After 30 years of living in, and off, the worlds of poverty I needed to stop.
There was nothing left to give and, it wasn't the homeless and poor who took everything, but the politicians and pious who did.
Five years have passed and they still come to me ... in my dreams.
It's funny because throughout my life I've never had vivid dreams ... sleeping like a rock until I woke at 2:30 in the morning thinking about work and tossing and turning until it was time to go.
These days dreams come often and I welcome them.
They're strange ... bizarre and unexplainable ... faithful documentaries of things that actually happened with fictional twists ... erotic craziness ... or visits from Angels and Assholes long dead but alive as ever as I sleep.
At first I'm shocked at their "weirdness" but now treat them like crossword puzzles ... "What was that about?" I ask myself, rolling over and hugging Sarah.
Laying there, I spend half awake moments pondering, "Where did that come from?"
It's becoming a discipline ... and I try very hard to remember the dreams to consider in the morning light ... to ask "Why that?"
My friend Michael Ruffin often reports on Facebook ... "In last night's dream my Father visited me and we had a good time" ... or ... "My childhood friend and I were in the woods when my Good Wife showed up."
Michael takes dreams matter-of-factly whereas I ask, "What The Hell?"
"Indeed God speaks once or twice, yet no one notices. In a dream, a vision of the night, when sound sleep falls on people, while they slumber in their beds, then he opens their ears and seals their instruction …" says the prophet Isaiah in the Bible.
They didn't teach any of this at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary where I paid damn good money to learn such things.
It pisses me off.
I'm having to learn to listen in a whole new way.
And am finding it most fascinating ... compelling ... as interesting as anything I've done ... and am learning lots about myself.
Though I do confess ... Thank God ... Sarah slumbers there beside me ... letting me throw my arms this way and that ... snore or talk ... and whatever it is I do in the night.
It suddenly strikes ... she's the reason I'm finally talking to my dreams ... or made it contextually real that I'm in a place to hear them ... and converse with them ... which may very well be ... dialoguing with God.
