One of the things I love about being a mother is tucking my children in their beds at night. After reading stories, brushing teeth, and putting our pajamas on, I love praying with them, leaning over to give them a kiss and put their favorite blankets over them. One of the things I make sure I tell them is how good they are. No matter what has happened during the day, I want them to go to sleep knowing and believing in their absolute goodness.
Remember the good 'ol days when you could nap when you needed to or go to bed early if you felt like it - or better yet - sleep in as long as you wanted! Ahh! Sweet sleep! Everyone tells you to learn to sleep when the baby sleeps and then they remind you that you'll never really sleep again after you have children. The statistics are pretty grim when it comes to our sleep habits in this country. We are lucky if the average person is getting 6 hours of sleep a night. Some people have to work night shifts and sleep during the day. Many of us fall asleep with televisions on or our computers and phones by our bed. And then there are your children who wake up because of a bad dream or wet beds or just because they are afraid of the dark. And then there are times when we we simply can't sleep because we can't shut our mind off. The list of things we have to do keeps us anxious, and winding down from our cares and concerns is difficult. Even hormones can affect our sleeping habits. If there is one consistent thing about sleep that we all have in common, it is this. We all need sleep. Even God needed to rest after six days of planning, creating, and putting together a beautiful world where everyone can live and prosper in.
Our physical bodies require sleep so that we might be alert, productive, and more loving toward one another. When Olivia was born, I had no idea what I was in for when it comes to sleep. You could feed her till you thought her tummy should burst, swaddle her, rock her, and put her down for what should have been a pretty long period of sleep and twenty minutes later she was wiggling out of her blanket and ready to do anything but sleep. I went for months with sleeping at the most two hours at a time. I cried and I prayed to God begging for just 4 or 5 hours of straight sleep. I was so sleep deprived, I didn't know half of the time if I was coming or going. I was definitely not alert, let alone productive, and I'm pretty sure I wasn't very loving either. I could have put Oscar the Grouch to shame, once in awhile popping out of my garbage can of crabbiness in an attempt to be social. In order to keep my sanity and my family from falling apart, I did what I didn't want to do. Sleep with Olivia. Desperate times called for desperate measures, and Olivia became my new bunk mate for awhile. Eventually, she slept. Eventually, I made it back to our bedroom. I was so messed up in my sleep habits, it required my doctor undoing what months of not sleeping had done to me just to help my body adjust to sleeping normally again. And now when I put all three kids to bed, there is not a night that does not go by that I don't thank God for all the hours of sleep( in a row) that I am getting.
Sleep not only serves the purpose of resting and rejuvenating our bodies, but sleep has its purpose for our spirit too. When we lie down at night and fall asleep, many of us dream. Much of our dreams we don't remember, but some nights our dreams our very vivid and seem very real. Some dreams are so fascinating and bizarre that we share the details with other people, wondering why we would have dreamed about something so unexpected.
Until I studied in the spiritual program at Creighton University and participated in monthly, and sometimes weekly spiritual direction, under a person who had completed a degree in Spiritual Direction, I used to believe that our dreams were separate from our daily life. I thought that our dreams were just something sort of funny and even entertaining, but not something that reflected who I was as a person, or a textbook of how I was growing spiritually. Dreaming seemed to be something that I had no control over, something that happened to me, not for me. Our dreaming is of God, and anything that is truly of God is for us, not against us.
Psalm 16:7 says: I will bless the Lord who guides me; even at night my heart instructs me.
This verse describes perfectly our spirit's ability to learn something about ourselves, and God, even while we sleep. Our bodies may rest, but our spirit enters a new classroom when we dream, and in our dreams, God is our teacher, our guide, our instructor of our inner selves. The things that we remember from our dreams are symbols of our inner life, and reflect to us many things about our soul's journey. One very common symbol is pregnancy. I have heard many people say that they dream of being pregnant. While for some it may be an actual pregnancy, for many others, it is simply a symbol of something new that is coming into being in their lives. For example, I had many pregnancy dreams when I was about to start a new teaching job. Every time I changed schools, I would see a pattern of pregnancy dreams simply reflecting to me that I was embarking on learning new things about myself from my students and other colleagues. New situations that arose in my classrooom caused me to be aware of a spiritual lesson - maybe forgiveness, maybe a character trait of mine would rise to the surface, or maybe it was simply a new beginning in a new grade that I had never taught before. Over my years that I participated in spiritual direction, I learned to write down some of the dreams I had, and as time went on, I could see familiar patterns and symbols of who I was as spirit.
Another example that occurs from time to time in my life are dreams of tornadoes. Every time we move to a new state or city, I dream about tornadoes and their destruction. I have moved many times in my life, and tornadoes became a symbol of having to build a new life from scratch. As the spouse of a priest, a move means finding new friends and building new relationships. It means settling into a new home, finding new doctors, new schools, new babysitters you can trust, and getting to know a new congregation. What seems so easy for people who have never moved can be challenging to the person who has to move often. New grocery stores, new hair stylists, and even a new "culture" to learn. Everything that I once knew in a previous home is gone. The first year of transition is never easy, emotionally and spiritually. No matter how smooth a transition goes, that first few months in a new place seems overwhelming, sometimes very empty, and you are definitely building a life from the ground up. Physical, emotional, and spiritual skills of survival come into play, just as if you really lived through a tornado.
