Any Dream…

During Advent, members of the A Nun’s Life community will be posting reflections on the Jesse Tree and the O Antiphons.

Day 8 :: Joseph written by Regina

What kind of dream is this that you have had? Shall we indeed come, I and your mother and your brothers, and bow down to the ground before you? – Genesis 37:10

I tend to have strange, vivid dreams in the hours right before dawn, often after I’ve woken up briefly and then fallen back to sleep for a bit before it’s time to get the day going. Most of the time I can’t remember them, but once I dreamed I was driving through the Appalachian Mountains in West Virginia. I took what seemed to be a familiar exit, drove over a hill and happened upon a beautiful volcano. Another memorable one: I was back in college, in West Virginia, but apparently I a) hadn’t gone to any class all semester, b) hadn’t checked my mailbox in months because I didn’t know the combination and c) couldn’t remember where my dorm room was, as I wandered a building that looked like my dorm, Agnes Howard Hall, but inside was more like Houdini’s house. I can still remember much of that dream, including the fear I had when I woke up, CONVINCED that I had really messed up by not going to class – which, quite honestly, was never a real fear of mine, as my professors in both college and seminary can attest to. And then there are the dreams where I get a leg cramp and right before it hits, I’m dreaming that a crab has suddenly appeared and is about to bite me!

I wish I could remember the details of the really pleasant dreams, the ones I don’t want to wake up from, the ones I can remember for just the briefest moment, the ones that I can sometimes recognize as a dream while I’m dreaming, the ones that just make me smile.

When I have a vivid dream, I like to tell people about them. I’ll mention it to my mom, or someone I work with, and we’ll laugh together at the absurdity of the images – a volcano in West Virginia?? – so I wonder if that’s what Joseph’s conversations with his family were like. He has a dream and he just mentions it to them, curious about the images. Maybe he had the dream about the sun, moon and stars bowing to him and thought, “Man, this is just weird. What the heck does it mean? I think I’ll ask Reuben and Simeon later.” And of course his already envious brothers over-reacted a bit.

But why? It was just a dream. For all they knew, Joseph could have eaten something before he went to sleep that made his neurons a little extra active. Maybe his dream had absolutely nothing to do with them… In the ancient Near East, though, it was believed that that God communicated via dreams to give human beings instructions or bits of prophecy. And this we know – whether a dream comes while sleeping or is something we articulate for the future while we are wide awake, if some piece of it means turning power structures upside down and all around, someone’s going to be upset.  In the best situations, people can engage the dream and its images and unpack it and figure if – and how – to make it a reality.  In the worst situations, opponents of the dream try to literal kill it by murdering the dreamer, in a tactic taken right out of the Bible, sadly. Like Joseph’s brothers found out, though, you can’t just snuff a dream simply because you don’t like it or because it doesn’t fit into your plans. As evidenced by many great martyrs, dreams have staying power, and they reach far beyond the dreamer. In the end of Joseph’s story, his dreams kinda came true – but he gained no real pleasure from the fall of his brothers. What mattered to him was being reunited with them, being able to show them love once again. Great leaders and martyrs who have had dreams of dismantling the status quo often express similar things – the victory is not in the glory of seeing other made low, it’s in lifting others up. Those are the dreams I want to not just dream for myself, but to be a part of in the Kin-dom.

(And since I can’t think of Joseph without thinking of his Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, here’s a a clip of three famous Josephs from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical singing “Any Dream Will Do” at the Concert for Diana in 2007.)

* * Want to revisit the other symbols of Advent? Click here on Jesse Tree. * *