Recurring Dreams

Do you have them? Recurring dreams? I do and they make me wonder. Why? What do they mean? Is God trying to tell me something? Am I neurotic? Am I normal? Do other people have these?

A while back I wrote about a one of my recurring dreams. It's OK, I don't expect you to remember. In this dream I came upon a town square. Where there is normally the county courthouse, here was the bricked back of an aging apartment building. There were no doors or windows but gas meters every thirty feet or so across the building and up for several floors. Who and how do those meters get read was the question I had.

I have had others. In one dream I have not had for a few years, I am on the run from the law. In one of these iterations, someone put me in the trunk of their car, at night, and drove me to Jackson, Mississippi. From their I called a friend on the coast who picked me up and drove me to Florida where another friend helped get me out of the country, to Germany. The law is always only a step behind me and the fear is palpable even in my sleep. Sometimes I am literally running in these dreams, running in the woods, running down roads, alleys, across parking lots trying to get away. I wonder why. I stay out of trouble with the police so why does this dream keep showing up?

Another recurring night vision I have involves me being at church with cars pulling in fast and furious. The people are filling the pews, and I have not even studied. I am sitting in a little office and the dread of not being ready begins to overwhelm me. What to do? I don't even know what I am going to preach. In one of these dreams, besides all of the above, my shoes are muddy. I can't go to the pulpit looking like this, I think looking at my shoes. At least I can understand this one. I have this one because for years I felt under constant pressure to preach, to prepare, to come up with another sermon. My fear always was that I would not be prepared. I had this one a often for many years, but I have not had it in a long time. Maybe I finally trust God that if I do my part, He will do His and I will be ready.

Last night I had another recurring dream that caused me to awake and once more wonder why. In this one, I am leading some people through a huge building. The building is aged but magnificent. We are trying to get to a particular place. There are occasionally hallways but more often than not there are none. We go through a door into a large room. A single secretary sits behind a desk. We go out another door into another room. Once, we come upon a roundabout where halls branch off in every direction. 

We follow a hall, go through another door, out another door, into a large men's restroom that has thirty urinals and ornate trim work that looks like it alone costs more than my pickup truck. We go into another hall, up and flight of stairs, into another room. We ask the secretary which way. She silently points a finger behind her and we go that way. We get behind a small group that vows they know the way, but we soon lose them in the maze of rooms, doors, hallways, and stairs, restrooms. We never get there, wherever "there" is before I awake.

This dream totally confuses me. I keep having it. Why? What does it mean? It seems to say I am lost, but lost how? During the dream I keep thinking "This should not be this difficult." I do think that about a lot of things I have to daily deal with. Maybe it is a subconscious protest about unnecessary complexity. At work, for instance, we have tasks to do on the computer. The things we do once a year are easy to get to. The things we do everyday, several times a day, require clicks, scrolling, more clicks, more scrolling, wasted time, wasted time. Why is this set up this way? Who does this to us? Why do they hate us? Why such senseless inefficiency?

Maybe, however, it has to do with an old memory when something like this actually happened. When I was a Ph.D. student at Mid-America Baptist Theological Seminary, one of our professors required us to attend the Evangelical Theological Society meeting held at the Opryland Hotel in Nashville. A group of us walked almost an hour looking for the area that held the sessions we were looking for. We walked past motel rooms, past conference rooms, past cafeterias, past restrooms, past gymnasiums. Our feet hurt by the time we got where we were trying to go. Yes, that place really is that big.

Oh well. Do you have recurring dreams? Do they trouble you, confuse you, make you wonder? Tell me about them, if you will. I'd like to think I'm not the only one.