I needed to write this down to sort of put it behind me. Every so often, people have dreams that aren't just ordinary dreams. That is, whereas ordinary dreams are more or less just random association and memory processing, sometimes dreams are more significant. Once in a great while I've had a dream that made much clearer to me some of my own thoughts and feelings. When I woke up remembering it, I had a new understanding of my relationship to a person or situation. I guess I would call these "marginal" dreams, because they sort of occupy the border between ordinary life and supernatural experiences. Not meaningless, but not miraculous. And I would also create a third category of dreams; those that cross over the borderline and are shaped in a supernatural manner. For all of human history, some people have recorded this kind of dream from time to time; and sometimes they are dismissed as lunatics, and sometimes they are listened to as prophets. But of course, for people who are "religious" or "spiritual," such things aren't so controversial.
I'm a Christian. I was raised in a fundamentalist church where the Bible was preached as the inerrant word of God, and pretty much accepted literally. As I grew up, I became frustrated with the limitations of such a world view, and began looking for a spirituality that was less dry and rules-based. I sampled the "charismatic" Pentecostal-type churches, and found there both a refreshing spontaneity and a disturbing inclination towards sensationalism. Eventually I was led to a church that had some Pentecostal-type attributes, such as the use of the "spiritual gifts" that are mentioned in chapter 12 of the New Testament book of I Corinthians, but which was peaceful and reverent, rather than boisterous and undisciplined. So while I believe the Bible, I don't consider myself wise enough to have an opinion on whether or not God created the universe in six literal twenty-four days; or whether the universe is six thousand years old or fifteen billion. To me, the most important thing is just God Himself. I'm wandering kind of far afield here, but I basically just want to set the context: in a nutshell, I take the Bible literally enough to believe that wherever it says "and God said" something to somebody, He really did. And I take it literally enough to believe that if it says "and the Lord showed in a dream" that He did just that. So when I speak about some dreams having a supernatural influence, I mean that God or some extra-human angelic being that He created influenced the dream. If you believe that this kind of thing never happens, then I'm certainly not going to change your mind. If you do believe it happens, then maybe you've already had some experiences of your own. I had this particular dream near the end of 1999, and it influenced how I experienced and understood several important things that happened to me in in following six months.
It was a bad dream. The first thing I remember is being with my mother, my ex-wife, and my daughter in a parking lot. We needed to get in my car and drive someplace, and the most direct route would have been to take an immediate left turn out of the parking lot onto a four-lane divided highway with a lot of high-speed traffic on it. It would have meant crossing over the first two lanes and turning into the third, then pulling over into the fourth lane. But the traffic was so heavy that I would have had to sit for some time and wait for a big enough opening to appear in both directions at once, to allow me to safely pull all the way across and get up to highway speed. Being a guy, which is to say being impatient and short-sighted, I decided that it would work better to simply turn right out of the parking lot into the closest lane. Then, when I'd come up to speed, I would make the first convenient left-hand turn and go around the block, to where I would eventually be able to make another right-hand turn in the direction I really wanted to head. Made perfect sense at the time, and I've certainly done this many times in real life.
So in my dream I made the right-hand turn, got up to speed, eased into the left lane, and made a left turn onto a side street. So far so good. Nothing could have been more ordinary. I made the second left, now paralleling the road I wanted to return to. Then I came to an on-ramp to a highway that would take me at maximum speed to the place I wanted to go. I turned onto the long on-ramp and began accelerating to reach highway speed again, so I could merge with the high speed traffic to my left. Now in the dream, the on-ramp was very long, and climbed upwards quite a distance, as at this point the highway began climbing the side of a mountain. So I sped on up the ramp, gaining speed and looking left for an opening. Then I began to run out of ramp, and was forced to ease onto the shoulder, still looking left and trying to merge into a steady wall of high-speed traffic.
