Editorial: LIFE AS TRUE DREAM

In their various ways, the authors in this issue of DreamSeeker Magazine seem to me to be pondering how life may—or may not—be experienced as a true dream. Having grown up in multiple countries as a missionary kid, I remember experiencing the crossing of borders as creating such a sense: the prosaic reality of one country would come to seem dreamlike as the reality of another country shook up what had seemed the “but this is the way things are” settledness of the prior country.

Brenda Hartman-Souder’s report on the experience and lessons of driving in Nigeria does something like that to me and perhaps us. Plunging us into a horn-honking road trip on what is actually an ordinary road for its setting while insightfully jarring us with the signs she sees along the way, she destabilizes our sense of what seems real and what seems dream depending on one’s country and angle of vision. 

In her story on “Dreams,” Noel King makes explicit this matter of dreams “that flow forth regardless of one’s state of waking or of sleep.” Next Lee Snyder helps us see that her mother’s discussion of the down-to-earth vagaries of weather is actually a kind of dialect for discussing something much more: “permission to address the soul while acknowledging chaos and predictability, mystery and surprise, expectations of the moment—and hopes for tomorrow.”

Deborah Good helps us ponder the dangers of chronos time and invites us into kairos living, which might also be seen as seeking to live in God’s time, God’s dreams, while awake. John Janzen plays a variation on this theme with his three contemporary parables, which seek, as parables do, to make our ordinary understandings seem dreams and what seem dreams become thinkable. In related ways,
Renee Gehman helps us seek larger meanings in small moments. 

In my column on seeking home after the birds have left the nest I’m ruminating, really, on how what once seemed to stretch endlessly to the horizon, life with children, is now a dream, and what once seemed a dream—empty nest—is now real.

David Brattston might be seen as flipping the angle of vision: The New Testament dream is of Christians who don’t slander, but Brattston shows us how hard it is to live this as true dream. Dave Greiser’s review of the “The Informant” exposes us to a main character torn between dreams—one rooted in money, the other soul. Dan Hertzler reviews books focused on how Anabaptist-Mennonite dreams can be actually lived out. Finally, the poets can be viewed as negotiating dreaming expressed through living.

—Michael A. King