A Dream Is Not a Message

The lamp is on in that room at twenty past eight and nobody has gone anywhere near the switch.

Camila is seven. She is sitting up, which is not the shape of a person going to sleep, and she has her knees pulled up under the blanket with her arms around them. Her mother is on the edge of the bed with the storybook still open on her lap at the page they got to.

Something happened in Camila's sleep the night before. Her mother knows roughly when, because of the sound the door made and the way the hallway light came on at ten to three.

Tonight Camila is not asking about it. She has already decided about it, and what she has decided is the part her mother did not see coming.

"It was telling me something."

That is all she says, and her mother does not ask her for any more, which is exactly right. But somewhere between breakfast and the walk home, a seven year old did a piece of reasoning nobody ever taught her. She decided the thing in her sleep was not weather. She decided it was post. Something sent, from somewhere, about tomorrow.

So now she is sitting up at twenty past eight guarding a lamp, because if the dream was a letter then turning the light off is opening the letterbox.

Her mother has already said the obvious things. It was not real. It was only a dream. Nothing is going to happen. All of them true, all of them said kindly, and not one of them touching the actual problem, because Camila is not arguing about whether it was real.

She is worried about what it meant.

And if that is your room, and you have sat on the end of a bed at that hour with a book open on your lap and nothing in your head that fits, this is your doorway. There are two separate things in that bedroom tonight, and only one of them is worth any attention at all. It is not the one everybody is looking at.

Weather, not post

Here is the plain thing, said once and not turned into a lesson.

A dream is what a tired head does with a full day. It is not a message. It did not come from anywhere and it was not sent by anybody, and it does not get a vote about tomorrow. That is the whole of it, and a seven year old can hold it if it is said simply and not explained six ways.

Notice what that does and does not say. It does not say tomorrow will be easy. Nobody can hand a child that, and it would be unkind to try, because a child remembers what somebody promised them. What it says is smaller and much stronger: the dream was not the one telling them anything.

You are allowed to say the plain thing, and the plain thing is that a dream does not decide anything at all. Psalm 46:1 calls God a very present help, and present is the word the whole verse turns on, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes present mean this room, at twenty past eight, tonight.

God is our safe place and our strength, a very present help when we are in trouble.Psalm 46:1

And there is a second thing worth having, quietly, for yourself. God does speak. He is not silent and He never has been. But He does not go to a sleeping seven year old at three in the morning and frighten her in order to be heard.

You have been handed the authority in this house, and it does not run out at the end of a long day. Scripture says God did not give us a spirit of fear but of power and of love and of a sound mind, and it is the Holy Spirit who puts a sound mind back into a small person at bedtime.

Two different things are in that room

The dream and the room are not the same object, and a child cannot separate them without help.

The dream was real to feel. It is not real now. It ended the moment your child's eyes opened, and it has no address, no follow up and nothing to do with the morning.

The room is a different matter. The room is the same room it was on every ordinary night. Same curtain. Same door. Same shoes by the wall. Nothing in it changed while your child slept, and nothing in it changed at ten to three.

You were never given a script for this, and none is needed. His word says the Lord is near to everybody who calls on Him, and the Holy Spirit does the being near while you sit there with a book open on your lap and nothing prepared.

And notice which way round this goes. The room does not become safe because a child stops being frightened of it. The room was never the problem, and it was not the problem at ten to three either.

You are switching that lamp off over a room that is occupied, and it was just as occupied at ten to three. Psalm 139:12 says the dark is not dark to God and the night shines like the day to Him, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a fact in a bedroom instead of a nice idea.

That is what sits underneath everything else here, and it does not depend on how the night goes or on how the sentence gets said.