I am awake.  It is four in the morning.  Those of us who are trained in the Wesleyan way know that John Wesley woke up every morning at 4:00 AM to pray.  When I see four in the morning it is not usually because I have set an alarm but because I am not sleeping well as is the case this morning.

This morning when I woke up, I picked up my phone from the bedside table, made a brilliant play in Words with Friends, and then decided to see if anything was stirring in the Facebook/Twitter world.  While I skimmed lots of posts from the night before I was struck by two very different posts.

The first was a series of tweets by a friend who was having nightmares, the most recent being six minutes ago.  Her brief descriptions of her nightmare and her anguish at not being able to find peaceful sleep were heart wrenching.  I said a prayer for my friend. Like her, I have had nights when sleep wouldn’t come and bad dreams intruded on my sanity when sleep did come.  These are dreams of the unwelcome variety.

And then I came across another tweet about dreaming. This was a blog report about #DreamUMC.  (You can read the entire report at http://pastorbecca.wordpress.com/)  #DreamUMC is an invitation to have online conversation about the future of the United Methodist Church. Specifically, it is an invitation to chat live via Twitter at predetermined times about issues  that challenge us but also about issues that give us hope. I didn’t find much about which to be encouraged in this General Conference, but I find hope in conversations like the one that is happening at #DreamUMC.  I look forward to seeing where it may lead us.

I haven’t decided yet whether to give up on sleep tonight, or this morning, depending upon how you look at it, but I am sure that I have not given up on dreaming dreams.  At least of this second variety.