I have always loved dreaming. No, not daydreaming, although I’ve done my fair share of that (and then some); I’ve always enjoyed dreaming in my sleep. I feel bad for those who don’t remember their dreams and I know one person who swears they never dream. I don’t believe that. I believe all humans dream – heck, we’ve seen evidence that animals dream too.
In my youth I saw a movie called “Dreamscape” starring Dennis Quaid. It was about a man who could enter people’s dreams and help them if they were having nightmares, etc. In one dream, he meets an assassin who has the same ability – entering the dreams of others – and that assassin has been trained in how to manipulate the dreamscape. The assassin can create weapons out of thin air, change the environment, etc. He had full control over the dream because he had realized that changing the dream merely meant changing a thought. That concept stayed with me.
When my youngest son was a toddler, there was a TV show on called, “Bear in the Big Blue House.” It was a great show that taught young children a variety of lessons and one of the shows dealt with nightmares. Bear tried to teach the children how nightmares weren’t real and how, if you just change a thought, you could change the nightmare into something that wasn’t scary.
Another thing I learned about was something called ‘lucid dreaming,’ in which you’re aware that you’re dreaming. Imagine… being in a dream and being aware that it’s a dream… and then add in that ability to control the dream with just a thought. At some point I learned to do this… on occasion. I found myself falling off a cliff in my dream, realized it was a dream and decided instead of falling I’d fly. Off I went, flapping my arms, looking silly, but flying, not falling. It was an awesome experience and one I’ve repeated in my dreams several times now.
One concept of dreaming that I’ve also always found interesting was the Native American belief that when you’re dreaming it’s actually your spirit leaving your body and moving around in different places… sometimes different realities. Imagine being able to visit different realms, different dimensions, different but parallel universes? That was another spectacularly cool thought/outlook I wanted to remember. In my dreams I’ve visited the same place multiple times… and done so with many places. In dreams like that I’ve had glimpses of what life would have been like if a parent hadn’t died yet… or if I’d made a career of the army… or if I’d gone to work for a different police department. The similarities to my reality are uncanny and the differences, while seemingly minor, have such a huge impact.
All of that has driven me to do two things: I always try to remember my dreams. If for no other reason than that I usually find them very enjoyable and entertaining, I always try to remember my dreams. The second thing is that I always try to learn from my dreams if there seems to be a lesson available. In our dreams, as we experience realities different from the one of our waking world, we have the opportunity to learn. Since it’s a dream, and therefore temporary, there’s no real impact on our life unless we take it with us FROM the dream and into our real life. We’d be foolish not to learn from the mistakes we make in our dreams; they are the least hurtful mistakes we can make.
With all of that in mind, I woke up today and remembered a dream I had last night.
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So, last night I had a dream, and as I try to remember all of it, I think I must have fallen asleep thinking about movies, television and God. There were bits and pieces of different movies and television shows and at least two variations of God.
I was sitting in this old, abandoned church. From the outside it looked like the church at the end of the movie “The Rock.” It was the church Nicolas Cage’s character (FBI Agent Daniel Goodspeed) was running out of with the microfilm full of national secrets; the one that had been hidden by Sean Connery’s character (British agent John Mason). Inside that church, it was dilapidated. The paint was peeling off the walls; the stained-glass windows were so dusty as to look fogged over. There were hymnals on the floor… but the alter was in place; the crucifix behind it was still there; and there was a Bible on the podium in the pulpit. It was open but I couldn’t see to what passage.
I was sitting in one of the pews on the right side of the church, looking around and wondering why the church failed. Not “the church” as in all of religion, but that particular church. If the congregation had been supportive or faithful, if the minister had tended to his flock… what would have had to happen for the church to still be in use?

As I sat pondering, God appeared in the pew directly in front of me. He was sitting sideways, his arm on the back of the pew, looking back at me. He was the God from the television show Supernatural. Yes… it was Chuck. Obviously, I was startled, and he chuckled, and then apologized for having startled me. In my dream, I immediately knew it was the personification of God, so I didn’t ask him who he was or how he got there. The conversation that followed went something like this:
The rest of this entry can be found in the book “Farther Down the Road”.