Even in My Dreams

by Lori Wilson

I'm remembering my first time to the Cape this year.  It was cool.  It was April. . . . 

My room is right on the water. The breakfast nook has windows on three sides, and everywhere I look - ocean. It's cool outside, the light is doing something extraordinary on the waves, and I find myself just... stopping. Watching. The colors shift. The movement changes. The vastness of it pulls at something deep in me.

For me, the ocean has always been a symbol of God. Bigger than I can imagine. Mysterious. Magnetic. I am drawn to it the way I imagine we are all drawn, at some level, to the One who made us with a longing we can't quite name.

God seems to be saying something simple here: Come. Rest. Be.

And yet underneath that invitation, a familiar undercurrent. A nagging feeling that I've forgotten something. A to-do I haven't crossed off. My heart wants to sink into this beautiful space, and my head says, not yet, not yet.

Perhaps you know this tension. The grace is right in front of you, and something in you keeps reaching for your list.

It's into this tender in-between place that a dream came to me this week.

I was swimming with an octopus. Not a small one. This creature was three times my size. And it was bioluminescent: shimmering, radiant, alive with its own quiet light. What I remember most is what I felt in its presence. Gentleness. Safety. Love.

In the dream, we prayed together. I entrusted a six-year-old girl into this creature's care, knowing she would be held. And I breathed underwater, fully and deeply, without any effort at all.

When I woke, I sat with the image for a long time.

Dreams are one of the ways God has always spoken to us. Scripture is full of them: Joseph, Jacob, the Magi, and Mary's husband, Joseph. And yet many of us have been taught to dismiss our dreams as random, as the brain processing the day's noise. It was just a dream. We wave them off before they can say what they came to say.

What if we slowed down enough to listen?

The octopus, I know, has three hearts (the trinity) and multiple distributed brains, intelligence woven through its entire body, not centralized in one place. It can do many things at once in ways we are only beginning to understand. The number eight, on its side, becomes the infinity sign. A symbol I've long associated with God. Three hearts. Eight arms. A creature that sees, feels, and moves in ways that humble me.

In my dream, this creature prayed with me. Not at me. Not over me. With me.

And the prayer that emerged felt like it came from somewhere deeper than my own imagining:

Dear God, You are omnipresent and are always with me. You truly see me, and I am never alone, so that I can be your heart to others and reflect that love in our blessed and broken world. Amen.

I am here at this big water, and I hear something underneath the sound of the waves:

I am with you. I see you. You are not alone. The decisions will be made. The tasks will get done. Everything will be okay.

Even in my dreams, God breaks through, surprising me with bioluminescent light and a creature I never would have chosen, and breath I didn't know I had.

Maybe that's the invitation for all of us right now: to stay open to the unexpected places where God speaks. The dream you almost dismissed. The image that stayed with you when you woke. The thing your inner life is trying to say that your busy outer life keeps interrupting.

The invitation is not to analyze. It is simply to notice. To breathe. To trust that what rises in the deep places of us, even in sleep, can carry the fingerprints of God.

For Your Reflection

• Is there a dream, image, or inner impression you've recently dismissed as "nothing"? What might happen if you sat with it a little longer?

• Where in your life right now is God perhaps saying, 'You are not alone, everything will be okay'? What makes it hard to receive that?

• What does "breathing underwater" mean for you? What would it feel like to move through a difficult season with unexpected ease and grace?

• The ocean, the octopus, the bioluminescent light, God speaks in symbols that are personal to us. What symbols or images in your own life feel like they carry something of God?