Dreams.
When I was at my lowest low, I tried anything and everything to pick myself back up again.
One of the things I've always been fascinated with is dreams. I think dreams tell us a lot about ourselves. They are our way of letting stuff out and letting stuff go. I think dreams help us sort out our feelings and thoughts so we can hopefully gain perspective and think more clearly about certain situations and problems. I also believe some dreams are messages God is sending us. So I started taking the first half hour or so of every day writing down the dream or dreams I'd remembered from the night before, and started analyzing them. I took my dreams very seriously. I prayed every night before I went to sleep that my dreams would give me answers I needed and prayed to remember them. This worked every time.
I had many different dream dictionaries and once I started reading about all the symbols and meanings it amazed me. I saw that every dream had a theme; even two and three dreams in the same night would have the same theme. Maybe every symbol in this dream was all about mixed emotions; maybe every symbol in that dream was all about being headed on the right (or wrong!) track. Some symbols showed up dream after dream after dream. One was water, in all shapes and forms. Water being your emotions, this was never a surprise. Another symbol the recurred was alligators. For YEARS I dreamt about alligators I would say about once or twice a week. When I started my dream analysis this was the first symbol I looked up and found out it is a symbol of hidden danger; something lurking before it strikes. Yes, the alligator was in water. Once I confronted these symbols I knew I was on the right path. I needed to confront the hidden danger of my emotions that had been building and building. I knew that looking for messages in my dreams was going to help me. I've never had another alligator dream.
My first Jesus dream was short but vivid. I had been going through a divorce and had spent the first year reading the Bible and other spiritual awakenings, so I wasn't surprised I had dreamt of Jesus. I was in a dark classroom crouched under a desk during some kind of tragedy (in my head it's always been a school shooting), and I was praying. Someone else was kneeling with me but I never saw her face although in the dream I felt I knew her. The door of the classroom came flying open and Jesus came bounding in, pointing and shaking his finger at me saying, "I am sick and tired of saving you from evil." I realized with this dream that God was paying attention but He was telling me He couldn't do it all, that I had to help Him by learning the lessons He was trying to teach me. The funny thing about this dream is that Jesus looked like the boyfriend of a friend of mine from my waking life. I was definitely steered towards her because of this and this friend became my holistic therapist and helped me during my "final" months of self-discovery.
My second Jesus dream was years later during a time I was so depressed and angry I couldn't even breathe sometimes, and in the dream I WAS Jesus. I was in some sort of dark, underground tunnel, dirty, dressed in rags, crawling along the ground. I was crawling past people I feel I didn't know, all I could see were their legs, and no one tried to help me. I was thirsty and I couldn't get words to come out. When I turned around (still crawling, dragging really) there were people also crawling behind me. These were all people I recognized and knew. Because of this dream I knew that God was trying to tell me that He was with me, and that those I loved were behind me and would see me through it all. I knew that God wanted me to know He felt the pain I felt, knew I felt like I was at the bottom of the lowest low I could feel, but that He was with me.
My final Jesus dream was closer to the "end" of my long six years, closer to where I was starting to feel "healed". My dream was that I was walking along a path, holding hands with a man. I never saw the person's face in my dream. I remember feeling that the man was a friend and then out of the blue we decided to hold hands. (This I know now was my "premonition" of Bob.) We were walking down a woodsy path that came to a clearing. That clearing was 3 baseball fields behind a school, and kids were playing on all fields. (The school was St. Charlotte's school, I remember in the dream making it a point of walking around to the front of the school to see what it was called. I've never heard of a St. Charlotte, nor have I ever met anyone with the name Charlotte...so that one I'm still waiting on.) So anyway, we're at this field and all of a sudden Jesus is floating down in cross form (but not on a cross), looking like he would have looked on the cross - bloody and dirty. But then all of a sudden all the people I loved, friends and family, were all in a circle holding hands, with Jesus next to me, now beautiful and clean and dressed in bright white holding my hand. And He says, "Let us pray." I knew from that dream that I was going to be ok, that I was about to be given a new life. Jesus was telling me I was healed, I was going to comfortable and at ease with everyone and everything that I loved around me. Young and renewed, ready for a new life. And He was right, of course.
A few months later, around the holidays, I'd made a plan for the rest of my life. Ready to accept that I may never find the love of my life, but that I needed to still HAVE a life, and I would still be ok. So I made a plan to buy a condo, move from my apt and start my new life. After the holidays I had one final "breakdown". Bob was the one who pulled me out of it, talked me through it, told me to take some time off from work. I did that, regrouped, and started my process again. A week later, Bob and I went out on a platonic dinner "date".........we've been together ever since. And I've never had another Jesus dream again. But I know He's still with me.
Other people have started to ask me to analyze their dreams at times and I absolutely love it. I love seeing the light in their eyes when they realize what the dreams are saying and how it affects them. I don't know what every symbol means off the top of my head, but I can gather all the information and come up with a pretty good idea what message is trying to be sent.
I don't have as vivid of dreams anymore like I did when I was on my journey of self-discovery. But I still recognize my dreams and learn from them. I want to stay aware, because you never know when He might come through again with something important. And I don't want to miss it.
