wage an impossible battle.”
Now in the context of the dream it makes sense, but it’s kind of cliché and unnecessary. Yet often, I find myself waking with those words burned into my psyche, as if they were the only thing I was meant to remember or as if someone is trying to tell me something. So I am left pondering the meaning for the rest of the day. Throughout the day my mind wrestles and turns and when the sun sets and I am prepared to sleep, I have crafted a story on that simple premise. There are times when God calls us to wage impossible battles because victory is not the concern, the fight is. We may not achieve justice, but we are to fight for it regardless. The war is worth fighting losing battles. Yet the story might be very different. It may be the story that says to count costs and to fight wisely. It may be about knowing when to let go and let the Master have control. It really all boils down to how my days before and after go.
With all of that said, dreams are God’s gift to us. To me they are a treasure trove of ideas and inspiration. My favorites are those of the goodness of the creator. My happiest are when the truth is revealed to me when I couldn’t see it before. Those are the dreams I crave more than anything else, more than any story or plot, and more than any pleasantries. For they are the dreams that I carry with me to his Word and carry with me into prayer. They are the ones that lighten my walk because I know my father speaks to me.
And maybe this is all just nonsense to you. If so, feel free to find me crazy. I know that I do. We’ll be in good company.