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Many of the songs I know on the fiddle and banjo are rooted in the repertoire of a particular family down in West Virginia, the Hammons family. It’s figured they arrived in the US in the late 1700’s and settled in Eastern Kentucky and eventually wound up in Pocahontas County, WV. The reason they left Kentucky had something to do with a dream, but it wasn’t what we today would call following your dreams or even the American Dream. There were a couple of literal dreams that wound up playing out in the awake world. Here’s the story according to Maggie Hammons Parker who died in 1987 (born in 1899) and it pertains to her great-grandfather whose name she never mentioned.
They were one of two families of white settlers living near a place called Whitley in Kentucky among a lot of First Nations people most likely the Shawnee. They got along great. There was an old Shawnee man who came to visit nearly every day. They shared stories and jokes. He often brought a little boy who taught her great uncle who was also just a boy how to hunt with a bow and arrow and how to swim. One day another man came with the old man. The other man said he had had a dream the night before and that for his people, whenever they had a dream, it had to come true. He said the dream was that he owned her great-grandfather’s gun. It was a very nice gun that under any other circumstance he would never have parted with. But he was afraid they would kill the two families of settlers if he didn’t, so he gave up the gun.
Her great-grandfather was greatly disturbed with having to part with the gun but didn’t know what to do about it. A couple of weeks passed and he got up one morning and said that he had had a dream that he owned his gun again and one of the Shawnee’s ponies. So, he went to the Shawnee camp and told the man who had his gun the dream. The man studied him for a bit and then said, “Take it, pale face, but dream no more.”
A few days later, the old man came to see them. He was visibly bothered but wouldn’t say why. He actually wouldn’t talk at all. They finally got him to speak and he said for them not to tell anybody that he told them. He said the Shawnee were coming to kill them and they’d better leave. So, they grabbed what they could and fled all the while listening to a war party “a-hollering” behind them. The two families came to the Ohio River and swam across to West Virginia and kept heading east on up into the mountains until in a generation or so they wound up in Pocahontas County.
Well, there’s some similarity here to our story of Jacob’s dream. Jacob was fleeing for his life from his brother Esau after having stolen his father’s blessing and he had this dream in which God conveyed the promise he had made to Abraham on to Jacob. On the other hand, the Hammons’ had to flee for their lives on the coattails of some dream inspired events that may have involved some trickery as well. Personally, I can’t help but believe that by means of those dreams about a gun God was saving the Hammons’ lives and also a strand in West Virginia traditional music. This event occurred at the time when things were starting to get really bad between the Shawnee (and also the Cherokee) and the European settlers.
So, let’s talk about dreams for a moment. I think I’ve opened that can of worms. In the Bible and in most every pre-Scientific Revolution culture, they believed dreams could be a means of communication from the divine realm to us in our everyday lives. It is easy to understand how this could be because dreams can seem a lot like real life, but we’re asleep and so they must be like a window or a portal into someplace else. Sometimes they can seem so emotionally impactful. We can wake from dreams with feelings that persist for days. Dreams can recur. Sometimes in dreams we run into relatives and friends who have passed on and they seem to have something relative to say, if we could only remember it. Sometimes our dreams feel so good we wish they would go on forever…and then there are night mares. Sometimes we dream of something we wish could happen. Sometimes we dream of walking naked through town. Interesting things, dreams are. Could there be meaning to them? Can they tell us something?
There’s been a resurgence in the last couple of decades of people searching for meaning and direction from their dreams. The idea is that dreams are a window into your subconscious. If you can figure out what’s in your subconscious, you can figure out anything you want to know about yourself. Moreover, they say the subconscious can tell you what you really want in life. It will show you the dreams you should pursue. Thus, there are lots of sites on the internet where you can go to find out what a dream means. Things like, if you see a black dog in your dream, this is what it means. They tell you to write down your dreams as soon as you wake up so you can figure them out and determine what your subconscious is telling you. Do that and you’re on the way to your unique happiness.
