Forgotten Monsters and Why We Are:
The irresponsible rationalization of fear and passion

Have you ever heard a song in your dreams?
I’m not talking about America’s top 40, I mean a real song. A song you’ve never heard before but there’s something about it —
Something familiar
You wake up just as the room is turning gray and you can still hear it. You’ve never heard it before in your life, but it’s beautiful. You hum it in your mind, thinking. wow. how. lovely. And as you look at the clock and realize you have another 2 hours to sleep before you gotta get ready to make the day work for you, you roll over, close your eyes, and think:
I’ll remember it … I’ll write it down when I’m awake
But when you get up in two hours, the world will be a whole lot different. Your heart will be a little faster, and your mind will be a little sharper than it was at 4 in the morning.
And as you’re brushing your teeth, wiping the sleep away and swapping glasses for fake eyes, you’ve already forgotten it.
It wasn’t a choice you made. But by the time your feet hit the floor, everything that made you you while you were dreaming gets shoved in a drawer of your heart like a sweater in the summer time. You think you’ll use it later, it will come in handy down the line sure, but it
n e v e r
c o m e s
b a c k
What is it about being human that makes us forget? What is it about walking on two feet that makes us so irresponsible with memory?
There’s a lot of reasons we forget.
It wasn’t a choice we made, but by the time our feet walk into the office and we’ve left behind the ways of childhood, more than half our lives have been sadly, but to no one’s surprise
forgotten.
But when you dream —
It’s the only time when you’re really you isn’t it? It’s the only time when all your worst fears, all the things that stress you out, all the things that go bump in the night can live in your heart and in your soul without any fear of being rationalized away.
It’s the only time when you’re a kid again, that lost scared little kid looking for his mommy in the grocery store, and when he’s finally found her and tugs at her coat, he only finds that who he thought was one he loved is actually
a monster.
So we’ve learned.
We’ve learned that it’s a whole lot easier to forget that time your husband cheated on you, that time you lost it all in a business deal gone wrong, or that time when your father climbed out of a window and out of your life.
… forgetting
… it’s so easy
We think we’ve forgotten the things that we need to, the things that we had to. The things that would have kept us in bed are cast aside in the dark corner of the closet of our lives. And all in the name of self-preservation, we’ve forgotten all the things that have made us us.
But, when you dream —
It’s the only time when you’re really you isn’t it? It’s the only time when all your desires, all your hopes and aspirations can really live.
All the things that make you come alive can thrive in your heart and in your soul without any fear of being rationalized way. It’s the only time when you’re a kid again, that joyful, happy, funny, dancing little kid.
Fighting off dragons
Saving damsels in distress
And singing at the top of his lungs only to find that he just wrote a symphony for the angels to sing.
This is the kind of dreaming that could change it all —
And the devil himself will stop at nothing to make you forget. What you’ve used as a salve for your bruised and aching heart, that practiced skill of forgetting, is slowly choking the child out of you. Oh I know, I know that if we stop forgetting it will hurt. It might even kill us. But someone was already killed on our behalf, and He died to make sure that we never forget
what we are
who we are
why we are.
He’s been singing songs over us for ages, and children have not yet forgotten how to hear it. They sing along, they spin around, they dance and laugh in the arms of the One who made them them.
Have you ever heard a song in your dreams?
Next time you do, and you wake up in the middle of the night, and the black is becoming gray again, I pray that you don’t forget it. Write it down, sing it, hum it, over and over again. Do whatever you have to to bring it alive. It might be something that you’ve forgotten. Something that you’ve been trying to remember all along. It might just be the lover of your soul singing to you and you alone.
Sure you could forget it,
but where’s the fun in that?