So, I had a really odd dream the other night. It was actually a dream within a dream. Which, I can honestly say, I have never had before. What I mean is, I had a dream that I was dreaming about another dream that I woke up from while I was dreaming that I was dreaming. It went like this.
There I was, watching my own funeral. I was sitting in the back of the room. At first I was thinking, “This is not my funeral.” And not because I was in some strange state of denial that I was dead, but, because it was nothing like what I had ever said I wanted my funeral to be. When I finally came to understand that the service that was taking place was for me, I became very agitated.
As it began to unfold, people came by to pay their last respects, and the preacher, who I could not make out who it was, by face or voice, asked people to be seated so they could start. I found myself at the front of the room sitting on top of the coffin. It was a very elaborate, outlandishly fancy, polished metal box covered and surrounded in flowers. The smell of flowers permeated the entire chapel with no single recognizable sent of any one flower, but that indistinguishable wafting smell that comes out from the florist shop when you first open the door.
And all the while a really bad funeral home sound system played unrecognizable music that I think was old hymns, over crackly speakers. I sat there watching people walk by one by one, and, morbid as it may seem, I found myself saying, “Hi (fill in name here), glad you could make it. Good to see you.”
I kept hoping, even though I knew it would do no good, to change the mood of what was no where near what I ever said I wanted for my funeral. I kept staring them in their faces, yet they obviously could not see me. I told them each one to stop crying. Really, we should be laughing, and singing. I turned on multiple occasions to say to the preacher that was speaking to please stop this somber soliloquy that he was reading that had nothing to with me; not even a mere resemblance of who I was or what I had done with my life.
At this point, all I was hearing was blah, blah, blah. I had had all I could take when I stood up on the coffin yelled at the top of my lungs, “STOP.” And as I jumped to the floor, I sat straight up awake in my bed, with an unbelievable urgency to make sure that my funeral was planned and laid out just how I had always imagined it to be. So I started to scribble out notes.
Number one – a simple pine box, just like the ones from an old western movie, or the one in which Jack Sparrow paddled away to his freedom in “Dead Man’s Chest.” Number two – Music: good music and good singing, worship. Number three – Flowers: do I really want people to spend money on flowers?
And that is when reality and the dream world crashed together. As I stopped to ponder the thought of flowers or no flowers, or what mission I would rather people make donations to, I began to notice that my hands looked funny and my eyes were playing tricks on me. It was like I was looking into and through my hands and the paper I was writing on and into another room that looked more familiar than the place or room and bed that I was sitting on.
Then just as I was trying to continue to write out my funeral plans, and ignore the strange tricks my eyes were playing, focusing in one more time with just a bit more strain than the first, I woke up. I mean I really woke up, in my own bed, in my own room, in my own house. Needless to say it took me a few minutes to go back to sleep but I did and when I did, I slept well.
