A few nights ago I was repeatedly woken by a series of frightening dreams. In the first, I was driving along the highway in my truck when my engine fell out! I checked my cell phone to call somebody, AAA, or someone else closer... and it was dead. I got out of my truck and approached a dilapidated shack on the side of the highway in front of which a middle-aged man was working with his hands, building something from nothing. Unlike the real me, I asked if I could use his phone, and he did not hesitate to hasten me into his condemned hole of a home. Once inside I discovered that he had also welcomed into his home several young teenagers, some looking my age, some perhaps even younger. They all, however, looked like they were into heavy drugs and other miscellaneous instruments of torture upon the body.
Something sinister was about to happen, and I wanted out of there. Phone or now phone. But no matter how often or seriously or sweetly I asked, the man would not let me use his phone or even leave until after, he kept saying, after. After what? After they killed me? After they forced me to use heavy drugs? Just as I was considering making a break for it, a cop burst through the back door. Thank God, I thought, someone's here to talk some sense into this man! But I was wrong. This cop was dirty, and he was what everyone else had been waiting for... and they all looked at me.
That's when I woke, trapped in that house with that creepy man, and those doped up teenagers, and that dirty cop. I couldn't move, I couldn't call for help, and I couldn't breathe.
I lay awake for at least ten minutes before I finally fell back into a light slumber, but time after time, I was awoken by another unhappy dream. In each one I was driving down the highway in my truck, my truck broke down, my phone was dead, I went to find help, and I was kidnapped. In every single dream I was kidnapped. In every dream I was trapped, lost, helpless, and lonely. And there was absolutely nothing I could do.
For the last time I woke after one of these horrid dreams and swallowed some melatonin. It helped me go back to sleep and this time the dream was sweet. In it there was a young man, a cancer patient. Quiet, reserved, and lonely, he spoke to absolutely no one. Everyone else thought him weird, ignorant, rude, selfish. I didn't. The dream me understood what he was going through. In the end of the dream, I was the first person he spoke to, other than doctors, in a number of years.
I don't believe in the symbolism pertaining to the telling of the future when it comes to dreams, but I do believe that your dreams can tell you things about your subconscious that you don't know, or bring to the surface embedded fears, wishes, hopes, worries.
I'm worried about my truck. I'm afraid that I'll break down one day and not know what to do.
I'm worried about my piece of crap phone, that one day it will finally die for good and I'll be stranded with no way to call anyone.
And I'm worried about being kidnapped. My mother ingrained in me from the very beginning of my childhood a fear of being kidnapped. From the stories of little girls kidnapped at age 11 and found years later
(still living in a tent in that man's backyard, having had two children by him and might I add, all having happened while the man was married - and his wife knew all along what was going on), to the story of Natalie Holloway, not much older than me, who went missing on a trip to Cuba and was never found...
This world is a cruel and unyielding one, and without guidelines and careful consideration of decisions and without moderation, we would all be swept away by its evil. Keeping our eyes on the prize and our hearts with God is the only way to survive with our integrity and pride intact.
