I just awoke from a terrible dream. In it Scott had went to war and I had received the news that he had went missing in action. It might as well been happening in my waking life because the pain of it was real. I'm sure I was crying out in my sleep. There was such an ache inside of me and in the dream I just walked the streets crying. I was like a crazy woman; unkempt & lost inside myself. Their finally came a time when my family found me on the streets & it was like I had awoken from a dream. I knew things wouldn't be the same, yet I knew I couldn't stay asleep in that pain forever. So I started rebuilding my life. Yet in the dream I had built this mountain in the middle of a busy road in our old hometown, Tampa. I had literally scoop by scoop made a living monument to him. It was my obsession. As time went on the mountain took on a life of its own. A river was formed on it and trees grew from it. I had made pathways on it and visitors from all around came to walk on it. I also built a house on its peak and I guess somewhere in me I believed that I would see him walking from a far, coming home to me. After this the dream became influenced more and more by a movie I saw a few weeks ago or was it that late night Alfredo dinner. He did come back and I embraced him; wanting never to let go. Then I came to learn that he wasn't the same man. He had been changed by his experience.
So Hollywood story aside; as I sit here writing I cant get this mountain out of my mind. What was it and does it speak of something deeper in my life right now? Had I built it up to take the place of something or had it built itself out of the pain I had felt? The dream was so vivid. I could see the dirt on my hands and at first the mountain was just that, a mound of dirt. A mound of dirt that had blocked traffic and had separated me from the reality of the world. It became everything. I put every piece of me in it and while watching from a far I watched it transform before my eyes. I saw the river as it was formed and the trees as they sprung up I viewed it from a distance and saw that it obscured the landscape. As you can imagine, it being in Florida, it rose up from the ground out of place in its surroundings.
Looking back on it, still half asleep, it seems the mountain had become more overwhelming than the original trauma. At one point in the dream; when Scott came home, he had to climb this mountain to reach me. I watched as he walked up to me instead of me running to his side.
Right now Im humming this song by Brandon Heath, Don't Get Comfortable. Excuse the lyrical montage & listen to the song. I guess if I had to connect this dream to my own life then I could say that I had built up a mountain in the place of all my fears. I had given this place too great a space in my life and it obscured everything. I viewed everything from its heights. I felt protected from the world around me. Im starting to see that I have expected others to come to me. I stayed safe within the fear and built pathways through it for others to reach me and I made my home on it. I know that in the past few years I have made giant leaps from its peak, taken risk in my life and with my heart, but I don't think I have allowed God to remove it completely. I have kept this mountain as a memorial to my past and came running back to it when the world got to hard. It's strange, in the dream when I realized that Scott would need help I knew that I would have to leave the mountain. I would have to leave it or die on it.
Nicole,
ReplyDeleteI think having a dream of this capacity may have been a vision of some sort - it being so vivid. It is worth exploration. Sometimes I get dreams like this and the meaning won't come to me until later.
This is how I see it. Building a marriage is like building a mountain. You make an amazing monument in the middle of a city (like the city in the scriptures that is set on a hill) from your marriage and people will not be able to help noticing how beautiful it is.
At the end, you will be married to a different person who has also climbed his way through his life challenges just like you have.
Scott being called to war may be symbolic of the fight in this world that he will have with Satan. Maybe at one point or another he will give in, and you will feel like you have lost him forever, but you can never give up on anybody.
You could choose to not build the mountain but every part of you is telling you that you have to. That's God way of telling you that your marriage is right, and the fact that you are responding by building means that you are on the right path.
At the end, you may not run to your hubby, but that is because you won't have to run. You will have the rest of eternity together and you will have learned to enjoy things as they come. (In my church families are sealed in our temples for all eternity, just like it talks about in the Bible)
Loved this recollection of your dream. It's so cool that you wrote it down before you forgot.
Alice, I love your interpetation of the dream. I too have many dreams like this & God has shown me many things through them. I fully believe, as the bible asserts, that God comes to us in visions & dreams. For fear of sounding crazy I often save my stories for those closest to me. To be honest this wasnt the whole of my dream. Some of it was much too intimate to share or too similiar to the movie I had seen to deny its influence. Also I always look at what is taking place in my life to see what God might be trying to show me through the dream. It is very clear to me what it meant especially knowing the small details that I failed to share and the feelings I have been battling the past few days. God has often used my dreams to bring healing & clarity to a situation. He is truly the wonderful counselor.
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