When Mom dozes during the day, she’ll often dream she is talking with friends and family long gone. Sometimes these are happy conversations, but occasionally she has some issues to resolve with folks. She’ll smile or frown or get angry. I’ve tried many times to interrupt her dreams when they seem to get stressful, but the bewilderment she has when awakened seems to make her even more upset.
I have asked her about the dreams. Most of the time she doesn’t immediately recall who or what she was dreaming. Once reminded to whom she was speaking or what she was saying, she can easily go back to tell me what was going on in her dreams. It seems much easier for her to access the information in her dreams than for most of us. I can usually remember for a few moments after awakening. If I tell someone, I might even be able access the dream sequence for an hour or so.
For Mom, her dreams easily get confused with her reality. She will tell me of a conversation she had with her brother Graham yesterday. I might hear her talk to him in her dreams, but he’s been dead for many years now. According to Edgar Allan Poe, that’s fitting. He wrote, “All that we see or seem, is but a dream within a dream.” Our thoughts and our dreams get tangled.
I have a recording from several months ago when Mom spent most of the night talking in her sleep. She was hosting some sort of revival meeting and after several hours of listening, I hit voice-record on my phone. By then she was preaching. All those years of Sunday school teaching made her a wonderful witness, even in her dreams.
I love it when Mom laughs in her sleep. It reminds me of watching my babies as a smile would cross their faces. As with them, I wonder what she sees in her dreams. I believe babies can still see heaven and are smiling into that space. Is she looking into heaven, too?
I agree with James Arthur Baldwin’s thoughts about dreams. He wrote:
The best thing about dreams is that fleeting moment,
when you are between asleep and awake,
when you don’t know the difference between reality and fantasy,
when for just that one moment you feel with your entire soul that the dream is reality,
and it really happened.
When I was a little girl, Mom would always pray with me before bed. We would say the “now I lay me down to sleep” prayer and remember all those we loved. She’d kiss me goodnight and before leaving my side would always wish me “sweet dreams.”
If only all our dreams would follow Mom’s instructions to be sweet!
