Earthborn animals do this thing, inside their brains-- a sort of mad firing-off of synapses, controlled insanity. While they're asleep. The part of their brain that records sight or sound, it's firing off every hour or two while they sleep; even when all the sights and sounds are complete random nonsense, their brains just keep on trying to assemble it into something sensible. They try to make stories out of it. It's complete random nonsense with no possible correlation to the real world, and yet they turn it into these crazy stories. And then they forget them. All that work, coming up with these stories, and when they wake up they forget almost all of them. But when they do remember, then they try to make stories about those crazy stories, trying to fit them into their real lives. -- Xenocide by Orson Scott CardI think that sums up dreams fairly well. Even so, I feel a need to relate my dream because it was an experience I have never felt before.
Of course I don't remember exactly what I dreamed, but I remember how the dream made me feel. The dream was filled with evil. Not in the sense that I saw evil or did evil, just that I felt evil around me and was anticipating to see evil. For the first time since I was a kid, I guess you could say I had a bad dream because it freaked me out. I woke up, scared from all the evil I was feeling in my dream. I looked at the clock and of course it was 3:03... freaked me out even more to tell you the truth.
Still, the first thing that came to my head was the Jesus Prayer (Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, have mercy on me a sinner), so I furiously started saying it over and over in my head, trying to drive out the demon, the evil that seriously freaked me out.
Why that particular prayer, I have no idea. Why a prayer that focused on me and my sins when I was confronted with evil?
Anyway... God showered me with graces today and I am eternally thankful.
Peace all
Just to let you know, you're not alone. I had a freakout dream of evil a few weeks back, and woke with my heart pounding. In my head, I was thinking about omens and precursors and "what did I do wrong." I'm not sure of the prayers I said, but even though the dream was about me, I immediately took it as associated with someone else. Whenever I wake in the middle of the night, I instinctively wonder: "Am I being called awake to pray for someone, right now?" And so I do.
ReplyDeleteI never have forgotten the time I was traveling on business on the West Coast when, driving back to the office after lunch I suddenly decided to stop and look in at a church I was passing. While "sightseeing" there, I noticed the votive candles and felt compelled to light one "for whoever you need me to pray for, Lord." After I arrived home, I found out that a co-worker's baby had died, at precisely the time of my stopping and prayer. I always felt I was called then, and assume I am now when I wake in the night.
I've had many instances of God dragging me to prayer in my life, except now I go willingly.