I had a Dream

This may be one of the most personal, open, and honest posts I have ever written and it was hard to write. But I was telling this story to someone last week and it really encouraged them so I thought I would share it here. I should be writing a medical update since I was at Cleveland Clinic on Friday but that will have to wait. 🙂

A while back I was on this medication that caused me to have nightmares. Now before this, I had really not had very many dreams. At all. I rarely ever dreamed, good or bad. But something about this medicine suddenly cause an influx in dreams. They were only bad dreams and they were very, very vivid. The kind that you wake up from in a panic or wake up crying. Sometimes they were so vivid I would wake up and had already jumped halfway out of bed before I realized what was happening. Every night I would climb into bed and pray that I would have no dreams that night.

One night, I had a dream. I dreamed that I was pregnant and gave birth to this tiny little baby. It was so small that I could hold it in my hands only. This is really hard for me to write and some of you are going to think I am crazy, but did you know you can love something in a dream? I don’t know how that’s possible, but I loved that tiny little human in my dream. Shortly after it was born, some soldiers broke into the hospital where I was which was a big room with a bunch of people in it. I was going to spare the details but I think I’m going to tell the complete story. One of the soldiers grabbed the baby from my hands and killed it by stomping on it with his boot. And I woke up crying.

These are the kinds of dreams I mean. I don’t read into dreams or try to interpret them; I just take them as dreams. For days after I would think of that dream and still cry because of the love I felt for that baby. How can you love something in a dream? That’s ridiculous, right? The months went by and the pain of that dream slowly faded until I didn’t think about it anymore. I came off of that medicine, the dreams stopped, and I praised the Lord!

Fast forward to two weeks ago. Suddenly, that dream came to my mind in the middle of the day. And not once, but 4 times that day. And the next day. And the next. And I found myself thinking about it a lot. I prayed and asked God why it was coming to my mind and that he would fill my thoughts with things that were pure and lovely. I would recite Phil. 4:8 every time it came into my head.

One day I was talking with Natalie, just exasperated that I couldn’t figure out why that dream kept coming to mind. She asked if I had been thinking about babies or pregnancy or anything like that. And it suddenly hit me. Like a light bulb moment. I had had one thought a week or so earlier that if I started to date someone, at sometime I was going to have to tell him that I can’t be pregnant.

You see, you can’t be pregnant while on seizure medicine because it almost always causes severe birth defects in the baby. It is still possible to have epilepsy and have babies, you just have to come off your medication and go through a process with your doctor. And while I wasn’t anticipating being pregnant anytime soon, I realized that I hadn’t fully given that desire over to the Lord yet.

It’s odd how God uses stuff in our lives sometimes. How a dream from months before was used to show me an area that I needed to pray about and be at peace with. And the dream has vanished. I haven’t thought about it once since that day. But I am thankful that God used it to bring me to the place where I am now. I don’t plan to be pregnant anytime soon but I am confident in God’s will in that area and will cross that bridge when it arrives and I wasn’t able to say that honestly before.