A few years ago—I think it may have been just before the wonderfulness of the COVID experience—I had a dream. I’ve heard that we dream every night but don’t always remember our dreams, and I find that I sleep so much better now than I used to that I don’t remember them as often. But even when I do remember them, they rarely feel as important as this one did. I’ll tell you the dream.
I was standing in the ocean at night, and it was lit by moonlight. Everything was bathed in deep blue. I was in the ocean at least to my waist, fully dressed. (This calls back in my mind to a real memory I have, of when I was walking on the shore ankle deep at Agate Beach, wearing a sweater and jeans, and a wave came up and pulled me down. When I came up, I was waterlogged and my pockets were full of colorful agates, from pea-sized to the size of seeds. Anyway.) In the dream, my hand was raised up as high as I could raise it, and in that one hand, somehow I was holding both my laptop and a book. I was trying to get to the sandy shore, and as I was fighting against the ebb and flow of the water, I knew deep down, as if God were telling me, I would never make it out, and I would die by being pulled under and drowned, if I didn’t let go of the laptop and book.
I think the surface meaning of the dream is fairly obvious, and it hit me really hard, so that the next day I searched the internet for a picture of the ocean as I described it and made it my background image on my computer. I think that’s why I haven’t forgotten it until now, really. Because for a long time I didn’t really give it much more thought than that, but whenever I noticed the background of my screen, I would think, “Oh, yeah. That dream,” and revisit it for a minute or so in my head.
It came back to mind recently, even though I have a different laptop now and no longer have that image as my background. And I felt convicted. Why hadn’t I paid it more mind to begin with? I took the time to think over what it meant, because at the time of the dream I felt that its meaning was quite literal, that I needed to spend less time on the computer and reading books, and I never really did that. As I thought it over, I realized that possibly the meaning was less literal than I thought (though it might be a good idea to spend less time on the computer). Because for one thing, though I have hundreds of books, I don’t read as much as you might think, considering. So why was there a book in my hand?
I was thinking it over in bed, hurkle durkling (as you do), during a time when I was going through one of my bad anxiety spells. Battling the pervasive, intrusive thoughts. And it occured to me that what God might have been telling me through the dream is that I need to quit always trying to find answers through the knowledge of men, and instead trust in Him. You have to understand that when I go through these anxiety spells, or sometimes what will kick one off, or just sometimes, when my brain is kind of stuck in gear and fixating on something, I will do an internet search to figure something out. And I will search, and search, and search. Sometimes, I might even be looking for something I was able to find a long time ago, but can’t any more. And not being able to find it doesn’t make sense, and my brain gets stuck trying to find it, and I can’t give up. I will sometimes waste a whole day or even multiple days fretting over this, and trying to find the answer. And what I think is that I need to learn to say “no” to that. That I need to trust in God’s ability to get me through, and that it’s the anxious searching and fretting that is the problem.
It’s not that I’m supposed to ignore the issue, or deny reality, but instead say to myself, I may not have the answer, but God does, and He will take care of me and my mind and I can trust in Him. That by not doing so, what I’m actually doing is treading down those negative, cycling neural pathways even further; if I stop doing that, and trust in God, I believe He’s saying that He will actually heal those neural pathways and I will be able to form new, good ones. It may not be overnight, but over time, if I let Him, God will heal my mind. Writing it here, after a few weeks have passed, I feel even more convinced that this is the answer and that this is the meaning of the dream. I need to let go of needing to know and let God heal me and help me recover from those bad thought habits. As always, the hardest part is remembering what it is I’m supposed to be doing, or rather, not doing.