The Misty Bridge

Testimony By Laura Bondarchuk

Life Is But a Dream

I

’ve been praying for a friend who might be nearer to death than either of us knows. Because he is an atheist, I have asked in my prayers if I should take the opportunity to say to him, “You know, regarding God, you could be wrong.” I can’t seem to let it go. In my meditative state I saw a vision of God the Father, bigger than a mountain, drawing into His embrace thousands of people who were fast asleep. I silently asked what this meant. The answer, whether real or imagined (I invite you to decide), was that everyone, no matter what their beliefs, is welcome in Heaven. Some may have chosen spiritual sleep as their modus operandi on earth, but when they die, they are given an opportunity to wake up to the experience of Heaven, or to simply keep napping. Either way, God’s got them.

This meditation got me thinking that no matter who we are or what we believe, God is in charge, especially in our sleep state, which I like to think is another dimension of existence. If we don’t choose to listen during the day, perhaps He speaks to us at night, showing us mysterious images that we either cannot remember when we wake, or clumsily attempt to analyze. Our analyses rarely involve the idea that God has spoken to us or given us something to do. Often, we miss the point entirely. But occasionally, a dream affects us deeply.

In one such dream I sat at a picnic table across from two parents and four children. There was a tiny blue-eyed girl named Greta, to whom I said, “You are the cute one.” Shyly she nodded. Then there was Siobhan, an intense-looking girl with a rebellious vibe and a touch of genius in her dark eyes. I observed, “And you’re the one in charge.” Her parents smiled and shook their heads no, but I kept my gaze on her and said, “Oh yes, you are.” She smirked with pleasure. Next was Manuel, a slight boy with sad eyes. I said, “You’re the sensitive one.” He nodded and searched my face for a sign of simpatico. Then he closed his eyes and telepathically sent me flashing images of starving children

and natural disasters. I wanted so much to ease his pain. The special phrase from Julian of Norwich came to mind: “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well,” but I couldn’t say this to him. I also somehow knew that I couldn’t help him. My heart aching, I moved on. The last kid, Frederick, very handsome, was ready for college. I said, “You’re the successful one.” He nodded aristocratically, enjoying the singular attention. I never did make eye contact with the parents, but the pride pouring out of them was palpable. I woke up then, feeling full of emotions and thoughts that were difficult to organize, but it felt as if I had just met people who exist as surely as I do, in high color and emotional detail, with unique dispositions and names.

Many dreams are made up of impossible characters or strange moving patterns, and from these I wake up puzzled but dismissive. I realize that some dreams are a symptom of my mind cleaning out unneeded files; and nightmares, the baser, stray emotions that just need release.

Not this time. Like a piece of art that is neither beautiful nor ugly, but provocative, with visceral sensation and lingering thought, these people I “met” in another dimension continue to haunt me. Who are they, and why did I dream them? Each child impacted me uniquely, and even the quiet parents beckon me to think about them. I wondered if they represented people I already knew in real life, but I couldn’t match them up with anyone familiar.

Arriving at work one morning, the dream continued to nag me. I considered its main theme: I had recognized something beautiful in each child, and they had received my observations gracefully (though I sensed the exchange with Manuel was incomplete, casting a humble shadow on my reverie). I decided to try something with my coworkers. As each person came to me with an issue, regardless of whether it was business-related or personal, I tucked into our conversation words that recognized their talent or goodness. Their expressions of surprise and sometimes relief were priceless. The Holy Spirit was in my office that day. I’m not suggesting that this dream was absolutely a message or even that I’d gotten it right. But in reconsidering it as a divine communication, something truly wonderful had occurred.

There’s a misty bridge between sleeping and wakefulness, with gradients of awareness as we drop off or come to. In the twilight of sleep, I sometimes sense departed loved ones around me. They don’t say much, but their presence is comforting. One night as I drifted off I pictured the wing flaps of a small airplane being tested for flight, and flapped my feet in sync under the blanket. I think my father was having some fun with me. Not only had he been the pilot of a small airplane himself, but he used to marvel at my enormous Norwegian feet. I giggled like a little girl and felt just lovely as I melted into deep rest.

These funny moments in dreams offer a playfulness that we don’t normally expect in life. One time my oldest son, already a postgraduate and fast asleep on his back, sat bolt upright and said with a great deal of alarm, “Someone has to keep track of the cookies!” He gently fell back down onto his pillow and remembered nothing the next day. In another dream, he was tasked with improving the sales of greeting cards, and came up with the idea of including a leaf of romaine lettuce inside each one. This one he remembered and posted on social media to the amusement of hundreds of friends.

