“All men dream: but not equally.
Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.”
-T.E. Lawrence
I’m one of the few people I know who can remember their dreams upon waking. I don’t know if this is a blessing or a curse. I don’t place much significance on the content of my dreams usually, but I do know they usually involve whatever I’ve been dealing with the day before. The really weird, I-don’t-want-to-be-dreaming-this-dream, dreams are those which include different people from varying times of my life, and now, unexplainably, these people all know each other even though, in real life, I don’t know them anymore. (Those types of dreams are probably mostly vanity.)
When I wake in the day, though, what then? Is there any connection between the images in my mind’s eye and what I can easily see everyday? More importantly, what dream am I living out?
My wife asked me the other day, “What’s your dream, Ben?” I honestly wasn’t sure how to respond. I’ve been concentrating so much on what kind of person I am that I haven’t really stopped to consider where that endeavor is taking me. Maybe it doesn’t matter. I could have a grand vision that drives my every waking second toward completion of some goal, but if I arrive there as a jackass, what good would it do? I believe that the product is the process, so to speak. In other words, my bigger vision is not ‘what am I doing?’ but ‘who am I becoming?’
See, that’s why the whole ‘What Would Jesus Do?’ craze unsettles me. If God truly desires to transform me into the image of His son Jesus, as the Holy Scriptures attest, then I don’t need to run every decision through the WWJD filter. I need to trust in Him to complete the work He started in me when I accepted Him as my savior and remain receptive to the counsel of the Holy Spirit. (See Phil. 2:5)
If my dream of Christ-likeness is going to have any chance of coming to fruition, my eyes need to be open and focused. It’s acceptable that I dream by night (I have no control over that anyway), and it’s kind of neat to be able to remember those dreams. But, as in the quotation above, if I want to have fervent, effective, visions of what may be and who I might become, then it’s my responsibility to “act [those] dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.” I guess that begs the question, how dangerous am I?
