In this Post, I share one of the most amazing and pivotal dreams of my life. It is one of several major dreams featured in my Trilogy, Lucid Dreams and Spiritual Warfare, three novels based on my real life experiences and dreams, and which also includes the dreams of several other persons who willingly gave me permission to share them. 

The heroine, Mary, skips her high school graduation ceremony to catch a plane for Cairo, Egypt, just as I actually did when I was eighteen years old. I stayed with an American family stationed there with U.S.A.I.D. for which my father also worked in Washington D.C., which is why I grew up in Fairfax, Virginia. What my parents never imagined would happen was that my hosts in Cairo would permit me to fly to Luxor and other sites in Egypt literally all by myself. The adventures I had during this trip of a lifetime were different from Mary's, but I have no doubt that during those unforgettable three weeks my Guardian Angel worked overtime day and night.

I narrated the Audio Book version of my Trilogy, and the audio file included in this Post is Mary (me) sharing her-my dream with Steve, a young archaeologist and lucid dreamer.

The Dream

I become aware of young women all dressed in white who appear to be students in a great building that's a cross between a church, a university and a convent. It may be all of these things, and I wonder if these girls are all planning to dedicate themselves to Christ. I watch them as they move purposefully and peacefully, and distinctly see two of them ascending a tall wooden dais, the kind thrones are placed on. I can feel their immense joy and excitement when they learn that their beloved teacher is due to arrive any moment now. Directly ahead of me, they flock toward a great opening. I get up off a couch and join them as they sit cross legged on the floor, waiting for him. 

Abruptly, I become aware of a man in an elegant dark suit sitting on my right, so close that his left arm is touching my right arm. I look at him, and immediately recognize my maternal grandfather. “Grandpa!” I exclaim, scarcely able to believe how clearly I can see him. His face is old, like I remember it, yet his skin is somehow also firm and timeless looking. He doesn't smile as he says something. At the same time, I realize his sudden appearance happened just when the beloved teacher arrived, so that I missed his entrance. Even now I can't seem to turn my head to look at him because I'm so captivated by my dead grandfather's presence. Then I become aware of Steve sitting down on my left, and turning to him, I ask, “Do you see him? It's my grandpa! Can you see him?” But he replies, “All I see is a darkness.” 

This makes sense to me, and when I look at my grandfather again, our eyes meet as he asks me, “What do you want?” I don't think about it, the answer wells up from within me, “I want Christ!” 

For some reason, my response doesn’t please him, in fact, it seems to make him angry, and he begins lecturing me. Looking over at Steve, I say, “He just keeps talking and talking, and it all started when I told him that I want Christ.” When I turn my head toward my grandfather again, he is no longer sitting beside me. He’s standing a few feet away flanked by two men in dark suits like his, and suddenly he no longer resembles my grandfather at all. . .

Rising, I pull a pair of white gloves out of my long black coat, vaguely surprised to find them there, and the next thing I know, I'm sitting outside at a white table flush to a waist-high white wall. A white city spreads out around me in the clear bright light, but I'm not aware of traffic or pedestrians. I'm focused with the single-mindedness of a child on what I'm drawing on a large sheet of paper—the figures of three persons in long robes, one of which is a midnight blue. . . 

I'm hanging out with a group of people my age, talking to a young man with red hair. I'm telling him the last thing he should do is walk out on the streets holding a bottle of vodka as I urge him to cover it up. When he offers me the bottle, I take a long swallow, but tasting nothing, I hand it back to him. I know they're planning to stay out all night, and from where I remain standing on some sort of threshold, I see where they end up—in a white van parked in darkness where they spend all their time drinking and having sex. It's so pathetic, so undesirable, so sad, I wish I could communicate this to them somehow, but they think it's cool and that there's nothing else really worth doing. . .

I'm running outside on a clear day across a large expanse of grass where I glimpse a variety of animals. All seems well, until I glance behind me and spot what looks like a huge wild black boar running only a few yards away preying on the other creatures. I'm sure it will come after me the moment it sees me. I begin running away from it, but I know I can't run fast enough, and when I glance over my shoulder, the boar is chasing me. I have no weapons. I can't fight it, and I can't outrun it. I'm totally helpless! But as I turn to face the boar, which is nearly on top of me, I discover a white lamb lying at my feet, soft and plump. I grab it with both hands, and it remains utterly passive as I thrust it in front of me so that the black boar attacks it instead of me, thrusting its tusks into its belly making all sorts of bestial sounds as the lamb's blood flows from more and more terrible wounds. This lamb is saving me! If it wasn't for this lamb, it would be me the boar was savaging. Losing my fear of the black beast, I'm somehow able to hold the lamb up before me without any effort. After long horribly violent moments, I judge the time is right and begin retreating toward a building behind me, still holding the lamb's shield before me.

Once inside, I run quickly around the place, which has clear walls that are more like plastic than glass. I'm trying to secure the doors, but the structure is hopelessly flimsy, many of the doors and walls are off their hinges, and there's no way to completely close the various entrances. I seem to be in a lab of some kind because I see desks and computers. It feels like a workplace, but it's completely empty and provides no secure protection from the danger outside. I know the black beast is still prowling around, and even though the lamb has saved me, I have to make every effort not to expose myself to the beast again, because it can still kill me.

