Dreams about the recently departed
–A first post to a blog that explores why there is belief that ‘God does exist’, I offer a dream.
This blog is about theology, which is an academic’s word that just means ‘God talk’. I talk about God in this blog because I think about God regularly and hope that sharing our ideas about God is something worth doing. Beyond being worth doing, it may take us somewhere we cannot imagine. Or it may not.
Dreams can take us to spaces, relationship experiences and outcomes our waking moments do not.
God talk tries to go to spaces, explore relationships and see possible outcomes that may not be reachable or understandable through the approaches that guide scientific work, mainstream culture and simple physical reality. Or, better put, honest God talk tries to do that while at the same time admitting that everything that points to the existence of God can have a rational explanation that does not include God.
God talk is like much talk, a way of getting something done, a way to communicate a need, idea, response or emotion. It is a conversation, though, only when comments flow back to the talker–in this case a blog author. I invite such comment.
Post no.1, ‘Dream of the departed’
This morning in late November, 2019, I enjoyed the great luxury of sleeping six or seven hours, waking and thinking for an hour or so without rising from my bed, and then sleeping another couple of hours. At this, my other home, in rural Nayarit, Mexico, with my wife now visiting in Arizona, and our roommate gone to his work, extra sleep and dreams are sometimes possible until almost 11am.
The pueblo where live, sometimes for months at a time, is a small agricultural town a few miles from the Pacific ocean and near the confluence of rivers in which shrimp and fish are abundant. It was long the home of indigenous peoples who occupied it for thousands of years before the Spanish came some 500 years ago. Their impoverished descendants live mostly in the bleak sierra now until harvest employment brings them down from the mountains and back to the fertile coastal fields for a few months.
By November, crops have already been planted, so the road near our home is quiet; except for the occasional sounds of pickup trucks or taxis passing in the distance or perhaps a vendor’s voice or beeping horn announcing their pan dulce, tortillas or bottled water deliverable to our door step.
I am the only American here. I am pursuing a career in ministry after a religious awakening some 17 years ago and after having completed nearly six years in seminary in Berkeley. It has been a slow road. This writing is today’s work in my nascent blog ministry.
While dreaming, I have noticed that I still seem to be pretty much ‘me’. In my dreams I mostly seem to do what I would do in my waking life. I don’t know how true it that rings for most people, but it seems pretty consistently the case for me. If what happened in my dreams happened in my waking moments, I’d probably act the same, with similar ways of thinking about things, with seemingly the same morality; just me and pretty much unchanged as I go through my dreams. Yet, I seem to learn in these spaces–even though that learning might not immediately express itself. So I value my dreams–they may help me grow or just survive this tumult or that grief.
But while I may seem to be mostly the same, other people usually seem a bit changed as I interact with them. Dream experts have much to say about the ways and reasons that people dream the dreams they do. I am not such an expert, but once in every few years a dream seems important to me in a distinct way. The dream seems to hint at another possibility, something that makes me want to talk about God.
This morning’s dream was one of those dreams, where my own years of God thinking and God talk intersect with a liminal moment in my best friend’s life: the death of his life companion, Camille.
This is the dream:
I am standing on an urban street’s sidewalk when a tiny, cheap and older eastern European or maybe English car, coasts into an off-street parking space near where I stand. The space is part of a small parking area in front of a four story ,modernistic, flat sided apartment building like you might see in many middle income areas of Los Angeles.
Three women get out of the car. Their faces are not easily characterized. They seem almost Eastern European, looking like workers in some documentary about post-Soviet factory life as does the car. They are their thirties or early forties –except for one who is a teenager We exchange no words as I stand a few week away, curious as to what went wrong with their car and wondering if there’s anything I can do to help get it going.
The teenager goes to the already open hood of the car, reaches in and then touches a cable to the single cylinder head causing the engine to turn over, but too slowly to start. The engine looks like its has never been serviced, dirty and largely covered in dark grease with missing parts and looking more like a motorcycle or lawn mower engine than anything that could power a car.
I caution them that trying to start the car that way is probably going to hurt the engine. Whatever is wrong with the engine, it is beyond my limited abilities and I simply walk away–into the apartment building that turns out to be where I live.
I guess I live alone there. Somehow my decades of marriage has simply disappeared and I live in this space, which was somewhere in West L.A.. As I walk up to my apartment, I suddenly am aware, (perhaps she has said ‘Hello’), that in this same building lives the daughter of Camille, the woman who had just died.
What a co-incidence, I think, of all the places I could have possibly moved to in L.A., to be in the same building with Camille’s daughter. Maybe I’ll get to know her, I think. It seems to be a good thing, someone that I have something of a connection to living in the same building where I live.
I climb up the interior stairs and walk down a hallway. Still wondering at the co-incidence of our living in the same space as I open the door to the small apartment. I don’t close the door. After I walk into my living room, I turn and see that Camille’s daughter walk into the apartment.
I look at her and saw a strong resemblance to Camille, a young, perhaps late 20’s, maybe 30 or so, Camille. A bit taller and with a shorter hair style that framed her face. I study her face and the resemblance is more convincing than when I first met her moments earlier.
Even just standing there, she seems a bit bit bolder than her mother. I welcome her and don’t think it unusual at all that she just casually walked into my apartment. She is there to tell me about an event that afternoon she’s going to that afternoon that I might also be interested in going to.
