Dreams and God

I have asked my friends in the past if they have very realistic dreams. Some of my friends said they only dream in black and white while a few say they don't remember their dreams. One actually says he doesn't dream at all. I find it hard to believe that anyone can go through life without ever having a dream, though. As for me, my dreams are often as real and vivid as real life. There have been more than one occasion where I have awoken from a dream unable to tell that I had just been dreaming. It took awhile for me to clear out the emotions and images from the dream and accept it was just a dream.

There are many different interpretations of dreams. Some psychologists believe that dreams are nothing more than the brain reorganizing its own experiences from the previous day in an attempt to file those away into permanent storage. This would explain why some dreams are very random in nature. Another interpretation of why we dream would include the need for the brain to sort through many subconscious thoughts and process them in order to deal with those built up images and internal beliefs. Many of my dreams have also shown examples of this -- where I will dream of something that night that I had been thinking about on a deeper level throughout the day.

Another more esoteric interpretation of dreams is that they are created partly from a supernatural nature. There are cases where one dreams of something that foreshadows what will occur that day or possibly an event that will occur in the near future. I have had probably a dozen or so dreams in my life that fell into this more "paranormal" realm.

I'd like to expand on the previous interpretation of dreams as supernatural in nature. Out of all the dreams I've had, the ones that were foreshadowing in my life were also very much different from my typical dreams. Most of the time, my dreams are broken up into distorted images and strange emotions. They follow a more "Freudian" interpretation. However, I've had reoccurring dreams that basically gave me the same message over and over. One set of dreams happened at least 5 or 6 times and foreshadowed an event that took place over a year later. This could have been mere coincidence but it was fascinating nonetheless.

Out of all the dreams I've had, there was one that stuck out as truly significant and life-transforming. It started out as a lucid-dream. A lucid-dream is a dream in which you are fully aware that you are dreaming and you are capable of interacting with your dream elements in such a way as to remember vividly what occurs inside that lucid-dream. This particular lucid-dream began with me standing on top of a large mountain that was surrounded by large fields in all directions. When I have lucid-dreams (about once every couple of months), the first thing I try to do it fly in my dreams. In this particular dream, I started to run down the mountain and then jumped up and thought, "fly! fly! fly!" I began to sore across the mountain's side towards the field. It was an exhilarating and intense feeling. Unfortunately, I was not able to stay in the air and began to fall. I hit the side of the mountain and skidded down a large slope and ended up at the base of the mountain next to a large cave.

Unfortunately, when I get hurt in a lucid-dream, I can actually feel the pain. I stood up, still in pain from falling, and brushed the dirt off of my clothes. I looked over and remember seeing the cave and how dark it was inside. I felt compelled to explore the cave to find out what was inside of it. I began to walk over to the entrance of the cave. I stood at the entrance and felt a cool wind being sucked into the cave. I walked inside the cave and began to feel dizzy. Suddenly, I heard a voice call from within the cave. A light appeared, dim at first but slowly growing in brightness, deep inside the cave. I called out, "who are you," and proceeded to walk deeper into the cave. A few moments later a voice called out and said, "I am." "Great," I thought -- "you are ... what?"

I'm not exactly sure what took place at that moment. Somehow I was instantly wrapped inside an extremely bright light of blinding intensity. I felt the air literally get punched right out of my chest. I felt my own thoughts getting absorbed into the air. What happened next is nothing less than a truly religious moment. Somehow, I was able to feel a type of love that was infinite in nature. For around ten seconds, I was able to feel every thought, see every image, hear every sound, experience every emotion and relive every moment that every living thing has ever experienced. I was quite simply overwhelmed in such a way that I literally felt my soul begin to burn with the intensity of every star within a large galaxy. I fell to my knees as my hands hit the soft dirt. I felt like crying in a way that I have never cried in my life. I simply could not take the huge amount of information that was being pushed into my soul.

I remember waking up from that lucid-dream literally in tears while shaking. I spent a good hour laying in my bed trying to absorb some meaning from that dream. Any dream that commands such emotion deserves a bit of analysis.

Moving on, I can honestly say there have been a few times in my life that I have felt the presence of a god -- that dream was one of them. It happened once while I was a little kid, too. It happened again when I had a near overdose as a young adult while going through my rebellious phase. I have felt a source of strength fill up inside of me when my father has a heart-attack and I had to be the man of the family until he got better. It is a scary feeling wondering if you are actually looking at your father for the last time before they move him to surgery.

I was always very close to my grandmother growing up. I've lost both my grandfather's but it is a different experience being next to a woman when she dies. Both of my grandfather's served in prior wars -- World War II and the Korean War. They lived long lives and were very honorable and honest men. I was sad when I saw each of them for the last time while they were laying in a hospital bed close to death. I knew in both situations that once I left the room, they would die within a few hours. Both did.

However, dealing with the death of my grandmother was much different. She was always a beautiful woman -- always there to bring the family together when people were arguing or squabbling with each other. She had a series of strokes in her final days that left her basically in a coma. When I went to visit her on this one particular evening, she looked very close to death. It took me about a half an hour to compose myself in the bathroom so I was strong enough to sit at her bedside and talk to her without being blinded by tears.

If you have never experienced being at someone's bedside while they approached death, there really is no experience quite like it in our lives. It is a moment of such emotional intensity that one literally pushes aside all the bullshit about religion, philosophical debates, etc. The very clear and real realization that I had on that particular night was that there are indeed forces, spirits and other unknown things within this universe that science simply cannot explain.

I remember holding her hand for awhile while talking to her. Her hand was cold and bloated from the blood pooling inside of it while her heart began to fail. When you talk to someone who is near death and unresponsive, they cannot necessarily hear you, but I do believe they can understand you on a deeper spiritual level. It is vitally important to tell them that you love them, that you loved knowing them and enjoyed all the happy memories growing up together. Then it comes time to tell them that it's alright to stop fighting and to allow themselves to pass on. A lot of times people in that situation will fight to stay alive for another loved one or simply out of regret from leaving those that they love.

In any event, I was filled with very peaceful emotions while sitting beside her. I half crawled into the bed with her to hug her before leaving. Amazingly, at some point I left feeling happy for her rather than sad.

I've had too many experiences in my life to deny the existence of a God or a greater purpose to the universe. In some respects, I find it to be a blessing to be able to understand such things in this life. On the other hand, it also become a huge burden as others will often doubt you or try to argue with you that those experiences are not real or that they are delusional.

That's it for now.