September 16 2023
Dreams
Your old men will dream dreams. Joel 2: 28.
Count me among the old men. Count me among those who dream. Count me among those who see dreams as wrestling with oneself. Count me among those who see dreams as cleansing the mind so that I can enter eternity a bit closer to my true me. Count me among those who see dreams as often inexplicable because they deal with the unconscious. Count me among those who believe there is no one dominant explanation for dreams.
Carl Jung stated that dreams are a way for the unconscious mind to communicate with the conscious mind. He also be asserted that dreams are symbolic and can have multiple meanings.
My unconscious mind caused me trouble at night.
Looking back, as far back as the day of my birth, has been a liberating experience. I’ll tell you why. For many decades I’ve had nightmares, fighting off an attacker, thrashing my sheets and blankets but never able to catch the bugger.
Then something dawned on me. When I have born, I weighed 5 kg, or 11 lbs. I also was circumcised right at birth. As a youngster I was called ‘dikkop’, ’fathead’, indicating that my head was larger than normal. Combining all these factors, I concluded, that my delivery was a difficult one, struggling to get out, while, once safe in my mother’s arms, I experienced the pain of penis plight. Once this had become plain to me, my nightmares ceased.
Several Dreams.
In the last year or so I have had different dreams. In one of them, I became quite agitated and worried: “how, in the world, I, as an unskilled, impractical, green immigrant, 23 years old, brought up in a better than average middleclass home, never having worked a day in my life, suddenly landing in Canada, engaged already to the love of my life, how would I ever be able to earn a decent income to support a family?”
Well?
Somehow, by the grace of God, I managed, reinventing myself three times: from starting an insurance business, then adding by becoming a real estate broker, and finally, relocating from the Niagara Peninsula to Eastern Ontario, where I reschooled to become a commercial Real Estate Appraiser. All good enough to earn a decent living, saw five children become professionals and managed to save enough for retirement.
Alone in an unending desert.
Last week I had a dream in which I stood in a stark, unending desert: a Sahara-like situation with sand dunes everywhere, and I the solitary person there. That was my dream.
I immediately connected my dream to my life prior to 1972, when, raised in an orthodox Christian family, committed to everything Christian, activist, promoting Christian education zealously, but having a faith more historic and traditional than progressive and vibrant.
That all changed when, in 1972 two books came my way, thanks to two friends: one a Dutch one, “Sterven… en dan” (After death… what) and another by Dr. Donella Meadows, the lead author of Limits to Growth.
After death, what?
The first book changed everything in my life that I had automatically assumed to be the true faith: “we live, go to church, have a decent life, die and go to heaven”. My dream of standing in a barren desert portrayed to me that sort of existence: sterile, unquestioning, stagnant. Through that book, I suddenly saw Christianity in a new light: not heaven as goal, but the earth, God’s precious gift to humanity; God’s infinite work of art; God’s marvelous, majestic, wonderful miracle, where all creatures, great and small testify to God’s greatness.
Then in 1972, now more than 50 years ago, faith became real for me, expressed in John 3: 16: “God so loved the ‘world’, that he offered his Son as a sacrifice to buy the cosmos back from the Devil”. I then saw for the first time in my life that Christ died not merely for our sins, but primarily to ‘redeem = buy back’ God’s precious creation. The church, exclusively focusing on ‘sin’, has turned Christianity into the desert, where it still is languishing and dying.
The Finite Earth.
The second book, Limits to Growth, suddenly saw me living in the world, a different world, a world dying by a thousand cuts. I then saw that I lived in a World that God called ‘good’ seven times, a world created to support us fully and gloriously when we practise symbiosis. I finally, by the grace of God, saw how we must truly see the world as ‘holy’ as God’s expression of what is good and wise and infinite, a true symbol of his majestic creativity.
Yes, old men do dream dreams.