Now in my dream the right shoulder of the ramp began to narrow, and there was nothing between my car and what was now a very steep drop-off. I desperately decided to simply force my way into the traffic now, and began turning the wheel to the left, away from the edge. But the car wouldn't move left. I steered left, and it drifted right, toward the steep drop, which was by now maybe a hundred feet. Then the shoulder disappeared entirely, and the car began to tilt sideways and roll over the lip of the drop, still moving at high speed. As the car went upside-down, and I looked out the window at the rocks below, I had time to form the thought "People die from this." My incredulity changed to simple fear and a certain knowledge of death, and then I woke up.
It was such a vivid dream that even now, more than a year later, I can still clearly recall many visual images from it, and I can taste again the sense of ghastly inevitability that I felt as the car flipped over. I woke with a clear sense of impending danger, expecting that the Lord was warning me about something bad coming towards my life. Then within a few days, in early January 2000, I thoughtlessly did some things that deeply wounded my daughter and her mother. They cut me out of their lives. I was devastated, both by the wound and by the knowledge that it was my fault; that I could have avoided the breach if I'd done things differently. I kept remembering the sense of helplessness I'd had in my dream when the car swept inexorably over the cliff.
But at least, I thought, I now understood what the dream had meant. A major disaster that involved my family. My relationship with my ex-wife and daughter was now dead, as if it had gone off a cliff. In the back of my mind, I wondered why the dream had also placed my mom in the car with us. Then about three weeks later, my mom went into the hospital. She never came home again. She died in early March. In fact, in July 2000 I wrote about that experience.
Ah, I thought, at least now I understand why my mom was in my dream. And only once in a great while, I would have a small, niggling doubt in the back of my mind. I wondered if there was anything else waiting to happen to me personally. And then at the end of June, I lost my job. Circumstances dictated that I would receive no unemployment compensation (don't ask), so I needed to find a job within a pretty short time, since my savings were minimal. Life was looking rather bleak. There were some bad hours and days, when I just had to keep putting one foot in front of the other one until eventually I got to a different place.
But at least beyond this, there hadn't been any more people with me in the car dream. No final shoe left undropped. I stopped looking over my shoulder. And I found that there is life after death. Of course, being a Christian, I always believed that my mom went to be with the Lord as soon as her body stopped working. But I found that there was also life after death for my other family relationships, and for my professional life, as well. The Lord gave me another job after about five weeks, when my checking account was down to about $15. And my mom's death has brought me closer to my brother and sisters, and even to my ex-wife and daughter. I hope that the first half of 2000 was truly the bottom for me, and that the upward trend that began after that will continue. I'm building many relationships now, and learning many things. Now most of my dreams are ordinary dreams.
So why did I write this? I guess seeing it written down kind of puts a stamp of finality on it; lets it move formally into the past. I just felt compelled to write it, perhaps as a sort of exorcism (in the generic sense). I felt that God had spoken to warn me about a bad patch of road coming up. Because God does speak, and that's maybe more important than anything else we can know in this life. He speaks today in all of the ways that He's ever spoken to people in the past. They're all listed in the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation. He speaks in our hearts through nature when we look at a sunset; He whispers to our spirits when we read the Bible with an open, seeking heart; He moves in our dreams when we need Him to; He sometimes even puts audible words into our minds; He gives visions; He sends angelic beings to carry messages to us; He speaks through the mouths of other people who can be used prophetically. But here's the thing — He does all these things quietly. If you hear stories of So-and-So the Great Prophet, or Reverend Such-and-Such the mighty healer, don't bother to go there. People who seek publicity aren't being moved by the Spirit of God. The people who are really having these experiences are people who will never be famous, nor want to. They may share their stories reluctantly, or not at all. God doesn't need a publicist. But people still need to know that He's exactly the same God today that He always was. He never changes. He spoke before; He will always speak. I know some people; I've heard stories; I have experiences of my own, too numerous to mention. That's the way my life is shaped now, and it's better than I could ever have imagined before.
God speaks to whoever is willing to listen: we just need to want it urgently enough to learn how.