These Dreams

These Dreams

Having her undivided attention, I began embellishing details. I told Mother that in my dream her mother, Charlotte, no longer wore glasses, but that she’d still given me a hug that made my back crack and breath disappear. I told her that Jesus had come into the room right along with Grandma. That his eyes were yellow; his hair like wool. He wore a sash of purple silk but no shoes. The angels, who were in the background during this exchange, had rainbows through their wings that changed colors as they moved them in a gentle circular motion. I told Mother that the devil and his angels had tried making his way into my room as well, but that Jesus’ angels had poked them with their fiery hot swords and — lickety split — they turned to ash.

Unlike most adults, my mother believed every word I said. Not only that, she believed that this might not have been a dream, but a vision. That the events as I had described them had actually happened in my tiny blue and pink bedroom. At four years old I was believed to have had my first encounter with spiritual warfare.

As people came over to our Owens Chapel home for supper or to write music with my father, my parents would ask me to tell them about my dream. I was sick to my gut about it. I knew that my dream had been nothing but a story, but I had told it as fact and therefore it was a lie. The thing is, I had loved telling my lie. I’d loved envisioning my grandmother floating into my room in a pink cloud reminiscent of Glinda’s in The Wizard of Oz. I loved imagining that my grandmother still had all of her pretty blond hair despite the chemo taking it away before she died. I loved imagining that in heaven her dimples tunneled just as deep, her smile just as wide. I loved imagining that her eyes — cornflower blue, just like my mother’s — sparkled as she looked at me, and I could see this because she no longer had to wear glasses.

But as I sat there at our kitchen table, sharing with these grown ups my lie, I yearned to scream, “It’s not true! None of it! I never saw Grandma, Jesus, or His angels with rainbows through their wings! They never came in my room and comforted me! It’s a lie! A lie, I tell you!”

But I never gathered the courage. I just couldn’t do it. Especially not when my mother showed me my dream in her spiral bound notebook where she kept only the best of her own; showed me the part where Grandma came into my room with no tears in her eyes, all her pain wiped away, her hair and smile back.

How could I tell my mother that this appearance never happened? That the last time I had seen my grandmother was in Lancaster, Pennsylvania and even then I remembered being more fascinated with the automatically closing doors of the hospital than my precious grandmother who was lying in one of the beds inside of it, dying. How do you tell somebody that what you told as truth was actually a lie when it is bringing comfort to that somebody who was heartbroken before?

Just this afternoon, twenty years later, it happened again. My parents, in-laws, husband and I were sitting around talking about visions and dreams when my father said those dreaded words: “Jolina had a vision where Bev’s mother and Jesus….” My father turned and looked at me. “Well, why don’t you just tell it. You remember, don’t you?”

Did I ever.

Suddenly, I was four years old all over again. That little girl sitting at the kitchen table with a lie on her lips she had to tell because her parents thought it was a comforting truth.

I smiled, shifted uncomfortably in my seat. “Uh, I really can’t remember. That was a long time ago….”

Probably thinking I was just being shy, my mother and father quickly filled my in-laws and husband in on the details.

“Jesus came into her room,” my father said. “He was wearing a purple sash.”

My mother added, “And the angels had rainbows in their wings. Rainbows! I tell you, I about got cold chills when I read about those angels in Revelation who have rainbows in their wings. I mean…no four-year-old child coulda known that.”

Right here’s where my husband started laughing.

I turned and swatted him, my face burning.

“You made all that up, right?” he asked.

I shrugged, cut my eyes over to my parents. “It coulda happened.”

“Sure it could’ve.”

“Randy,” I snapped, “there were rainbows in the angels’ wings…remember? Just like in Revelation. What kinda four-year-old kid comes up with something like that?”

My husband’s hazel eyes sparkled. He reached over and pinched my knee. “A four-year-old like you,” he said.

And — sorry, Mom and Dad — twenty years later, I have to say it: he’s exactly right.

(Image can be found here.)