The facility of our minds to write elaborate scripts in dreams raises the question, which side of our existence is reality? The sixteen earthly hours we spend clamoring for money, love, food, entertainment, or perfection, or the other eight we give up involuntarily? Sometimes this lack of control bugs me. Through an irrational fear of missing out, I will often fight sleep. After work I eat dinner and watch a little TV with my housemate, then go to bed and watch more mindless drivel on my iPad. When I’ve obviously nodded off and can no longer keep my eyes open, I struggle to watch anyway, turning a potentially good rest into a long series of catnaps and frustrating rewinds. When I finally give up, I put on Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing (the best show ever written for television) and burrow into my pillow. Because I have watched the entire series so many times, I know every line and have convinced myself that I sleep through it quite well. But in my more honest moments, I worry that down the road, when dementia kicks in, the only things I will remember are scenes from The West Wing. Regardless, I must finally concede that everything sleeps, even me. It is mysterious and a little unnerving. If I had been given the choice when Creation was happening, would I have included sleeping as a thing? No. I barely acknowledge it now. Nice dreams are one thing and, if we remember them, can even be fun. But nightmares can be deeply disturbing. We must understand that very little of the imagery we see in our scariest dreams will ever materialize in our regular lives. I believe they are simply expressions of our subconscious mind releasing the tensions and anxiety of our own fears and unresolved conflicts. I have woken up in a cold sweat at times, and can physically feel the relief upon discovering that it was “only a bad dream” flooding my body with endorphins. Though stressful, I must admit that on some level I feel better after my brain takes out the trash. The thing that often eludes me is what specifically my dreams mean, whether they are “good” or “bad.” There are very wise people who can interpret dreams quite fittingly, but like daily newspapers, I don’t necessarily want to read them all!

No matter what our sleep realms contain, our vulnerability during this part of the clock is absolute. In sleep we are like newborns, soft and small, unconsciously trusting that we will just rest now, and open our eyes again in the morning. How do we have such faith in this vast unknown? Or is it merely biology that forces the human mechanism to blank out for one-third of its life? Mysteries abound, but we are not equipped—or tasked—with solving any of them. Life could be simpler if we just got out of our own way.

One day I was sitting in my local mechanic’s shop waiting for my car to get fixed. The gruff patriarch of the place, an A-list baseball player who had made a fair show in his day, had died recently. My first encounter with him, many years ago as a broke single mother, involved a check I’d bounced for a repair. He was a bit mean about it despite my apology. Thoroughly embarrassed I returned with cash the same day to make good on the bill. Shaking his head in apparent surprise he showed me an envelope full of bounced checks that were years old, long uncollectible. I told him, “You should throw those away, you’ll live longer,” and he laughed. From that point on we grew to like one another very much. His family continues to run the place, as they have their whole lives. They’ve set up a glass case for their father’s gloves, bats, and other baseball memorabil-

ia, including a handsome photograph taken when he was young and happy. I was looking at this picture when I started to daydream, a thing that happens often, sleep deprived as I am from watching TV through my eyelids. I gradually felt peaceful, hyper-aware, and light as a feather all at the same time. Suddenly I had goosebumps as I said almost involuntarily, “Oh, you’re here?” To which the old man said, “Of course I’m here!” It was his tone of voice and his inflection that convinced me that he was, in fact, there. I sucked in my breath and whispered, “Hello!” Oh my, what diaphanous curtain separates us from the dead? Is it only our corporeal form that limits our senses? Perhaps their idea of Heaven includes earth. Maybe we are asleep to the reality that earth includes Heaven, and we all sit together now in Heavenly places.

I used to be an aide in a nursing home, and took care of a lady named Pauline who was in her upper nineties and had not woken from sleep for years. She was fed and hydrated intravenously; it was my job to keep her clean, warm and dry. She had horrific bedsores which the nurses attended to. She never made a sound when her dressings were changed. I felt sorry for her and her family, who faithfully visited despite her silence, and wondered why God did not bring her home.

One day while I was bathing her, she opened her eyes wide and stared up at the ceiling. Startled, I looked at the nurse who told me it was just a reflex, that it happened all the time and didn’t mean she was awake. I continued washing. Then she gently turned her head to the left (which she no longer had the muscle strength to do), and now looking into a corner she suddenly giggled delightedly, like a much younger person, as if the funniest joke in all the world had just been told to her. Her expression said, “Oh, I see!” The nurse gasped and ran for help; I just stood there, shocked, fascinated and thoroughly useless in the face of this miracle. She quieted down then, and as the doctor examined her, she seemed to be asking something, but couldn’t speak. Shortly after this, she fell asleep again, only this time she died.