She says, “Peter said it would be at such and such a location at some time…”. As she begins talking, I first think the event was for Camille, a wake or celebration of her life and quickly said that I would go.
But as Camille’s daughter continues talking, I realizes my error. “Peter says the guy, I think his name is Walter, was innocent, a victim, but you know Peter, sometimes he doesn’t bother to know the whole story before he gets excited about doing something. She pauses, the adds “So I looked it up and it turns out there’s a lot more to the story, a lot about the guy that complicates the story”.
Now I pause, she is talking about a Police slain African-American and the event’s location is in an area where, as a 60-something white guy who has been called out by young minorities as a cop of a probation officer because I look like one, I now feel concerned about going and think that maybe I shouldn’t commit to go.
As she speaks, I recall Camille. I wonder how much Camille might have looked and acted when she was the age of her young daughter. I am sure, the longer that I look at her, that Camille probably had looked like her, but perhaps Camille never had her hair in that fashion. It just didn’t seem ‘Camille’.
But such direct and easy sociability with someone who she knew of only distantly, in that I do not see the Camille I had casually known over the years. Or maybe I can, but then it is a version of Camille that I never knew–and I certainly did not know her when she was that age. Or when she was living on her own, before Peter. I only knew her as part of Peter’s life. And I remember how mostly I spent time with Peter when I visited their home, so what did I really know about how Camille? How could I be sure how might have been with others or in her early adulthood, in the years before Peter and her became a life couple they were for so many years.
But somehow I sense that like this quietly determined daughter of Camille’s. She is a Camille, just a different Camille.
She leaves and I still do not decide whether to go to the event or not. I stand up and walk over to the window. Rain is coming down, not a hard rain, but a quiet rain who raindrops silently run down the window glass. And it is gray outside as the rain falls.
I decide I should go to the event, risks and all. I get up and walk into the hallway. Uncertain as to which unit is hers,. I hope I can find the it. I feel the the pain of self-incriminatory distress knowing that I may not..
…
I awoke.
I lied in bed going over the dream, wanting to make sure I would be able remember it clearly. I saw again the face of Camille’s daughter and saw in that face Camille. I felt good about the dream, seeing Camille’s daughter, but I was uneasy about the the end; it left me unsettled. I didn’t dwell on that.
I was just glad for the dream. I knew somehow I needed have to tell my friend Peter about it. -Camille, who only died a few days earlier, was his life partner for so many years, and as his long-time friend I believed he’d be interested in it. I thought maybe I should get out of bed and call him while the memory is fresh in my mind. But what if I forget something or we started talking about something else?
No, I should write out the dream and send it to him. (it was only later that I thought, that the dream and a few words about such dreams might make good first post for my goddoes-exist.com blog that Peter and his WordPress prowess had help me set up early this year, but for which I hadn’t yet posted anything.
As I lie in bed, I continued to think about the dream and then I realized, wait, Camille had no daughter. So was my dream was about Camille? And in my theology, maybe it was Camille. Could it have been a visit, a vision of her spirit, or was it just a dream, an uncommon one, but just a dream nonetheless?
I remembered that I almost never have dreams about someone who has died, except about my father about whom I still dream from time to time, especially in time of crisis. A notable exception was the time I dreamed about a woman who’s husband I had sat with in the ICU waiting room as machines kept her alive so that the family could have time to come and say good bye to her. He didn’t agree with that–but he let the machines do their work for the family’s sake until the next day.
I shared my dream about his wife to him a few days later after church. I told him that in the dream she was lying on her back, dressed in white, on a narrow bed, like a hospital gurney. Someone was slowly brushing her long hair as she looked straight upwards at the ceiling. She then said three words, “I love you”. She repeated them once. The dream ended.
It mean much to him and he brought his daughter to church so I could share it with her. I was bit embarrassed, but I shared it again. He was certain what it mean even as I was not. I thought he meant that she was speaking to God or Jesus, but I am not sure. But I didn’t share any doubts or alternate explanations with him, because it was about his belief, not mine. Ten years later, I have matured a bit more in my faith journey. After 17 years of belief in God, I am even more careful to not impose my ideas and interpretations on dreams, even my own, but rather to just gently offer up possibilities.
In our dreams we have certain freedoms. While in our dreams we may be pretty much ourselves, we also may freely imagine others and how they might have been if we could lift off the heavy cloak of culture and remove the pains of experience, which scar, distort and limit what people are.
And I hope, but am not sure, that God may also bring to our imagination, or to our sleeping reality, a truthful and loving vision of persons who have departed and who now are now free to be manifest in their spiritual forms; people who passed through our lives, but in death do not pass from them.
A wonderful and very old theologian who has now died, Huston Smith, a Christian and a Buddhist, and the author of the classic textbook, ‘The World’s Religions, answered a question from someone in an audience where I once sat while attending seminary; the question asked for his thoughts about immortality. He answered readily, for it was obvious he had spent considerable time thinking about the question. He said, “As long as there is someone alive who loved me, then I think my spirit will remain alive. But when everyone who has known and loved me dies, then I see no reason for my spirit to continue. At that point it will just pass into a great spiritual space with no identity anymore of its own.”
I walked up to him at the break and held his thin, wrinkled hand. I told him , “I also think think that you will remain in alive in spirit as long as the people who have known and loved you through your books and writings continue to live”. He remained quiet for a moment and then said, “Thank you.”
Bruce
