The Dream

Will Estuary and the TLC Survive the Death of YouTube?

This Post is about a Real Dream

Everybody seems interested in real dreams, the kind we all have at night. It’s a problem that most of the time when people use the word they mean “aspirations” even though few of our dreams are actually aspirational.

Yesterday at our every-week-Estuary meeting at Living Stones we had 3 visitors and not enough pitchers so I had to pitch. I pitched dreams and despite some other excellent pitches my pitch won.

The Conservative Re-Enchantment Fad

It’s popular now for Western religious and political conservatives to get excited about “re-enchantment”. The idea is that there is a renewed appetite for “the supernatural” or “the divine” in contrast to the demands for a dead-mechanical world. Rod Dreher ‘s last book was on this.

I’m not skeptical of the idea that there is interest. I’m skeptical of the idea that this is new. What has changed is the level of openness towards it in the public-status-marketplace. As the competing varieties of secularisms recede groups are more openly pursuing all sorts of proxies for “the woo”. “Spirituality” has been ascendant for a while but the same common charlatanism that stalks “the woo” will drive people to more organization, structure and authority even if the coolness factor of “organized religion” gains ground only slowly.

Despite being cautious about hucksters and cons people always have an appetite for that which thrills or promises to release them from the bondages of the age of decay. We all want our aspirations fulfilled. (I almost wrote “dreams”).

The London Dream

I’m burying the lede.

My friend and Estuary Co-Creator John Van Donk were in Europe to speak at a Festival in Germany and help start new Estuary groups. We had been working the Estuary Protocol every day with new cold groups but I had been invited to preach at the Streatham Central Church in London.

The church had a ministry helping immigrants and refugees with the legal practicalities of immigration and there were people there from Africa, Eastern Europe and Latin America.

After the service two couples from Latin America approached me. They didn’t speak much English but because of my years in the Dominican Republics I could understand their Spanish. One young woman was very excited to tell me her dream.

On April 15, 2022 she had a dream that made such an impression on her she had to call her mother to tell her the dream. In the dream there was a large, very white, very loud man using an electrical saw to make wooden bowls filled with light. For some reasons (dreams are like that) the electrical saw seemed integral to the process of making these light bearing bowls but then the power went out and the fear was the saw would no longer function and the bowls would no longer be reproduced and distributed. This felt crisis in a dream-like way seemed urgent, urgent enough to provoke her to remember the dream and share it with her mother over the phone. In the dream the man told her not to worry that somehow the bowls would still be made and the mission of multiplying the wooden-light-bowls would still go forward. I don’t remember if that was because the saw would keep working or the bowls could be made without the saw.

The kicker of the episode was that when she came to the church that morning and saw me she told her family with her “that is the man in my dream!”

The Lucy Lesson

As our Estuary session yesterday unfolded, I was asked about my pitch, so I told the story of the London dream. I was also asked how I approach such things. I replied that I usually try withholding judgment on them too quickly and just let them live out there as data. I think I learned this posture from my father who I think used it often in his years of ministry. I don’t need to make any large pronouncement about the strange things people tell me about their dreams, their visitations with dead relatives, their words from the Lord or their miracle reports. Just listen and ponder them in your heart. In the vast majority of cases of reports that pastors hear regularly they require no pronouncement judgment, decision or urgency of action. Let the thing just sit out there and breath and in time, maybe a lot of time, it’s quality will be seen.

I think my father got this from CS Lewis’ The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe when the Professor instructs Peter how to deal with little Lucy’s report of a wintery world opening up from the back of the wardrobe. The world is full of such portals as well as many other less real things and so just be open, don’t pass judgment unnecessarily and leave the person with their testimony.

It is good, however, to keep some sort of record close to the telling of the event, if it wasn’t your event, because time and memory have a tendency to impact the record. So I’m glad John prompted me to retell the story in our debrief of the overall trip.

Reports of Dreams Linger

We are naturally fascinated by dreams. The come at night, unbidden. We are all aware we all participate in a very non-prosaic dimension of glory and terror, of aspirations and tragedy, which vanishes every morning for most of us whether we want it to or not.

The Haitians I worked with in the Dominican Republic made much of their dreams. I remember one day a woman that I was quite familiar with (she was the wealthiest woman in the church in that region carrying on a rather open affair with the most ostensibly capable pastor in our region) came up to me all excited to tell me about the dream she had had about me. In that dream I was surrounded by flowers and fruit. I asked what it meant because for her it was clearly significant. She reported to me “you will have many children” which was sort of a surprise to me at the time because my wife and I up until that point didn’t seem terribly fertile, having had only one little boy. We would eventually have 5 children.

Dreams are a big deal in the Bible of course. Dreams and their interpretations were often messages from God or the gods and great dream interpreters like Joseph and Daniel were highly valued by their pagan emperors. Biblical dreams are very much like our dreams with unreal elements like scrawny heads of grain consuming fat heads of grain. Grain doesn’t eat in our waking world.

Most of our dreams pass or are easily explained as expressions of our wants or our anxieties, but sometimes we just sort of know or wonder if God or the future or something else has been in touch with us.

Have this conversation in a setting where people are comfortable enough to say what they really think and it’s easy to find reports of dreams foretelling the future or making meaning of our lives.

Not too long ago I reported a dream and asked for interpretation and some of you obliged me! I very much enjoyed reading your thoughts.

Time will Tell

I hadn’t thought about the London Dream for a while but then it came up in another conversation within the TLC.

Over the last 8 years I’ve taken on some additional hats. I continue to pastor Living Stones.

I continue to pastor (sort of) the TLC

and I continue to support the Estuary movement.

It’s been almost four years since the dream, and I still ponder “what are the bowls of light?” “What is the electrical saw?” “What is the blackout?”

I thought I’d write this post and see what you might think. Please let me know in the comments.

The End of YouTube Electricity?

My life and ministry took an unforeseen turn when I made a commentary video on Jordan Peterson’s Biblical Series.

That prompted hundreds if not thousands of regular people, mostly men between the ages of 25 and 50 to want to talk to me about their lives and how listening to Jordan B Peterson videos was changing them.

The Jordan Peterson Meetup gave way to Estuary. The “Randos” conversations grew into a flotilla of often tiny channels where people are working processing their lives together.

Most of this has been on the back of YouTube and there is good reason to believe that just like many things on the Internet the dynamics that helped us find each other might be ending.

That is part of the reason I’m spending a bit more time working on my Substack.

At the same time Sunday morning we had 3 new visitors to our Estuary session. One came through Meetup.com. One was the mother of someone who’s come “out of the lurk” recently and another is his nephew. Most guests of our local Estuary are one-time-guests but we’ve had sufficient people for a meeting nearly every week for the last 2 years even at the awkward hour of 9am on a Sunday.

If “the lights go out” will Estuary be OK? I think so.

The woman who came from Meetup this week said that her other conversation group wasn’t going well. I know what that looks like. Bickering over politics and social questions. I think she enjoyed our group even though none of us imagined we’d spend a couple of hours on a Sunday morning talking about dreams.

This is my current interpretation of the London Dream. Part of the reason I just let dreams and other “manifestations” as the Haitians used to call them just sit out there is because they look different as we travel through time. One interpretation may give way to another. I’m OK with that.

What do you think the dream means?

Let us know in the comments below.