Waking to a Dream

I just woke up from a really bad dream about Oprah.

It was one of those three-hour epics that leave you exhausted and sweaty. Now, I am okay with Oprah. I don't look to her for spiritual advice, but I think she does a lot of nice things with her money. I want to be in the audience when she gives everyone a car. In my dream, though, she was pretty much the antichrist. I had been invited to sing on her show and had to meet her before going on. I met her backstage in a very dark room and I couldn't make out her face. I had something she wanted in a little box that I didn't even know I had (you know how dreams are).

From approximately 3:30 to 6:30 this morning I was being chased by her minions. There was a lot of running and fighting. I had the sense I was only one step ahead of the very large and powerful mean guys chasing me at all times like in the movies. I could do some supernatural things like burrow through walls and levitate like the Mario Brothers. We wound up somehow on the rainy streets of New Orleans and I jumped into a car with some people I didn't know. They turned out to be allies, thankfully. We were being shot at and pulled into a convenience store for a Coke or for whatever the nice people in New Orleans drink. It was probably a dacquiri. That was pretty much where it ended though there were lots of other bizarre scenes and weird claustrophobic moments when I must have been suffocating in my pillow. Dreams are so weird.

When I woke up, finally, I thought about Ephesians 5:14 that says in the grand old poetic King James version, "Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light." Sometimes its hard to find the light of Christ in our dreams. One dream I have had over the years is that I'm casting out a demon and I can't get the name of Jesus to come out of my mouth, something very important I think for exorcism along with a cross and holy water. In that particular dream my lower lip quivers and my teeth are clacking together and I make a "Je-je-je-je-je-je" sound but His name never makes it past my lips. It is freaky. I don't like that one.

As I lay there thinking about that Scripture I realized that I actually wake to His reality, His dream, for me every day. In Ephesians 2:10 it says that we are His "workmanship" created to do good things with our lives and to spread His loving kingdom. The Greek for that word is poeima, which could easily be translated as poem or lyric. We're God's song. I like to think of it like He's singing me every day, making up the verses as He goes along. Of course, He already knows the whole lyric from start to finish, but its fun for me to think of Him using His unqualified imagination to dream-sing me every day. That just sounds like more fun for God instead of ticking my days off like a laundry list.

I'm usually sleepy about 9:30 each night. Unless I'm stressed or depressed I don't have too much trouble sleeping. I don't always dream a lot and I avoid excessive pizza, sweets, and caffeine prior to bedtime. I haven't even thought about Oprah in months and haven't seen the show in a long time. Someone said she was crying at the Democratic Convention last week when Obama spoke. Maybe that's what triggered it. I wouldn't mind singing on her show and I would love to talk about my worship book on it. Maybe that's what I have that she really wants, my book for her club. She doesn't have to chase me to get one, though. I'd be happy to drop a copy, autographed, in the mail.