From the time that I was a tiny girl, dreaming in full color on a nightly basis was my life. Unrelenting, the dreams came, some were good and some were not! To this day, I have full memories of a handful of dreams that repeatedly visited me in the night.

While you may think this is awesome, having constant nighttime entertainment, it has actually been more of an exhaustive burden! Isn’t it sublime to awaken on a sunny morning, discovering that you hadn’t moved at all throughout the night; you feel like you just laid down to sleep… sooooo restful. Well, I didn’t have this luxury for most of my life, until our RV came to rest in this very spot last year. Suddenly the dreaming stopped!

For over a year now, my dreaming has been nonexistent, MIA, if you will! It just suddenly disappeared! At first, I assumed it was because I had been exhausting myself with all the writing that was gushing out of my brain onto the page… my writers block had definitely been miraculously removed, for which I am eternally grateful. After a time, as the writing began to amp up, I found myself on the other side of the sleep number coin… insomnia! I had so much that I wanted to write down, I lost the ability to shut my brain down long enough for a decent amount of rest.

Aside from feeling exhausted, I didn’t actually mind not sleeping… you can sleep when you’re dead, as they say. I settled into a routine of writing til I dropped, tossing and turning for 2 to 4 hours, and back at it with coffee in hand! For a girl with a history of childhood trauma and nightmares that would make you cringe, the silence was glorious! Gradually, as the words emptied out of my overflow brain bags, sleep returned… just the sleep, without any dreaming at all! It’s been like this for a while now.

I want to say that it was maybe 4 or 5 nights ago that I dreamt for the first time in over a year. When I woke the next morning, I had just a brief realization about some kind of dream, but it was gone in the blink of an eye. I wasn’t bothered by any particular memory or feeling, aside from the disappointment of dreaming… I liked the quiet of sleep.

I have had some form of dream now, every single night, but with no residual memory of it… weird right?!

At first, the fact that I’m dreaming again bothered me deeply. I think it comes from having no control over where my mind goes when I surrender to sleep. This made me realize something I hadn’t thought about before. Though I believed I’d given every part of myself into Gods hands, I had yet to fully trust Him to protect my unconscious mind. There’s a lot of scary stuff rolling around in there!

Throughout my entire life, every bad dream brought forth many residual emotions of fear, shame, guilt and loathing about whatever occurred in the dream! I truly felt like I needed to be forgiven for things I didn’t actually even do. Have you ever dreamt that you did something very bad or embarrassing, only to wake up feeling so glad nobody saw what you dreamt? This has been my track record… until now.

So far, there hasn’t been any residual memories, or overwhelming self-loathing to follow me throughout my day. I’ve no idea why the dreaming has returned, but I do know in whose arms I rest my spirit within, while I’m sleeping! I do know that my spirit is much stronger today than it was even last year, so I believe that God is producing growth within this vessel. When one replaces fear and loathing with faith and grace… the cloying darkness has been replaced with peaceful freedom within my dreams.

God is good… ALL the time!