Sleepy Musings

 

The weekend comes swiftly, almost sneaking up on me. I go to bed on Friday and suddenly it is there a moment later when I wake up. Isn't it strange how we have no concept of time as we sleep? Eight hours passes by and we have no feeling of that time as we slip into an unconscious state that leaves us totally lost in time. I wonder why and how we dream of wild, timeless spaces and almost unimaginable scenes that seem like they are from a fantasy or myth. Are we able to reach those levels of mysteriousness because we give up our consciousness? Then, we wake up forgetting it all. We do, after all, almost always forget our dreams upon waking.

It is fascinating to think about because the question of why we dream makes me wonder about God's intent when he created us and our ability to dream. It's not something we did, God gave us that ability. What an interesting thing to think about.

What should we do with our dreams, whether we can or cannot remember them? Dreams are sometimes used through Scripture stories of God speaking some important message to people through dreams. But how would we know if a dream is a message from God? I suppose there might be a strong, clear feeling. Similar to the idea of angels among us, how do we know?

It requires of us belief and faith that what God created was good, imagination to see the spiritual realm dwelling in our physical realm, and the open mind to the heavenly. If we shut ourselves off and say that the material world is all there is, we lose so much of creation that is not fixed to the material world. That person lives in a world of despair because the material world will diminish, pass away, wither, fade. But we long for more than that. We sense we are made for more than that.

Since we have that longing that cannot be satisfied here, therefore, as C.S. Lewis concluded in Mere Christianity we must be made for another world. If we view this all as a sort of training ground, it won't seem so bad here, but it leads to the better place where we really belong and were made for.

All these words came along because I was waking and wondering about dreams. I think I am just fascinated by the mind and the imagination. Our world and the spiritual world collide more often than we notice. They are features of being human that sets us apart from other living things. It is astonishing that God has gifted us these abilities, meaning we are not automatons who just rotate through tasks because it is innately given to us to follow. 

We have choice, and we occupy time creating things with the talents we have and imagining and wondering about things that are beyond us. 

I absorb books and ideas like a dry sponge. Yet I also have a keen desire to create. We all do, in our own ways. We just have to find out what gift is within each of us to create. Mine is words - stories, poems, word pictures, musings. I cannot stop that desire in me. It is always there.