At the risk of overwhelming the folks nice enough to come and visit, I think I should ‘journalize’ a recent dream in a little more detail. The dream only took about 30 seconds, I’m guessing, but each time I went back to sleep I had it again.
The dream: I took my son, at age 9-10, to a sandwich shop. It was up a flight of stairs, with a maitre-d’ at the top. They had us wait on the staircase. After 20 minutes, my son said, “Abba, when do I get to eat?” I had no answer. In 5-10 minutes more, he asked the same thing. Plaintive voice, not impatient. I felt sad.
Next time: same dream, but I recognized the stairs as my grandparents’ house. The maitre-d’ didn’t let us through, but I knew I’d find a table somewhere and went through. Still couldn’t get served.
Next time: Got through and found… my late grandmom’s bedroom. (A person VERY closely linked in my life to the bracha of love. A story in itself.) She was sitting up in bed, sorta ghost-like with a very hazy exoskeleton (shell). She said, she’d been given permission to come down as far as a dream but no further, and only for a short while. Message for me. I MUST start to love unconditionally; ALL-LOVE. No choice. Time to fall into Hashem’s loving hand and just do it.
The dream continued but even more bizarre. She said: You must finish this work in this dor, in this gilgul. It’s been unfinished for too many doros. When Moshiach arrives, very soon, we’ll all attain this level but the s’char of attaining it is only in this age when we have free will in a battle with a Y’H. I realized I was standing on a spiral above the abyss where ALL-LOVE rested; I knew a Yad Hashem existed beneath me to catch me and take me to the new place in peace. But I struggled with the notion that I’d jump off the spiral in the wrong place and Yad Hashem would fail to catch me. The dream ended.
Reviewing the dream, I saw that my emunah in Hashem is unshakable but my bottom-line bitachon to simply jump into that abyss is lacking. So the dream is really a plea that I overcome my fears (i.e., lack of practical-level bitachon) and simply jump from a state of cautionary desire into a state of ALL-LOVE.
I’d defend myself that “I don’t know how” (to take the jump), but the truth is, I’m scared. I talk a good game about being an Eved Hashem and all that, but here I get a message that Moshiach is coming and there’s a great s’char I need to address beforehand and that heaven and earth are waiting and that life for me after that step is great and… I hesitate. A lofty level of unconditional love, free of lust or judgment or doubt or anything, seems like too much for my lifetime.
A few posts back, Guard said this was a step that takes years, and that I should be patient and forgiving with myself. But the side of me that resonates with that might not be my bitachon, but my pachad (fear). If He’s recently brought me to a state where I can put aside some of my deepest sexual fantasies, and where I can survive for an entire niddah cycle (comfortably if not yet ideally) without
, then why would I stand in the way of trying the next level? Jump. And if I fall, He’ll have another place for me. Or as you guys like to say, “fell, shmell.”
It doesn’t mean I’m not scared. I wonder, though, scared of what…. I’ll keep meditating on that one.