Well, who knows. I tend to lean towards what science says. As best as can be determined by scientific method, there likely is not some hidden vault full of hidden treasure inside ourselves that if we can unlock it the secrets of me and my little universe of happiness can be fully manifest and I can be all that I am supposed to be according to deep inner me which is somehow divine. Sorry, my sarcasm bleeds through. There are things about ourselves that we are not aware of that show up in patterns of behaviour that we choose not to deal with. There are emotions that weigh on us and beliefs about ourselves that are attached to traumatic events we chose not to remember because they are too painful to bring up. Any credible psychologist will admit that the subconscious is a closed vault that we are clueless as to how to open it and it’s probably best we didn’t. As far as actual dreams go, as best as anyone can tell, dreams are the brain's way of resolving what went on in a day, deciding what to keep. If we have recurring dreams, there might be something there we need to deal with. Since our memory of what we dream about typically lasts just minutes past waking, maybe we best just get plenty of sleep and let the brain do what it does.
That said, I’ve had dreams come true. We don’t have space and time for them in this sermon. What the dreams were about and what came true about them wasn’t life or world history changing, but was rather on the hilarious side of interesting. Ask me if you know what they are. There can be a hinky something or other about dreams. For some people this can be very true, but for most people not so much.
I will also say that God can and does speak to us through dreams and when God does, we will know it. Jacob here is the case and point. We find Jacob here fleeing for his life because at his mother’s prompting and scheming he stole a blessing from his blind and dying father that was meant for his older twin brother Esau. But his mother, Rebekah knew from a word that she had received from the Lord when she was pregnant with these twins who struggled greatly in her womb, she knew that the promise God made to Abraham to give him that land and make his descendants to be a great nation that would be a blessing to all other nations was to be fulfilled through Jacob. Jacob was fleeing for his life from his brother. He was leaving the land God had promised to give Abraham and heading back to the land that Abraham had come from. So, in this dream God reveals what he is up to with Jacob. Though Jacob seems to be losing everything pertaining to God’s promise to Abraham and Isaac, he is actually going to receive it all. This tragic turn of events was not going to hinder God’s plans for ultimately saving his creation.
In the midst of what was probably Jacob’s most painful and disillusioning moment of his life, God spoke to Jacob in a dream and got him on course. That happens. Don’t think you’re crazy if it happens to you.
Something else that needs to be said with respect to following our dreams. It’s very popular today for people to give the advice that we should follow our dreams, follow our passions. Go and be and do what we really want to be and do and that’s the path to happiness. Jacob here is not following his dreams. He’s watching for God to fulfill the Promise. The next 20 years of his life are not storybook-dream-come true stuff. They are quite difficult, full of hard work and routine abuse from his father-in-law. Yet, through it all he finds that God is blessing him. Eventually, he has to flee with his family from his father-in-law and his posse and go back to the Land of Promise and face Esau who actually welcomes him home. God had looked after Esau too.
Jacob cannot be accused of following his dreams, his passions, in the pursuit of happiness. That follow your dream stuff is a myth of wealthy, Western culture and quite frankly, you pretty much have to be independently wealthy to do it. Jacob pursued what God wanted for his life and God made it happen. God protected and provided for him through a life full of normal work and family struggles just like we all have.
I find Jacob’s reaction to this dream to be profound. “’Surely, the Lord is in this place and I did not know it.’ Overcome with reverence he said, ‘How awesome is this place! This is the house of God, the gate to Heaven.’” His response reminds me of Peter, James, and John and their response to Jesus when Jesus took them up a mountain and was transfigured and the Father spoke and the Spirit was there as a cloud. They responded, “This is GOOD!” In Jacob’s dream God promised that he was and always would be with Jacob and Jacob realized God was with him. He had been in God’s presence and it was good. The presence of God is the fullness of life that we all seek. Seek God’s presence above all else and God will take care of the rest. Amen.
