Sleeping on the plane

I boarded the plane, and sank into my seat; it had been a long, arduous week. Shortly after take-off, I drifted off.

I peacefully dreamt of a vast range of gently rolling hills covered in waist-high, golden-green grass spreading out before me as far as I could see, slowly wafting from side-to-side in a soft, gentle breeze. The sky was a deep, expansive blue cut with a few thin white clouds; it was the kind of sky that makes one wish that death was not real.

In my dream, I noticed a white-haired man coming across the field towards me. I was suprised to see it was my grandfather. In the last years of his life he had used a metal walker to get around due to some painful hip replacements. Yet now he walked freely through the grass toward me; he was smiling, exactly as I remembered him, from his pure white hair down to the pale-blue denim overalls and crisp, white shirt he always wore. I felt my eyes tearing up. I had always loved him best.

"Come with me", he said to me. "I want to show you what God looks like." He gently took me by the hand and led me through the grass to a nearby hilltop.

"Look", he said, pointing towards the blue-white sky. As I peered into the sky there was a pale shimmer, reminiscent of the Aurora Borealis. It lasted only a moment; then, it was gone. "That is God's presence", grandfather said, "He is too big for us to perceive".

In my dream, I thought of the day when I was a little boy and I knelt with my grandfather on the driveway watching an anthill and the horde of ants crawling over it.

"Grandpa, do they know we're here?" I asked, looking up at him blinded by the sun shining over his shoulder.

"I don't think so, sport. To them, we are too big to perceive, and if they can, they do not understand what we are."

I awoke with a start. I wondered what had made me dream of Grandpa. I hadn't even thought about him in several years, yet he had come to me so vividly; it seemed too real. It seemed as though he had come to me with a purpose: to make me know that God was real, and that He had sent him to tell me. I still wonder about that dream, and how real it actually was.