I Had A Dream

And boy oh boy, was it a weird one.

Somehow, a bunch of us had decided that the only way to do [some important thing that was extremely fuzzy in my dream] was to travel across the United States on foot through a long set of cavern-like tunnels. We were staying in a hotel somewhere in [another fuzzy part] and I was packing my backpack full of food for the trip, worrying about the batteries in my head lamp. The entrance to the tunnels was in the sub-basement of the hotel... and every time I went near the opening, I could feel the weight of the earth pressing down on me.

The crowd of people in the dream was a wild mix: gamer friends (both local & far away), folks from my church, and even a couple of teams from the current season of the Amazing Race. Shari was there as well... though she wasn't going to be traveling with us.

As the time for our departure grew nearer, I began to think about how long it would take us to walk to New Mexico - evidently Albuquerque was an exit point from the tunnel system. I worried about how much food we were carrying. I wondered if we could pull roller luggage with us or if the ground would be too rough. I continued to feel like the caves would collapse and leave me buried choking for air, dying beneath the deserts of Arizona.

And then I woke up.

This morning, while I was shaving, a thought popped into my head: "Why were we going through the tunnels? Why didn't we just rent a car or take a plane?" (Obviously, this level of clarity is not always available to you in dreams.)

From there, it was only a short mental hop/skip/jump to an actual meaningful insight: how often do we decide to "walk across America underground" because it was the first idea that came to us? Regardless of resources & common sense, we plow ahead... unwilling to examine our decision or explore the alternatives.

• in our personal lives, where we hang onto dating relationships that are clearly bad for us spiritually & emotionally rather than risk being alone
• in our business lives, where we follow a strategic plan that has been eclipsed by changes in the economy
• in our family lives, where we plod along on autopilot, doing marriage & parenting just like our parents did without heeding the consequences to ourselves or our kids
• in our church lives, where we're unwilling to try something different because "we've never done it that way before"

So the question I'm asking myself today is this: "What decision needs to be remade? What in my life smells dangerously of musty caverns?"

Because I know some of you will be interested, possible sources for some of the elements in my dream:

• cave tunnels - too much D&D as a teenager
• head lamp - Amazing Race + last week was "Black-Out Nite" at Awana and a bunch of the kids had head lamps
• hotel - looking forward to a vacation in a week or so
• Amazing Race - well, we watch it each week
• Albuquerque as tunnel exit - Bugs Bunny... "should have taken the left turn at Albuquerque"
• cave collapse - this last week's episode of Hawaii 5-0, which had kids being buried alive in a panel truck