Faith And Collective Trauma 19

I had yet another series of vivid dreams, most of which I do not remember. I often wake knowing I have dreamed dramatically, but I think it's just as well that I go through periods of poor recall. It is an intense and at times onerous burden to have such strong and present dreams, because it makes my dream life every bit and real as my waking life. But dreams are still, by their nature, very surreal, and I think my memory gets selective as an act of mercy for keeping me focussed on the waking reality. My last dream was of a house I was in where I was receiving visitors and guests, young men who looked like they had been street-involved, but were also themselves gifted and highly sensitive. I was making tea for one of them, I think. I had also previously been in a store looking at books of very beautiful bird illustrations, a huge focus on iridescence and the colours of blue and red. I believe that my dreams are actually another dimension, and that I am in contact with others whom I do not know in waking life, but nevertheless are real people. Some, perhaps many, have been long dead and I am in communion with their spirits. We are often conferring and consulting together, and I think that in these dreams I am both teaching and learning. I know this is quite a departure from some of the orthodoxies of dream interpretation, but I think that's because the psychiatrists who delve into such things are themselves, usually, atheists, who attribute anything spiritual to pathology. I used to bend over backwards, sideways, forward, then inside out in order to understand my dreams, usually adopting a Jungian model for dream interpretation. Sometimes, even often it has made sense. But there have always been those stubborn holdout dreams that resist that model. It was when I had that dream of a Mexican doctor in a clinic. She told me her name so I looked her up on the Internet. I wasn`t sure if she was actually Mexican, but I knew she was Latina and we were speaking Spanish in the clinic where I was visiting her. I also know that it was 11:30 am and she asked me to come back and see her at 3 in the afternoon. There were also present a troubled looking young man who could be her son, and a recently deceased coworker of mine. She told me her name. When I looked her up, there she was on a YouTube video giving a presentation about service delivery to an audience of medical professionals in the Mexican city Aguascalientes. Same age (fifties or early sixties), short hair, face, build, voice, accent of Spanish. I have had so many different encounters like this with so many complete strangers in dreams and I have come to believe that some, maybe many, perhaps all, are real people. The veil between life and death, the seen and the unseen is very thick in some places, thin in others. I heard a sermon recently about thin places, where we are more likely to encounter God. I also believe that by extension, some of us become those thin places. I believe that I am one of those people, and that my long life of prayer, Christian service and care for the dying has made me uniquely open and vulnerable to others, both known and unknown, living and dead, and this is not something that creeps me out. This is not Twilight Zone. This is a divine gift and I feel so very privileged and so rich to be able to experience those meetings with the cloud of witnesses who surround us.