How I longed for my Lord to visit me in my dreams. Prayer time; peace from the details and urgency of the day, and I wanted that same peace in my dreams. But, often, that would not be the case. Chaos frequently reigned in my dreams, nonsensical successions of people and things interacting in bewildering and unending ways with no semblance of meaning. Most mornings, I woke up in a funk. No energy, exhausted as if I had been awake all night or just run a ten-kilometer race. So I began to pray before bed for Jesus to come into my dreams and bring His Peace. You probably are thinking to yourselves right now, “Well, duh! You should have been praying for a peaceful rest every night. Isn’t that one of the first things you learn as a believer?” Well, yes, but success breeds complacency like anything else that works in life, and I stopped doing what worked. However, like anything else in my prayer life, Jesus answered with His usual wisdom, perspective, and perfect timing.

Winter solstice had just passed; the weather was intransigent: bitter cold in the morning and clear and bright during the day with the warmth that exists only behind a south-facing window. The leaves were all dropped, raked, and carted off to the composting facility, leaving a clean and dormant lawn. Christmas vacation spent on long walks with The King of Kings. Time passes too quickly on vacation, and the urgency to pray was thick in the room when bedtime came that night. Truthfully, it was a short but sincerely intense prayer for peace and a quick off-hand prayer for understanding and discernment to come during the dreams. I told the Lord I was tired of not understanding the dreams.

Then, under the covers.

The images tumbled past like tumbleweed on Interstate 5 on a trip to Los Angeles: buildings blending into passenger jets, faces of friends — long past and living in Texas — talking about disparate and out-of-character things. There was an overlay of peace and disinterest through all of it. But there remained a sense of awareness underneath it all. Then there was a hole…
I realized the dream was swirling like the water in a toilet bowl towards the hole, and I was being sucked towards the hole along with all these images. The airliner and the people, buildings I remembered from my childhood, my Jack Russel, Samson — no longer with us — and the subjects of my friend’s discussion that didn’t make sense (and that I now don’t remember) all swirling clockwise towards the hole. There went the Ferruginous Hawk living in the fields south of my subdivision. The land became liquid and began to run towards the hole like a canvas with too much paint splashed on it. The dream’s contents began crashing together as it tumbled into the hole…not making a sound. I started to accelerate towards the darkness of the hole, and yet the same disinterest prevailed.

The hole captured me like everything else in the dream. I tumbled headfirst into the hole and fell towards the field I walked through during my prayer walks. Only I was falling from a great height. The land looked like a quilt. Patches of green and winter brown, bordered by subdivisions, intersected with roads carrying vehicles north, south, east, and west. I still felt nothing but disinterest. A single thought came through the numbness, “I wonder if I can fly?” I could move my arms like a bird, but I continued to fall. The ground was rushing up to meet me, and the disinterest began to change to a bit of concern. “I’m in a dream. I can’t be hurt by falling, can I? STOP!” I yelled in my dream, stopped, and hovered maybe five feet from the ground. 

My prayer walking route…one of them anyway…stretched towards the north and behind me to the south. I floated five feet over the ground and slowly turned to scan the field for anything that could explain why I was there. Turning to the south, I saw a person almost right on top of me. Walking directly towards me and oblivious to my presence, walked a man talking to himself. Or, perhaps he was praying? But he walked right under me; his head passed right through my feet. As he passed, I heard the sound; rather, I noticed it. It sounded like a dial tone from an old dial phone or the sound the television used to make when the station would go off the air. The sound maintained a continual pitch. Only the volume changed as the man walked his constant pace to the north. Ten feet from me, I felt the tug; the man was attached to me somehow, and as he walked, I felt each footstep. 

I was a human balloon attached to him by some invisible strand. 

We walked along the diversion canal towards the subdivision until we reached his home on one of the streets that border the field. When we walked into his home, I heard new pitches…no…frequencies in the house, and a young boy came running up the man, and their two frequencies intertwined to combine into a harmonious new frequency. I was floating on the ceiling, and the sounds were loud and clear. Then, a third frequency began to join the father and his son’s frequencies. This was a higher-pitched frequency, and a woman walked into the room and gave her Husband a hug and a kiss. As the three frequencies mingled, the harmony began to move my heart. There was a primal beauty here. “What am I seeing? What is this sound? It is so beautiful!”

In the middle of my reverie, another sound intruded subtly. There was a low undercurrent of the Family’s combined frequencies. It wasn’t deafening, but it was annoying. Like an old record with a scratch, a click would interrupt the song when the needle came around on the disc. The word dissonance popped into my imagination. The sound was somehow related to the Family’s frequencies, but off by a mile. The dissonant frequency was as if someone turned the Family’s frequencies inside-out. Reversed it. Ruined it.

Then, a shadow entered the room, slid up to the Husband, and attached itself to him. Arms emerged from the floor, wrapping its arms around him like a Boa Constrictor preparing to squeeze life out of its prey. The shadow began to squeeze, and the Husband’s frequency began to come apart and sound more like the dissonant frequency.

Compassion rose up in my heart, pushing me to do something. I wanted to jump down there and pull the arms off the Husband, but I couldn’t move. I felt a pair of hands on my arms, holding me where I was.

 “Please don’t struggle. And remain quiet. I will explain in a moment.” I looked at the hands holding me; they were at least three times larger than mine. When I looked down, there was a pair of alligator-skin cowboy boots.

 In the blink of an eye, I was sitting on my bed looking at the largest person I had ever seen.

God will always give you answers.

 “What just happened? Was that a dream? Who are you?” My questions tumbled out faster than I could exercise good judgment.

 The person squatted down so he was eye to eye with me. “Well, yes, it started out as a dream. But, somehow, you fell into a rogue space-time burp, which is like a space between spaces. It was allowing you to see into the spirit. I wanted to stop you, but I encountered a bit of a defensive barrier. The enemy likes privacy when they are oppressing someone.”

“Oppressing someone? Are you saying that was a demon attached to that man? Couldn’t you stop it instead of taking me out of there?” My understanding of the spiritual battle needed to be improved.

“Yep, that was a demon.” The person, who I had guessed by now was an angel, took a deep breath and said, “That’s the Talbert family. They are one of the good ones. I used to be able to protect them from the demons. But those praying for them have passed onto the Kingdom side of things. No one is praying for them now. We angels call them prayer orphans. I am hoping you will take up the prayer duty for them. And there are many other families like them. As the old prayer warriors die and come home, the next generations are being left without protection.”

“Please Pray. Pass that on. Give us the strength to fight for you.”