Lightning of the Lord

In the following dream I used my lucid awareness to move beyond my regular dream images to experience something which, though still symbolic, felt more real to me. It felt as though I really had connected to Spirit.

In waking I often use Christ as a focus of my meditation practice. With this dream it is clear to me that the Christ Spirit may manifest to us in ways we may not expect.

The dream:

In the midst of a regular dream I realize I’m dreaming and the thought comes, “I must cut through all this illusion and seek the Christ.” When I think this, thunder explodes inside my head and my head is vibrating from this explosion. A clear, colour image of Christ appears before me. The image is like the Christ paintings in the Catholic Church I went to as a child. I am glad to see such a clear image.

I repeat my thought, speaking out loud now, “I seek the Christ.” There appears in front of me a hand, palm facing me. It is not just a picture; it’s a real hand, but not connected to anyone I can see. From the center of this hand a bright flash of light, very much like lightning, flashes out and strikes me. Again there is thunder inside my head so that it is almost painful, especially around my temples. The intensity of this feeling wakes me up.

I tell my wife, Anna, the experience and begin writing it in my notebook. Then I really wake up and have to write it again because I only dreamed I wrote it down the first time. In the notes I wrote in my dream book at the time I mentioned strong, electric, tingling feelings in my temples that I continued to experience after waking.

This short but very intense lucid dream affected my waking consciousness deeply for weeks afterward. No matter what I was engaged in, whether work or play, I kept being distracted by the powerful feelings I had experienced in this dream and by an almost constant, electric, tingling feeling in my temples. These feelings kept causing my waking consciousness to remember my spiritual focus on Christ. During that time I drew quite a few pictures of hands with lightning bolts shooting out of them. I even designed a stained glass window with this theme.

Although I had this dream a long time ago, back in 1976 actually, it is still part of my waking consciousness. Whenever we have a thunderstorm and I hear thunder, I think, “Oh, that’s the sound of Spirit” and I will often feel the electric tingling in my temples or on top of my head again. Thunder continues to remind me of Spirit.