Dream On!

by Chris Koellhoffer, IHM   July 6, 2025

One of the briefest conversations I entered recently began with the invitation, “Tell me about your dreams.” I have friends who can recount in vivid detail and in technicolor every aspect of how their consciousness came alive during the night and offered them fantasies or sometimes strange and seemingly unrelated stories. Sometimes these dreams are easily traceable back to an event that happened during the day or to a long-standing hope, worry, or fear. Sometimes they seem to have no grounding in reality but leave a person wanting to get to the root of significance and meaning.

I confess to feeling a bit jealous of these slumber experiences because when I’m asked what fills my sleep, I have nothing to talk about. I have almost no recollection of anything beyond getting into bed and then waking up. I do, however, have an answer to that invitation to share my dreams. You see, I believe I dream while I’m fully awake.

If I’m at home during the day, I’m usually engaged in creative and imaginative work in writing or planning presentations or I’m fully engaged in attentive presence to people I accompany in spiritual direction. All of this brings me face to face with both the joy and the pain of our world, so I’m understandably spent when I go to sleep. I’ve come to understand that for me, sleep is a time of restoration. The work of the day is pretty much given over to accompaniment of some kind, standing in for the Holy One who is healing the wounded, consoling the bereft, rejoicing with the hopeful. So sleep offers my imagination and my heart a pause. Sleep feels like a time in which my mind demands a surrender and a letting go of the deep listening and inner soul work I’ve been about during daylight hours.

Perhaps I’m thinking about dreams because I recently returned from serving as a guest director for a directed retreat. This is a privileged and deeply humbling experience for me. In that role, I’m a listener. I’m a witness to how the Holy One is at work in people’s lives. During the retreat, I’m in a constant state of awe that people who began the retreat as strangers have entrusted me with their dreams and their deepest longings.

Sometimes those dreams might be about something that came to them as they slept during the night. Mostly, though, those dreams are waking dreams, focused on a vision of what the world they want to live in looks like. Or on what the Holy One might be inviting them to do or to be to move that dream closer to fullness, more in alignment with God’s dream for our world: abundant life for all, no exceptions.

And what of your own dreams? Whatever those dreams might be, do they get you out of bed in the morning with a sense of purpose and meaning? Do they invite you during the day to wonder, puzzle over, and hold them in your heart? All I know is that our world so desperately needs dreamers, so please, dream on!
Perhaps you may find resonance with this prayer reflection attributed to Joseph Whelan, SJ:

Nothing is more practical
than finding God,
than falling in Love
in a quite absolute, final way.
What you are in love with,
what seizes your imagination,
will affect everything.
It will decide
what will get you out of bed in the morning,
what you do with your evenings,
how you spend your weekends,
what you read, whom you know,
what breaks your heart,
and what amazes you with joy and gratitude.
Fall in Love, stay in love,
and it will decide everything.

Finding God in All Things: A Marquette Prayer Book

Takeaway
Sit in stillness with the Holy One.
Share with the divine a sleeping or waking dream that reveals what you are in love with, what seizes your imagination.
Ask for guidance as to how to bring that vision closer to completion for the life of the world.
Pause, listen, give thanks.

Featured Images: Nguyễn Hiệpnguy, Unsplash, and Afsal Shaji, Unsplash

NOTE:
July 10-13
Please remember in your prayer the three branches of my IHM congregation (Scranton, PA; Monroe, MI, and Philadelphia, PA) and the Oblate Sisters of Providence, who are a significant part of our shared story, as we gather virtually to celebrate the 180^th anniversary of our founding by Mother Theresa Maxis Duchemin and Father Louis Florent Gillet in 1845.

July 17-20
Please also hold in your prayer all who will be part of a directed retreat at the Sisters of St. Joseph Spirituality Center in Ocean Grove, NJ. I’ll be one of the guest directors for this retreat. Thank you!

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