Ambushed in a Dream
[“On my bed I remember You, on You I muse through the night, . . .” (Ps 63:8).]
[“(T)he temple was filling with smoke. Then I said, . . .’my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts’ (Is 6:4-5).”]
O Lover,
The number of these prayer posts occasioned by a dream is very small. Although I have a vigorous nocturnal life with recallable episodes or ambiences more nights than not, these have typically consisted of an enigmatic blending of seemingly mundane fragments of my past. Indeed, I recall telling my spiritual director—only half tongue-in-cheek—a decade ago that in my dream life I was a rank pagan materialist needing each morn to be reintroduced to my identity as a person of faith. No, dreams have not been a major impetus for this blog.
However, a rare exception unfolded recently. I dreamed I was at a major reception event in a stately walnut-paneled room. As I mingled among other attendees I encountered first a close friend from my earlier life and then several others from my more recent past. These included both men and women dear to me in different ways. As our palaver ensued I became aware that I was letting go of the ties I had had with some of these even as I was strengthening the connection with others. In regard to both I experienced in the dream a pervasive acceptance, peace, and momentary equilibrium. Rather than a bucket of pieces, all the rich betweenness of our lives had been and remained good. In time this ambience of well-being, increasingly colored by a hue somewhere between magenta and fire, seemingly expanded to encompass the entire cosmos.
And then in the dream’s remaining moments I was conscious of You, O Lover, infusing everything, both that immediately encountered in the dream and all else. And in that awareness of what Christian Wiman terms “inarticulable affinities” I was at rest, entirely passive, my scrambling immobilized, within and without experiencing oneness with You whom I could not sense or think or question. As the dream was ending the prayer fíat volúntas túa enveloped me and I was aware that I was, however briefly, glimpsing Reality as it actually is in You. Even a word like “sublime” falls far short of conveying adequately that glimpse.
From basking in this lingering aura and then gradually awakening around 1:40 AM, I was immediately segueing into déjà vu, aware that various aspects of my dream were informed by those influenced by Christian mysticism. Regarding the unitive I found myself pondering Hadewijch’s “Totality” and Bourgeault’s “interabiding”; regarding pervasiveness I was reminded of Hillesum’s “undercurrent”; regarding fire and smoke I mused about both the transformative journey toward deification in Juan de la Cruz’s The Living Flame of Love, and the fetching possibility of spirituality traveling with synesthesia; regarding tranquil equilibrium I remembered Eliot’s “still point.” The dream had surely taken me to what the Celtic tradition dubs a “thin place,” one in which the membrane between the bound and the Boundless is unusually porous.
And yet, O Lover, being one both burdened and blessed by the need to seek to communicate of the incommunicable, I have subsequent to the dream been on the lookout for fresh language slightly less inadequate for this transcognitive brush with Your self-evidency: e.g., epiphany (“showing”); apotheótic moment; liminality; theósis (“engoddedness”); the finite as translucent, layered, and diaphanous; the cosmic scale of Your Incarnátio. In the words of Charles Wesley’s hymn: “O for a Thousand Tongues”!
Finally, I risk redundancy in citing again the matter of self-evidency. In my dream the air was thick with Your presence, a numinosity which I, uncharacteristically, questioned neither during nor after. Long wary of certitude and spiritual trophy jolts, I in this case was not theologizing or critiquing. You, O Lover, Self-named as Immanuel, in addition to shocking me, were unimpeachably permeating both the latter portion of the dream and its aftermath. And my “yes” to You in the wake of that experience was and remains as unequivocal as I can offer.
