Sleep is essential to our well being, and the dreams that frequently accompany sleep may be welcomed or unwelcomed. There are stages and cycles of sleep that influence our dreams, and attempts to interpret dreams and give them meaning date back millenniums. Personally, my own dreams tend to reflect my personality. I am detail oriented, given to the pursuit of making things “fit,” work together, and play out in an orderly fashion. Disruption anywhere on that continuum frustrates me – something God and I have been working on for decades, and I am doing better overall. But most of my dreaming is spent still, figuring things out, trying to make the pieces fit, and resolving any disorder. The end result awakens me with a still-tired kind of feeling, aware that my basic personality was actively at work while I was trying to sleep, but the memories I have of my dreams are usually very vague. There are mornings though I awaken with very vivid recall of what my dreams have been. Those “dreams” would more accurately be called “nightmares,” and they are very unwelcomed. They don’t happen often, but they do happen, and I can usually attach them in some way to a very tangible “nightmare” that has occurred in my life and they rehearse for me the fear, the sorrow, or the desperation that was once mine. I believe the very vivid recall I am able to have with nightmares comes from those strong emotions and feelings that were stirred.
The “tangible” nightmares of life also do happen. Abandonment, loss, abuse, the diagnosis we never wanted to hear, trauma with a thousand faces. They leave us with emotions and feelings that are very unwelcomed, and yet, with God, somehow, some way, in the over and over of going to God, bringing all of my emotions and irrational thinking with me, desperately depending on Him, reaching for whatever good He may still have before me, we walk through, finding the light, the hope, the joy God has for us. Why then do the memories still come with vivid intensity and rehearse the anguish and despair? Doesn’t God’s Word clearly tell us to forget the past? Paul was the one who wrote the exhortation to “forget” and yet Paul himself did not “forget,” if forgetting means to no longer have memories. (Study it through for yourself.) Paul though did not allow the past to control him, to set his direction, to cocoon him in such a way that he continually dwelled on the past. Nightmares, the harsh realities of life, do create strong, “negative” emotions, and it is because of those emotions that they seem to “re-surface.” Two persons can experience the same event, and for one, it has little emotional impact, while the other is deeply impacted. Which will remember the event the most intensely? In the same way, there are things we will always remember, and the waves of memories, although they may come less and less frequently, they will still come with vivid intensity, rehearsing the anguish and despair. What do we do??? We go again to God, bringing all of our emotions and irrational thinking with us, desperately depending on Him, reaching for the good He still has before us, and we walk through, and find the light, the hope, the joy God has for us. There are no other options.
– Bev
(Related Bible reading: Psalm 46:1-3)
