I swear that there are times my own subconscious is wicked and perverse. It waited until I had written (yesterday) about sharing dreams to share with me a literal dream about a broken dream! Sheesh…. I mean, have a heart!
In the spirit of full disclosure I suppose I ought to share it with you…
In real life 20 years ago I left the ministry when my own theology began to veer off into a direction that my flock weren’t interested in following. And, I was particularly cognizant of an Old Testament verse which cites several things which God hates, among which was this one:
“He who sows discord among brethren.”
In my mind it was pretty clear, if I was the divergent one then I ought to be the one who left instead of hammering away at my congregation and disturbing their faith. The issues were significant, it was never going to be likely that I convince an entire congregation that a fundamental aspect of their faith might be flawed, and so I stood up, made clear the reasons to those who would understand the theology behind the decision and leave.
Around that time I had thought — and it was only a thought — about visiting with folks in the U.K. with whom I had become close in spite of having left the organization. And that germ of an idea lay there for a while, I even thought to myself that I might wait a “couple” years and make the visit then.
Well, a “couple” years stretched into 10 and then nearly into 20. And last night I had this dream that it was “now,” and suddenly that dream was going to become a reality. Someone handed me tickets to make the trip and I sorted out my luggage and started off on the trip — only to wake up in the middle of the night to realize that “Always Ready Peter,” that “Never Say Die Peter” had set off on a trip for which no plans had been made, no one knew I was coming, I didn’t even know if the people I had intended to visit were still alive (more than a couple were older than me — perhaps they had passed already) — it was a right mess.
The dream got even more weird because my phone rang — the one in the dream — and it was my wife and daughter calling to check on me — on an old fashioned flip phone with extendable antenna (if that gives you any idea how dated the dream was).
Suffice it to say, and I’m cutting the narration short because the dream is fading as fast as I keyboard the details, that I was going lickety split in an effort to save the trip. I had moved some business furniture to a friend’s house and they were helping whilst I was overseas attempting to save the routing and still connect with a disparate group of people spread all over the U.K. It was a mess. And in my dream I realized how much of a mess it was and I couldn’t find a way out of it.
One might think that such a dream would raise my real life blood pressure. In fact it did not. I got myself out of bed at 5 a.m., dressed, forgetting to weigh myself, then undressing, weighing myself, and getting dressed again, and then taking my blood pressure. Whew! I’m tuckered out just talking about all that activity so early in the morning.
And to top it all off, it has now been 6 days since we had our new InterWebs installed and our installer had told us that we might be well advised to power off our interface box “once or twice a week” to keep the connection refreshed and I had not done that. My dear wife came to me wondering what was wrong with the InterWebs as she had already been up for a couple hours and “the little thingy was going round in circles” and nothing would connect. So, I unplugged and replugged the box and life returned to normal — another catastrophe avoided! Now I’m even more tired!
There is no end to this story. It’s an anecdote that I shared because I had just written about sharing dreams — and even though the nature of the dreams I was talking about in that post were more about goals and visions of the future, this little dream about something very real and concrete just seemed to real to ignore. Maybe having written it down my brain will think about it and a year from now it will mean something to me. Or maybe one of you, dear readers, will suggest something that will make sense out of it.
All I know is my subconscious can be a sneaky conniving so-and-so. And that’s all for today.
Talk to you tomorrow.
Embrace Serendipity 
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