Are there common dreams to those called to pastor? Our author reveals her sleeping soul.

Here’s the set-up. I find myself, out of nowhere, standing in the sacristy behind the ornate-raised chancel of a large pillared sanctuary. The congregation is in the pews, and the organ is playing. Clearly it’s time for worship to start. It’s time for the presiding minister (me) to make an entrance. Problem is, I’m wearing my jammies and my bathrobe. My mind races — How quickly could I get home, get dressed, find my sermon notes (assuming they exist), and get back here to lead this worship service?

I realize there’s no time — I’ll just have to tough it out. I step into the chancel in my bathrobe and stand behind the altar. Almost immediately, my attire becomes a secondary issue. As I look down at the missal book, looking for the right spot to start, I discover that, in place of paper pages, the book has slices of deli meat (turkey?) divided by sheets of wax paper. I am slowly flipping through these turkey pages when suddenly a whole turkey, plucked but uncooked, drops — splat! — right in front of me on the altar.

That’s when I wake up. Thank goodness! Just a dream.

But, really, I hate these It’s-Sunday-Morning-and-I’m-Totally-Unprepared dreams. I’ve had them probably about once a year since I started preaching. Though I’d have to say that the one I just described was the meatiest.

Starting without Me
There was a significant hiatus in these “Totally Unprepared” dreams following a real-life incident when the clock in the fellowship hall at one church was slow by about 20 minutes. I was chatting away with someone over coffee between the first and second services when I heard the organ from another part of the building. Then — wait — is that singing? Congregational singing? Fortunately, in that case, I wasn’t presiding, just preaching, so there was time for me to get my alb back on and make my ignominious entrance.

Once I’d been actually late for an actual service, my subconscious mind apparently thought I could use a break. But not forever.

A recent memorable dream had me arriving (fully dressed this time and in the sanctuary of the actual church I was serving) to find a parishioner operating a front-end loader in the chancel. This gentleman (Al is his name) is a collector of International Harvester farm equipment, so it was only natural that, if anyone was operating a front-end loader in the chancel, it would be Al. He was, however, doing some significant damage to the furnishings and even the walls, swinging the bucket back and forth in big sweeping arcs. And he was making it hard for me to take my place in front of the congregation.

I danced and dodged, trying to get close enough to communicate with him. When he saw me, he gave me his usual big smile and said, “Oh, Pastor! You weren’t here, so we thought we’d just get things started on our own.”

This kind of dream is, of course, just a vocation-specific variety of the standard unpreparedness dream—like having to take a final exam when you’d never attended the class. That was just a dream, right? Yeah, I’m pretty sure it was.

No Stress? No Sleep
The flip side is the restlessness of a Saturday night before an easy Sunday. My husband and erstwhile co-pastor, Fred, and I have both noticed that we don’t sleep very soundly on a Saturday night if there wasn’t much stress involved in getting ready for Sunday morning. Say neither one of us was preaching that week or teaching a class, and we had everything set up at church at a reasonable hour, and the computer and sound system were working fine, and the furnace too, and we had gotten to bed at midnight or before. Who can sleep under such conditions? What, the subconscious wants to know, did we miss? What had we neglected to do? Perhaps there is a big sheet cake sitting unclaimed at Sam’s Club with “Welcome to Redeemer” across the top in green icing, and we’ve forgotten not just the cake but that new members are joining. Maybe a connection in the projector is quietly coming loose as we sleep and we won’t be able to project some key image in the morning. Maybe daylight saving time is starting at 2 a.m., and we forgot to change the clock.

The subconscious, having accustomed itself to a certain pattern — stress (Saturday), adrenaline (Sunday morning), and then sleep (Sunday afternoon) — is agitated when the pattern is disrupted. It spends the night roaming through synapses searching for something to worry about. Ah, sweet repose.

Oddly, the one sleep that should invariably be restful really isn’t. For me, at least, the Sunday-afternoon sleep couldn’t really be described as refreshing. It has more the character of irresistible necessity. I will sleep, whether I want to or not. I won’t dream, as a rule. And I’ll wake feeling like I was drugged and now I’m awake but a little unclear as to what happened or where I am, and still feeling the effects as a kind of heavy reluctance to move in my arms and legs.

Contributing to the disorientation is the fact that I often fall asleep on the living room couch with lunch dishes on the coffee table and the TV on. When I fall asleep, the Bears game is in the first half or the Cubs are in early innings. When I wake up, it’s all over. Golf is the only sport you can always rely on to be there for you at the end of a long nap.

To be thorough, I should round this out with the one remaining very obvious connection between worship leading and sleep. But, regrettably, I can’t because I’ve never had the nerve to ask parishioners what they dream about when they sleep through the sermon.

Before taking a new call as an associate to the bishop of the Metro Chicago Synod, Carol Breimeier served as co-pastor with her husband, Fred Nelson, at Redeemer Lutheran Church, Park Ridge, Illinois.