Dream notes as dramatized in The Spirit of Imhotep: 

After the incredibly vivid dreams I'd had last night, I was finding it almost impossible to focus on anything else. I couldn't forget how that little lamb had protected me. It had saved me. But the strangest thing of all was that I hadn't felt guilty about holding it up in front of me like a shield, and I still didn't. In reality, the lamb would have died almost immediately, but its eyes had remained open the whole time, somehow remaining conscious and miraculously unharmed despite all the murderous abuse the boar subjected it to in its efforts to get to me.

“Mary, it's okay if you'd rather not talk about this today,” Steve said gently. “We have time.”

I thought I detected just a hint of uncertainty in his voice, and suddenly afraid he might mistake my silence for reluctance, I grabbed both his hands. We were sitting on the edge of the couch in Carol's apartment again, and this morning the official red seal on the envelope containing Richard's contract made me think of a bloody paw print. “Steve, I had some amazingly vivid dreams last night. They weren't lucid dreams. I mean, I didn't realize I was dreaming, but it's like you described yesterday, I was fully aware of myself and everything. Like the lucid dreams I've had, these dreams felt like real experiences. There was nothing vague or blurry about them and I remember them as clearly as I do my lucid dreams.”

“I understand.” He waited. 

“It was a series of dreams, but I feel they were all related to each other, somehow.”

“That often happens with significant dreams, they're strung together all in one night like precious stones on a single necklace.”

I smiled at the analogy, but then felt my lips wilt as I remembered the jewelry Richard had given me. The man who had sinisterly impersonated my grandfather last night had ended up looking a lot like Richard. If in real life someone had asked me what I wanted, I would have replied, “I'm not exactly sure yet” but in the dream, I had immediately said with passionate certainty, “I want Christ!” Was it just my so-called subconscious at work again, and what I had really meant in the dream was, “I want Steve” because I know he's a Christian? Or maybe I had replied as I did because I knew it was what my grandfather wanted to hear? But he hadn't really even been my grandfather. . . 

“Mary, if you're not ready to talk about them yet. . .”

“No, I am, and I'm hoping you can help me understand them.” I had intended to give him abridged versions, but as soon as I began describing my dreams, I found myself living them again, and every detail felt important. When I was done, I sighed, “So! Those are some pretty crazy dreams, huh? I live in a big city, so it's not like I have to worry about being gutted by a wild boar anytime soon.”

“Mary, I'm in awe. You mentioned when we were in Luxor that you went to Mass with your grandparents when you were very young, and that it's because of them your parents had you baptized.”

I nodded, and held my breath as I sensed a really deep wave about to break right over my head.

“It means you're protected.”

“Protected from wild boars?” I instantly regretted my glibly sarcastic tone.

He said quietly but firmly, “Do you want to hear what I think, or don't you?”

I lowered my eyes. “Yes! I'm sorry...” 

“The beloved teacher in your dream is Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, protects us from the Evil One and saves us from death, leading us to eternal life.”

The wave broke, invisibly flooding the living room, the apartment, the building, the streets outside, all of Cairo as the question burst from me, “Jesus is called the Lamb of God?! I held that poor little lamb up in front of me like a shield, and I watched, I saw, I felt that evil boar impaling him, goring him over and over again, creating these awful bloody gaping wounds in his body, and yet he lived through it all, his eyes were open the whole time as he just let me hold onto him and protect myself with him, taking all the pain and deadly abuse for me. . . He saved me. . .”

“Mary, you should know that the sacrifice of lambs to atone for sins was an important part of Jewish religious life. When we turned away from God, pain and suffering entered the world, but Jesus—who was fully man and yet also fully God—atoned for our sins and conquered death.”

“So the boar in my dream symbolized sin and death?”

“Yes, the Enemy of God and of life who never stops tempting us away from Christ's guidance with worldly pleasures, goals and distractions. But Mary, the devil isn't just a symbol of evil, and neither are the other fallen angels who serve him and 'who prowl the world seeking the ruin of souls' as the prayer to Saint Michael tells us.” 

I remembered then the two men who had flanked Richard. Both were tall and proud looking in their black suits and, like their boss, radiated a hostile authority. They weren't unattractive, but their expressions had been very ugly, purely evil. “I really dreamed all that?” I was beginning to understand Steve's awe. 

“You did!” 

“Steve, what you're telling me, how you interpret my dreams, it feels. . . it feels possible. . . more than that, it feels true. I can believe it's true, but only because I had these dreams and lived these symbolic images as actual experiences. If I hadn't, I. . .” 

“You wouldn't have believed me? I know. This is what I was talking about when I told you it was the Holy Spirit who made me a disciple of Christ. I didn't believe any of this either, Mary. But through the writings of the early Church Fathers, the Catholic Church recognizes dreams and visions as one of God's special charisms.” 

“What's a charism?”

“In Christian theology, a charism is any good gift that flows from God’s love to humans. And some dreams, like the ones you're having now, and like many of the dreams I've had, are the same as visions, which can happen when you're awake or asleep. Dream visions were central to early Christianity. The early church viewed them as one of the most important ways God revealed His will to us. Through our dreams, something other than physical reality can enter our consciousness directly.”

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