Funmurphys: the Blog

What a mixmaster our dreams are for our memories

It's a strange thing about sleep and dreams, I can go to bed worrying about a problem and either wake up around 2 or 3 and be unable to get back to sleep or wake up at 6 or 7 and have this plan fully formed in my head as to what to do. And sometimes I pull together bits and pieces of seemingly unrelated events and go on a tangent. Or they may be actually unrelated events but my well developed apophenia finds a connection anway.

I woke up this morning with the memory from one of my seventh grade Religion classes: Fr. Miles reading Genesis 46:4 and explaining it to us.

"I shall go down to Egypt with you and I myself shall bring you back again, and Joseph's hand will close your eyes."

which was juxtaposed with a remark a good friend of mine from college made the last time he was in town

"I was there for my father's last breath."

I couldn't remember my dream directly, but somehow it had combined those two memories.

As Fr. Miles explained, God is speaking to Jacob in Genesis 46:4, promising him that he will be re-united with his estranged son Joseph, who will be with him when he dies. That Joseph will close his eyes means that he will be with him when he draws his last breath.

So I e-mailed my friend and told him of my dream, and that I thought it meant that he had been a comfort to his father. I am not in the habit of dreaming about Bible verses, much less e-mailing people about them, but it seemed like the right thing to do.

When I first heard the verse and the explanation I was twelve. Four years later my grandfather was felled by a series of strokes over a period of about nine months, he never recovered enough from the first one to live at home, and the succeeding ones washed away his personality until there was nothing left. But after the first stroke I remember going to visit him in the hospital and hearing this terrible loneliness in his voice as he recounted awakening in the middle of the night in the intensive care ward and crying out for his children (and he named them one by one as he recalled it, moving on to his grandchildren). And I got a better idea of the comfort promised in "Joseph's hand will close your eyes," that Jacob would not die alone, and understood the comfort that my friend had offered his father sitting next to his deathbed for his last week.