Richard woke up, scared, panting as though he had just finished a hundred-metre dash. His shirt was soaked wet. The part of the bed where he lay was also soaked. For a few moments, he wasn’t sure where he was. The dream, if he could call it that, was both scary and confusing at the same time. Many would call it a nightmare, but he knew this was more than just a bad dream. It was a message, a vision of some sort but he wasn’t quite sure how he should deal with it.

 

He looked around and saw he was in his room at school, thankfully. He could still make out the furniture in the room, even in the darkness. It was easy because the room was sparsely furnished. The reading table and chair, the wardrobe and the bed, were all the furniture he needed. Unlike the other students in his dorm who had furniture and electronic gadgets that would be considered respectable in many middle and upper income circles, Richard’s room paled in comparison, although many of them knew he came from a home that could afford to provide him with all the gadgets he needed. Why he picked this Spartan existence baffled a lot of them.

 

But Richard was pleased with his lifestyle. It was a way of life he had chosen out of knowledge and out of deep need. Not the type of need that drives people these days, accursed with a fast food mentality, moving from one crusade ground to another, looking for the next spiritual celebrity and hoping for a microwaved breakthrough, but discontinuing their pursuit when the breakthrough seemed deferred. His was a need borne out of the poverty of the soul.

 

Before he became born again, his life had been about the next shag. He was such an impassioned ‘player’. All he thought about was where the next shag was going to come from. And he shagged everything. Fat, thin, short, tall … any available shag would do.

 

But after a while he began to feel as though his life’s essence was being drained away as he shagged. Ecstasy soon gave way to guilt and bliss was replaced with emptiness. It was at that point he concluded he needed something deeper.  He realized sex couldn’t feel the void he felt in his heart. It was at that point in his life that he met God and started his own spiritual odyssey.

 

And now, alone in his room, confused and afraid, he wondered what link, if any, his antecedents had with the dream he had just had. He was still trying to make sense of the dream when it occurred to him that he needed to quickly write it down so as not to lose any of the vital details but he doubted if he could ever forget any part of that dream- it seemed so real!

 

 

 

 

 

 

The only interpretation that made sense to him was that the dream represented the struggles he would face in his spiritual passage. The tunnel represented life; the snake- like appendages were the battles the devil would throw at him to keep him down enough for the other worries of the world, represented by the tide of death, to wash him far away from his chosen path. But it was the sensual sensation that bothered him. He had a feeling it meant that he was going to have struggles with the opposite sex and fail. But how could this be?

 

His last shag had been 3 years ago, just before he surrendered his life to Jesus. And since then he had stayed on the strait and narrow path. He had not even thought about having sex all this while. This dream would have made more sense if he was still having struggles with sex but he wasn’t. He remembered some sister in his fellowship saying she respected the fact that he could be amongst so many ladies in his department (Choreography) in the fellowship and not feel tempted. To him it was not a big deal.

 

He then concluded that the dream must be a clever machination of the devil designed to distract him and sow some fear and doubts in his mind. The Lord had kept him thus far and he was confident that He who had begun a good work in him would perfect it.

 

He knelt down beside his bed and said a short prayer before going back to bed, unbeknownst to him that the dream would come to haunt him again, two years later.

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