I was pretty tired after all of the travel and went to bed early expecting to sleep through the night. By midnight I was kicking covers and thrashing around the bed with thousands of thoughts running through my mind. Goddess was, of course, snoring softly beside the bed unaware and unconcerned about me.
Sometime around 3:30 I feel asleep. And I dreamed. I do not normally dream or if I do I don’t remember them. Most of my life I’ve been a Day Dream Believer writing or making up programs or plans. But not last night! It was a vivid dream.
I was with my friend Gene and we were beginning an internship with a large law firm in Atlanta. The offices were in a corporate tower and everyone there seemed very excited that he and I were starting. Then we were called in to meet with our supervisor.
An attractive African-American woman was smartly dressed and flashed a very nice smile as she asked us to take our seats at the oak conference room table in her office. After talking for a while about things we’d done and things that we would be doing she stopped and started at me.
“You don’t remember me do you?” she asked with an intensity that bordered on anger.
I stared at her while Gene tugged at his collar and was obviously wishing that he was somewhere else. She locked my eyes and I searched and searched for some memory but there was none to be found.
“Back when I was in school,” she began crossing the border into anger, “I did a film of your work. It was the first big break that you ever had! After that, you never had any trouble getting your press did you? And you have no memory that it was me who got you started!”
The dream fast forwarded and Gene and I were with the other people in the office. They all reached out sympathetically telling me not to worry about it. That evening there was a banquet during which Gene and I were to be introduced. As she was making here speech, one of the young bright attorneys leaned over to whisper to me.
“Micheal, she’s not going to introduce you unless you sign this,” and a legal document was thrust in my hands. “It says that you must agree to never serve on the Board of this firm.”
I shook my head. “Sure,” I shot back, “I have no problem with that whatsoever,” and I signed the contract.
During the after party, many people came up to me telling me not to worry about it. The young attorney who had handed me the contract said, “Don’t worry about it Micheal. I changed some of the words around so there’s no way that she can enforce it.”
Then Dan Vaden of all people stood beside me and asked me what I was thinking. Dan is a friend, a successful Savannah businessman and a civic leader. I looked at him and he was giving me this large smile. Then he said, “We’ll going to have some fun.”
Crazy dream huh?
Throughout my career I’ve been an encourager of the people I worked with. “You’re more than you think you are,” I would often tell them quoting J.R.R. Toilken from “The Hobbit.” And I’ve tried to give others the credit while I shouldered the blame. So it’s funny that the dream was the reverse of what I’d tried to make my practice.
I’ve also known that no one accomplishes anything by themselves. Those who claim to have done it all by themselves are likely liars with the most inflated of egos. In my work help and support often were found in the most unlikely of places and the most unexpected of people. So it doesn’t surprise me that is what happened in the dream.
Attorneys? God knows I’ve spent enough time with them over the last four or five years. Recently I told one that I no longer wanted to have meetings at his firm as all of the news is normally bad and I’d rather meet in a happier environment so it’s a bit of a surprise that my dream had me interning at one.
And I’ve always looked for fun in the things that I have done and if you can pull that off with homeless people, the sick and the infirmed, then you’ve figured our survival.
I’ve read that dreams often represent the opposite of what one should expect. There were a lot of opposites in mine. We’re also taught that God speaks to us through dreams and I ponder the morning wondering what she is trying to teach me now.
