First to recap, in this short series of blogs on our TEDxExeter theme:
- Dreams can… slip us into imaginary realities and illuminate our own
- Dreams can… get tangled with wishful thinking
- Dreams can… push us further than our fear
- Dreams can… be our fragile futures
- Dreams can… show us ourselves
- Dreams can… create new and better realities
Dreams can also… completely upend our expectations, especially when they are God’s communications device. (God skyped all sorts in dreams: bit players like Abimelech the Philistine king and Pontius Pilate’s wife, as well as many major characters.)
So Jacob was on the run from his brother Esau when he dreamed of a ladder between earth and heaven, and God promised land and stability to his descendants. But for Joseph his penultimate son, dreams provoked his jealous brothers (because who wouldn’t want a coat of many colours?) to sell him into slavery; they became his Get Out of Jail Free card; and they set events in motion that brought Jacob and the rest of his family as climate refugees to Egypt. And then some time later, another Joseph was warned in a dream to escape to Egypt from the murderous rage of an insecure Roman puppet-king, and so the young Jesus became a political refugee. All unexpected, all upending.
A world full of dreams is not black and white and shades of grey. A world full of dreams is in glorious technicolor.
In one of my early posts, I asked: What is your dream? Are you willing to let it upend your reality?
