Calebites

I'm a little sad to write this post.  All my life I've suffered from vivid dreams.  Sometimes this means they are simply detailed and involved and intense (like when I was a member of a special guns unit of the FBI) but more often than not it means terrible, horrible nightmares.The first one I  can recall I was only about five years old.  For some reason, my nights are haunted by crimes and violence and wars and sadness.

It seems that Caleb suffers from this, too.  Sometimes he wakes up from a vivid dream and is excited to recount his nighttime adventures (he can go on for 20 minutes or more in great detail.)  Sometimes the dreams emerge later in the day, or even a couple days later, in much less detail; these are usually the scary dreams.

As I was tucking him in tonight, he briefly mentioned: "Last night, I dreamed that I was standing in the middle of a town, and they had to throw me in a fire until I burned to death, or everyone in the town would turn into zombies.  And I was just standing there, but I knew I couldn't let everyone turn into zombies so I had to let them throw me in the fire.  So I shut my eyes tight and said a prayer and then I woke up."

My heart raced as I listened to so few sentences that surely must have been terrifying to dream.  I was grateful he wrenched himself from enduring any more, grateful he thought to pray for deliverance.  I'm so very cautious about what he is exposed to, knowing how easily images and ideas can infiltrate into one's dreams, and yet somehow his subconscious can still create such terrible visions.  From my own experience, raised in a sheltered world of Disney movies and Road to Avonlea, there is no amount of sheltering that can eliminate the nightmares.  I just pray that the impact of the images fade and leave no lasting impression.