I don’t often remember my dreams. I think this is due, in part, to the fact that I have little patience for lying in bed when I experience periods of wakefulness. Instead of staying in my bed when I wake in the night, I’m likely to get up, read a book, and return to bed when I feel sleepy. Others are better at simply remaining in bed and quietly waiting for sleep to return. Another reason I do not remember dreams may be that I haven’t put any energy into remembering my dreams. When we were college students, one of our professors had kept a dream journal since his college days. At that time, he had more than a quarter of a century of dreams logged. He said that he learned to remember his dreams. When he began recording his dreams, he might remember one or two dreams a week. After practicing, he learned to remember four and five dreams each night, sometimes even more.

My subconscious doesn’t seem to need to be recorded and my conscious life doesn’t seem to be too interested in probing my dreams.

When I do remember a dream, it generally doesn’t take a psychiatrist to unlock its meaning. Generally it is pretty obvious what problems or issues in my life have given rise to working on them in my dream state. Last night I dreamed that I was preparing for worship. The event was an ecumenical gathering, with colleagues from many different denominations gathering. Our church was hosting the event, but we were somehow ill prepared. The guest musicians didn’t seem to have a clue about worship and were playing music that was not appropriate and playing at the wrong times. I was putting on my robe, but having problems getting it right. There may have been other details that I don’t remember, but the mood of the dream was slightly distressed. I was unhappy with the way things were going in the dream and grateful to wake and discover that it was a dream.

We are hosting an ecumenical gathering this week. It doesn’t involve worship. There are a few details that remain as part of the preparation. It needs to be high on my list of priorities early in the week, but we will be fully prepared when our colleagues arrive. The Association of Christian Churches in South Dakota will present the program for the event, so I have no responsibility for that part of things.

We do have guest musicians scheduled for a week from today. The University of Nebraska Brass Quintet will be playing during our worship service. I have, however, reviewed all of their music and they have an order of worship, so I do not foresee any problems.

And, after 24 years of wearing the same pulpit robe, I do have a new one that is different from the old one. It is not, however, difficult to put on and I have no fears about getting it right when I vest for worship today.

So my brain took three isolated realities from my life and put them together into a single dream narrative. None of them represent major anxieties in my life. They are simply normal parts of the life of a pastor. Maybe the reason I have never gotten into recording my dreams is that I fear that if I did they would, for the most part, be boring. After all, I sleep through all of them.

Exploring dreams and sleep is, however, a fascinating study. Because we lose consciousness each day in the normal rhythms of life, we have a certain curiosity about the difference between being conscious and not. What changes in our brains and awareness when we sleep? I think that another reason we are fascinated by these things is that we have no knowledge of what occurs when we die. We suspect that there is some kind of loss of consciousness or at least an altered state of mind, but we have no real knowledge of what death is like. So we use sleep as an analogy. Both religious and secular writers have referred to death as sleep, though I suspect that on some level we all know that they aren’t the same thing.

There are some people who experience a deep fear of sleeping. Hypnophobia is a recognized medical diagnosis in the general category of anxiety disorders. Some people who suffer from this disorder associate their fear of sleep with a fear of dying. Others simply do not like the loss of control. Others have problems with recurring nightmares and disturbing thought patterns.

I find sleep to be gentle and pleasant.

We humans have a lot of different ways of experiencing the world.

I am, however, quite interested in what happens when our brains put things together in new and unique patterns. I experience time,, for example, as a linear reality. I divide my sense of time into past, present and future. This way of thinking has evolved over millennia in humans. Others see it in a similar way. There have been many books written and records made of how we experience time.

But I know people for whom the barriers between past and present, at least have become murky. They lose the capacity to distinguish between memory and current experience. Once, years ago, when I was paying a visit to a nursing home, a woman greeted me at the door. I did not know the woman. I had come to visit another resident of the home. But she proceeded to take my arm and escort me through the hallways of the building as if she had long been expecting my arrival. She spoke of me taking her to the movies and speculated on what movie we might see. I didn’t know the names of any of the movies she named or the other people mentioned in her narrative. This process repeated on subsequent visits. I came to the conclusion that she was reliving some experience from her past and that I was playing the role of someone not myself in her little drama. The past had invaded the present in such a way that she could not allow me to be myself - or the trip to the movies to be a memory only.

It may be that sleeping is less an experience that reveals the nature of death and more of an experience that reveals the nature of our brains as we age. I don’t know. I suspect that there is no distinction between past, present and future from the perspective of the eternal.

But I’ll reserve future speculation about my dreams for another day. Right now I need to prepare for worship.

And I do need to make sure the musicians have their cues right and that I get that new robe straight before I walk into the sanctuary.

Copyright © 2012 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.