I will never forget Pauline. In my darkest hours, if I ever doubt the existence of God or the weirdness of His plan, or worry about the sheer scope of all that I don’t understand, I think of her. I feel sure that in her last moments here, she saw something so wonderfully funny it transcended her atrophied muscles, enabling her to open her eyes and laugh, not hysterically but with genuine, cognitive amusement. Perhaps her friends and lovers were toasting to her longevity while Jesus gave her a smile and a wink. I can’t even get close to the humor of what Pauline saw. It is not our privilege to know. But witnessing her death was an undeniable gift to those of us who were in her room that day. Her long sleep had ended, and now she was free and wide awake in Heaven.

This suggests to me that we’re getting things backwards. Life on earth is the dream state, and dreams, Creation’s method for helping us deal with living in this wild outpost. Look at the outrageous creatures we have here, the catastrophic events we suffer through, our own industrial inventions we seem to require for life on this planet. For that matter, consider the planets, the sun and the moon, the infinite galaxies we can’t

even see! These are the stuff of dreams. But we don’t feel awed by it anymore. We’re too busy. We’re sleep-deprived. Did we look up at the sky today, even once? When we rise in the morning, we believe this is waking up. Scientifically speaking this is true. But looking at it spiritually, we tend to sleepwalk all day, and barely notice the magnificence that is the universe we occupy, or the fragile beauty of the beings with whom we share it. God works mysteriously, but He is not elusive. We receive Him best in the tiny spaces of time when we have willingly relinquished control over life, including cooperating with our own fatigue and going to sleep. Our power is imaginary to begin with (we can’t even keep track of the cookies), so our difficulty in giving it up is like a child clutching a toy. We receive God in every single unconscious breath! There is no choice in the matter, not even for those who would deny His existence. Though we try to define our experiences of birth, life, sleeping and death—secularly or otherwise—we can’t do it with any kind of precision. And it seems that the more we learn about living here, the less we understand. Science shines a beam on what is, but can never answer why anything exists. This inability to explain life keeps us spellbound and a little insecure. So we compartmentalize what we do understand and shelve the rest as “yet to be discovered.” After all of this hard work and confusion it seems to me that the easiest part of the entire experience of living life, other than sleep, is death—and I don’t mean the protracted horror of dying slowly. I mean the final instant of closing our eyes, lights out, The End. I once read somewhere that death is like taking off tight shoes. As a person with unusually large feet, this comforts me more than I can say. As I imagine it, we effortlessly pass through to a different here when we die, and can choose to be awake or take a nap.

Sleep is finally optional. I’ll probably run around like a toddler who does not want that nap! If you buy my premise that earth is where we walk in sleep, with every gorgeous thing that surrounds us, then ponder how much better it can be in the new here. I bet it’s spectacular—blindingly beautiful oceans, meadows, forests and mountains under skies full of stars too bright to behold. I imagine friends and family who’ve passed this way before us—all looking so young and beautiful again—greeting us with hugs and kisses and chatting about all the amazing things they’ve been doing, eager to introduce us to new people they’ve met. I imagine the many mansions in which our Father, His Son and the Holy Spirit dwell, and the sumptuous feasts They provide. I see the mystical city where Mother Mary is conducting her choirs of angels, their songs so exquisite that we could die again in holy ecstasy. In this place where all are welcome, we can be and do anything that makes us happy, become our favorite version of who we are. We can eat and drink anything and never get fat. We can love everyone and never get hurt. We will finally enter into the full awareness that our Father, who is the architect of everything we thought we understood, loves us unconditionally, with no performance reviews to defend or invoices to pay or clocks to watch. Time is no longer a thing. In the new perfection of our eternal present, we can go to the places where we used to live, visit the old gas station and say hello (and sometimes folks will sense we are there). We can check in on friends and family who are grieving our absence and sit right down with them at the picnic table. Or we can go to the nursing home, hold the hand of a dying friend, perhaps whisper a funny joke in her ear, and stay with her until she wakes up here. That’s how it is when Love is all there is. And in the stunning moment when we make this discovery, it might even occur to us that that’s how it always could have been. We are Love, manifested by God. It’s hard to believe and impossible to conceive. But nestled deep in the arms of the Holy Trinity, in Heaven where all things are possible, where our lives have always been, we wake up and begin again.