Dream Themes

Life is largely telling our­selves about our­selves. Most peo­ple do not know that; they get too busy with the details of wak­ing life and ignore the inner para­bles they tell them­selves all night long about what it is to be alive and what it is to be them. Few pay enough atten­tion to their dreams to remem­ber them, and most write their dreams off as silly noc­tur­nal actions of the mind. By doing so, they miss a won­der­ful inner mir­ror edu­ca­tion about themselves.

Dream lan­guage is sym­bol and para­ble lan­guage. For exam­ple: two themes that repeat them­selves in my life are sym­bol­ized by floods and going to school. Lately, these two themes have become inten­si­fied. Floods usu­ally rep­re­sent impend­ing chaos and extreme demands. I have often told peo­ple lately that I am “drown­ing at my desk.” Word cues in the day often become image-stories in our sleep. The floods are excit­ing and take place in child­hood geo­graphic areas, but end the same way: they threaten to over­whelm me, but they sub­side at my feet. Yes, I have a lot to do. No, I do not feel inad­e­quate to the tasks or sit­u­a­tions. Chaos has a way of back­ing away in the pres­ence of my faith in God and con­fi­dence in myself.

Life is a school. That too has always been a pow­er­ful theme in my life. Thirty-five plus years of edu­ca­tion from early child­hood to mid-adulthood have also been cou­pled with a decade of teach­ing in var­i­ous col­leges, plus even more learn­ing and teach­ing in my pri­mary task as minister/counselor. Life for me is learn­ing, learn­ing, learn­ing, and teach­ing, teach­ing, teach­ing. Con­se­quently, my dreams are often cast in class­room sce­nar­ios. In those class­rooms, I am very sel­dom the teacher; I am gen­er­ally the stu­dent. To this day, I am an avid stu­dent of life — and I hope you are too.

In a world in which oth­ers try to tell us who we are, it pays to stop and pon­der what we think of our­selves. We mir­ror our­selves in our wak­ing actions and in the all night dra­mas of our dreams. The key ques­tion has to do with whether or not we are pay­ing atten­tion: Are you learn­ing who you are? You are made in the image of God. Life’s les­son is mostly you. Pay atten­tion. Do not reject what is in the mir­ror, for it is divine.