Nightmares

I have never been one to think too much of my dreams. In our over-analyzed post-Freudian world, what ought to be taken as innocent dreams are often twisted around and interpreted to tell us that we have very dark desires and are actually very bad people. As for me, I don’t think that what I dream is necessarily always what I want to do, and I know that if I dream about trees and buildings and people and normal things that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m 100% repressed.

In my spiritual life, my dreams have never been a very big part of my relationship with God. Although I once met the pope in a very lively night of dreaming, I can’t recall meeting God or an angel by way of vision, and I’ve certainly never received any clear instructions for my life while asleep. Although I’ve dreamt of Christian reconciliation between people who have been separated for a long time and of the spiritual salvation I so greatly desire for many friends and loved ones, I claim no prophetic vision and write it off more as wishful thinking on my own part than the reality of God’s workings in the world. I’m generally very skeptical and uncharismatic when it comes to interpreting dreams as revelations from God.

All this goes to say that I’m really surprised at myself for being so impacted by what’s been going on in my dreams the last two nights. I’ve had terrible nightmares for two nights straight: nightmares where everything around me in my bedroom—my blankets, my clothes, the fan, and even my roommate, turn into menacing demons and grotesque diabolic forms. The room swirls with evil, an endless maze of altered reality and torment. I cannot explain it well, but it has terrified me at night and left me feeling completely helpless.

Last night, when the nightmare was at its worst two or three times, I had no recourses left but to cry out to God with the Lord’s Prayer. I didn’t speak with any authority as one rebuking demons, but instead, as a lost and terrified child crying out to his father, I prayed for salvation from what I dreamt was evil all around me. As I recited the “Our Father," the incubus world quickly receded and I was left quiet, alone, and trembling in my bed.

I’m really at a loss as to how to interpret what actually is happening. Perhaps I just am eating too much chipa, and my dreams the result of too much Paraguayan cheese in my system. Or, perhaps I have a lot of subconscioius transition stress and it’s working itself out in nightmares. I’m tempted to believe, though, that it really is some sort of spiritual warfare going on and a very real vision of the constant fight going on within my soul between good and evil and light and darkness. Whatever it is, though, it’s shaking me up, and I’m coming out of it able to testify to the power of God in the midst of demonic terror, and of the presence of divine peace in the struggle with very dark dreams.