Did I ever tell you that as a kid I used to pray for weird dreams?
Yeah.
I liked the crazy stories my mind would come up with during my night time reveries. And so I would ask God to bless me with strange and crazy dreams.
I was an odd one, for sure.
I don't ask for that anymore. And while a crazy one pops in here and there my dreams have taken on a more realistic nature as of late.
Meaning that often, while I am dreaming, I have no idea that the things that are happening aren't real.
Because they are so believable.
Over the past couple of years I've had some particularly troubling dreams. Ones where I have done something things. Bad things. And the guilt associated with the dream is so intense that I am almost crying with relief when I wake up and realize that it was, in fact, just a dream.
I can't say that I am fond of these dreams. Though I do see them as warnings.
But the dream I had last night was different.
It was a dream the likes of which I have never had before.
In it, I was going to die.
And I knew it.
I had 24 hours at the most.
There was no disease, no injury, no ailment of any kind. Just a certainty that I was, in fact, going to die.
I know that through the course of my dream I came to some rather poignant conclusions but I can't for the life of me remember what they were.
What I DO remember was the crushing guilt and disappointment.
Not terror.
And not a fear of what came after or what would happen to me.
But a deep and terrible wish that I had:
1. Done more with my life
2. Tried harder to be the person I know that I can be
I could not stop thinking about how I was going to miss out on so much of my life. I wondered what was so important in the next life that God couldn't afford to keep me in this one.
And most of all, I knew deep down that I had let too much slide. I had failed to be the strong, devoted daughter of God that I knew I had to potential to be.
Was this dream also a warning?
I know I'm not going to die in the next 24 hours (boy did I just jinx myself...).
But I know that I can always be doing better. And yet I let so much fall by the wayside.
What more should I be doing? What can I do so that if I were going to die in 24 hours I would not feel those things I felt in my dream?
I'd take strange, crazy dreams over these frighteningly realistic ones any day.
But maybe I need these wake-up calls.
