Sweet Dreams

 Sometimes I have sweet dreams.  Sometimes I have really weird dreams.  Sometimes I have dreams that are so irritating that I wake up wondering if I really got any rest at all.  

But last night they were sweet dreams.

I was with a friend from the past.  We were together after a long awkward silence- very long in fact- like a life time.

It seemed that we hadn’t planned the get together, but it also wasn’t completely unexpected.  I felt uneasy because of some things I had said before the current meeting.  

We were sitting together- being uncomfortable together- when another friend came in.  I felt this was both good and bad- good because perhaps this new friend would break the tension and make us feel normal- bad because it had been so very long since I had seen or talked to this old friend that I had hoped that we would have some time to ourselves to catch up.

The new friend greeted us and started settling in for a visit.  We were happy to see this addition to our group, so the tension did break and we were becoming more natural.  

Suddenly the new friend had to leave, and he gathered all his things and was gone.

We, my old friend and I, were alone again.

Then he came to me- embraced me and and said, “I wish it could have been different for us.  I wish we could have had a  _____ relationship.”  I don’t actually remember clearly the word he used.  That’s odd because I remember thinking when I woke that the word didn’t match the feeling in the strictest sense. 

The word that I keep landing on now is “corporal.”  Corporal means ‘body,’ but this was not at all a sexual tone- more like a brotherly affection.  As I write this I’m thinking the body of Christ. 

Perhaps it meant, ‘I wish we could have had a relationship as part of the body of Christ . . .’ 

Or maybe it meant that our friendship will continue outside of our corporal existence- in heaven . . .

When I woke it was a sweet feeling- and a little sad.  

I wish things were different too.

I wish my girls had an uncle to tell them about the ‘War of Northern Aggression” (I think we all see those quotation marks- I considered making them bold- but . . . I don’t need to be too aggressive) and the Old Republic of Texas.  I think they would quite like an eccentric uncle- current uncles are generally low on eccentricity- most of them anyway.