I Dreamed a Dream...

I'm sitting here at 4:45 am in the sleep lab, waiting for 6:00 to come around, and as I do, I have a plethora or thoughts running through my head. I just can't seem to get them to stop. So I'm glad I'm working, and not attempting to sleep, because I wouldn't be very successful at that right now. So I figured, I'll put my fingers to work and just type out everything that's in my brain. Because once it's out, I might just be able to chill the freak out.

I had a really crazy dream the other night. Not just crazy, but disturbing and ridiculous and sickening and frightening and funny all at the same time. I'm not going to tell you the dream, but I will say that when I woke up in the morning, I had the worse feeling. I was sick, but slightly amused. I wanted to throw up, but laugh at the same time. I couldn't put into words exactly what I felt at that very moment. Even now, two full days later, I still remember every vivid detail of the stupid dream. Now if you know me, you know that I don't just disregard dreams. All my life I've remembered most of my dreams. I've written many of them down. I've had many of them interpreted by people who are talented in that area. I've even read many books on the subject of dreams (Thank you Carl Jung and of course, Freud) and I have a dream directory that sits next to my bed and is cracked open pretty much every morning. The people I did tell the dream to just said things like, "Well your subconsciously stressed and your mind and body are trying to make sense of what's stressing you..." or "It's just nothing. Dreams are wierd and don't mean anything."

But what if they do?

When I was 6 years old, I started having a reoccurring dream. It started out on a dark, rainy night, and I was 22 years old. I was riding shotgun in a car, with a brunette behind the wheel. She was someone I knew and trusted. Of course in waking life, I wouldn't have known her from Adam. We're driving down a winding road, and all of a sudden there's a screeching sound, then the sounds of metal crunching and glass breaking all around me. The dream then shifts to an omniscient view, and I realize that I am looking at my dying body from many feet above the wreckage. At first in the dream I would wake up before I died. But as I got older, I would die in the dream every time.

I had that dream at least once a week for the next 16 years.

I'm 22. I'm a missionary in the great state of Wisconsin. My companion is this fantastic girl that I got along with beautifully. She is a brunette. And she is the designated driver. One night we were running late getting back to our apartment after a dinner appointment. She was going a little faster than normal, and she decided to take a short cut. As she turned onto a new road I'd never seen before, it began to rain. It was already dark. Suddenly the dream sequence wasn't a dream anymore. It was actually happening. That same road. The same car. The same driver. The rain.

My heart started racing and it felt as if it might just beat right out of my chest. My fingers were wrapped so tightly around the door handle that they lost all feeling. My breathing quickened and I closed my eyes and began to pray as I prepared myself for what I had seen coming since I was only 6 years old.

Now you can probably imagine that the dream didn't QUITE go as had been played in my dream for all those years. It actually turned out to be a pretty amazing experience. As I kept offering up my plea to the Heavens, I actually felt like I heard someone say, "Not this time."

When I opened my tear filled eyes, we were no longer on the road. We were turning into our parking lot. That night I prayed so hard with thankfulness bursting out of my heart.

I can't help but ask myself what it all meant. I've had similar experiences, as I'm sure you all have, where you have a dream and find yourself experiencing the dream in waking life - the detail just as clear as it was in your dream. Once I had a dream I was riding my bike in a skirt on a college campus. There was another girl riding a few feet ahead of me also in a skirt. My first area on the mission was Madison, at the campus of the University of Wisconsin. The dream was replicated exactly in waking life, not one single detail out of place.

It could be that I am just thinking too much about this - blowing everything completely out of proportion and making things into something they're not, but I just don't know. How are we even to being to know the truth about things like this? We can't comprehend it - our silly little human brains just aren't capable of it. Someday we will, and it will all make perfect sense - as if we had been told it every day of our lives. I just imagine us sitting with the ones we love, slapping our foreheads for being so silly as to forget such simple and insignificant details.

That's one of the amazing things about this life experience. We're so clueless! We're here, with words, people, experiences and histories to follow, and we can choose everything that we believe. We can decide to follow the teachings of any church we want. We can choose to be any kind of person we feel so inclined to be. We can choose to interpret something as silly as a dream to mean something incredible in our lives. But it's 100% up to us. We've been given the tools. It's up to us to start building. What you build and how you build it is totally up to you. We all have different tools, in fact. So not one life experience is going to be even remotely the same. How could it be?

Okay, well I think I've rambled on enough for the time being. I do feel better after writing all this down. It's so very theraputic. Perhaps I should start a dream blog - typing up the dreams I have and leaving them open for discussion. Maybe I dream so much and so vividly for a reason...who knows?