Sometimes, a person will dream the same dream over and over. God is always trying to teach us something about our inner lives through our dreams. If you dream the same thing over and over, there is something there, a lesson, a thought, or a soul-insight that you haven't quite gotten yet. I learned a technique of writing down everything I could remember about my dreams... specific colors, the way I felt, the people in the dream, and anything else that may have stuck in my mind. I would then pray with the dream, and ask God to reveal to me what I needed to learn from that dream. The dominant emotion you felt in that dream can sometimes be the key to unlocking your heart and releasing something that isn't of God. If fear is the dominant emotion, what is it that you most fear in your life and is causing you anxiety? If peace is the dominant emotion, thank God for that feeling and build upon that peacefulness. Many spiritual directors encourage putting yourself back in the dream and letting the people in the dream "speak" to you and "tell" you what it is they want you to know. The story they tell can often lead to solutions to problems or insights about who you are as a person. Our dreams are a fascinating way to discover who God is, and where God is leading you.
Have you ever told someone that you "needed to sleep on it" before you made a final decision about something? Have you ever gone to bed unsure about a decision you have to make and then upon waking up the next morning, you seem to be clear about what you should do, or feel reaffirmed in the direction you should go? While giving our bodies over to rest, we also give our hearts and our minds to God, and allow Him time at night to re-order our thinking, wash the residue of the day just past, and re-align ourselves with Love's purpose. At night, our spirit is freed from the demands of the body and is liberated to move into higher realms to be taught, led, and directed by God. It is not an accident that we dream the things we do. As amusing as dreams are, they also take on the more serious business of getting our attention in a way in which we are not always able to give our full attention to during the day. Once in awhile you will here someone say that they wake up at night for no apparent reason and cannot get back to sleep. Sometimes that is the only time that God can get through to us. The middle of the night is when we are least distracted and where real quiet is all around us. When God needs one on one time with us, that we haven't chosen to give at other times, what we label insomnia, can very often be something deep within us that is begging for our attention. God's devotion to our happiness never rests. God will come to us at any hour, day or night, whenever our happiness might be at stake.
Samuel was awakened in the night, hearing his name called. It was God calling him. It was God who aroused him from sleep and gave him the invitation to serve him. "Speak Lord, your servant is listening!" Our dreams speak to us, invite us, and are always calling us to lead and live from love. Our dreams hold spiritual solutions to our earthly problems. Our dreams carry the codes of our spiritual DNA that further explains who God is and who we are as God's beloved. When we dream, we are carried to places we would not otherwise be able to go as physical beings, and we remember what love is, what love looks like, and even more importantly, what love feels like. Some of us fly in our dreams, some of us see loved ones that have long passed away in our dreams, and some of us travel roads we have never been down with people we wouldn't be found with in our daily routines. Some dreams take us to foreign lands and we speak languages we've never learned. Other dreams are simple flashes of an image. There are times when dreams can be informative. Just before Charles was transferred to Kansas City, I had a dream that his job would offer a transfer there. When Charles came home and told me of the transfer, I knew that God was preparing me for this next part of our journey, and there was no question that we should go.
Keep a journal near your bed, and just take a minute to jot down what you remember, and when you take time to pray, go back to that journal and allow God to illuminate your mind with the brightness of the stars that watched over you as you slept. As you write down your dreams over time, notice patterns, notice what really strikes you, notice your feelings and what you are thinking. God will make the connection from mind to heart, just as the stars connect to form the constellations while you sleep. If you are open, the light of knowledge will enter your dream-state and be a lamp unto your feet as you travel through your dreams. There are lots of dream symbol books out there to try, and you can go online and discover what some of the symbols of our dreaming mean. In the book, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, there is a door inisde a closet, that when opened, leads to a completely different world and an unforgettable adventure for the characters. When we go to sleep at night, it is as if we open that closet door and enter a remarkable adventure of fun, love, mystery, and even danger, with all kinds of spriitual lessons just waiting to reveal themselves to us.
We can compare our dreams to the net that Jesus asked the fisherman to cast even deeper. Our dreams are the deeper waters in which we heed the call to cast our nets in, as we sleep, and "pull up" an abundance of insights into God, ourselves, what makes us happy, and how we can heal our hurts. Having taken the time to reflect upon our dreams, we feel the heaviness of our nets, overflowing with love and gratitude. Love for God, love for people, love for who you are in this moment, and who you are becoming. And we realize that if we had stayed in the shallow waters of our everyday thinking, brushing off such a vital part of God-with-us, we catch nothing. We end up with empty nets and no "food" to fill our hunger...no "real food" to share with the rest of the world who hungers for loving hearts and peaceful minds.
Before going to bed, it is important to prepare your heart and mind, and offer them both to God. Pray for the ability to remember the dreams that will help you grow in your relationship with God. Pray for a willingness to climb into your boat and sail out into the deep, and with great faith, lower your net upon the waves of your dreaming. And as your dream-tide flows in and out of your sleeping, pray to catch so many thoughts, insights, and directions from God, your net bursts and breaks under the weight and strength of love, spilling over into the morning light and flooding your day with new understanding of your life's purpose.
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