Buechner encourages us to pay attention to our dreams and tells the story of one of his “truest dreams”.
“You can think of a dream as your own creation, nobody else dreamed it, you dreamed it. It comes out of the depths of who you are, your subconscious, out of all the things that happened during the day, the raw material, and you dream about something somebody said, but why that something? There's a sense in which the dream is yours, your creation, yet at the same time as everybody knows, the dream speaks to you a word that seems to come from someplace other than yourself, because it's often a revelation. Everybody's had dreams that almost wake them up with their truth. So it's both a word from you, but it's also a word to you. I think everybody could name dreams like that. I've written about several of mine, and I'll tell you of one if you've read my books you'll know it, but I'll tell it anyway because it's one of the truest dreams I've dreamed, about being in a hotel.
“I used to dream a lot about being in hotels, whatever that means. I had this wonderful room that I remembered less visually than about how good I felt in that room. It was just the right place for me. I felt at peace and happy. And then the dream went on and I had other adventures which I've forgotten. But I found myself back in the hotel again trying to find that room where I felt so good, so at peace, but unfortunately I didn't remember what the room number was. It was a big hotel. So I went down to the desk and somebody at the desk was there, and I said I was trying to find this room but I can't remember the number. He said, "Oh, it's very easy to get to that room any time that you want. It doesn't have a number, it has a name." I said, "What is the name of that room?" He said, "The name of that room is Remember." It woke me up, in more ways than one. I don't understand entirely what it meant, but it somehow gave me a clue. It gives us all a clue that to remember far enough, to remember deeply enough, is to remember God, it's to remember Eden, to remember where you came from, and that through remembering you work your way back to some truth that is a liberating and healing truth. It's been true of me thinking back through those moments when God spoke to me. It's been true for me when I was in therapy, that whole healing process of remembering, real remembering with somebody to help you remember, to confront again, to relive old shadows, which somehow dispels them.”
Frederick Buechner, The Remarkable Ordinary: How to Stop, Look, and Listen to Life, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, p63-64.
To help you reflect…
Have you had a dream that “woke you up with its truth”? Spend some time with it today. You could write it out, notice what associations you have with each of its symbols* or even return to it in your imagination and have an inner dialogue with one of the symbols. Why do you sense you were given this dream? What was (or is) it’s “word” to you?
And/or…
In what ways has remembering been a healing process for you?
* A dream symbol is any person, place, animal, object, word, colour etc that features within a dream. Every aspect of a dream is a symbol. One way to work with a dream is to notice which symbols within that dream seems to have particularly strong energy/significance and then explore what associations these symbols have for you. Taken together these associations may give a clue about why you were gifted this dream. This article offers a brief introduction to this way of working with dreams.
