(Edited by sister Cheryl Lowe)
A bit of context regarding this dream: I came from a poor and remote village in China. When I was very young, we did not have electricity. Only later on, when my two elder brothers went to university, had we the advantage of electric lights. They had wiring of extremely low quality, and frequently had problems. Almost no one knew how to fix them when repair was needed. After few tragedies happened because of carelessness and ignorance, we became very fearful of such things. Children were strictly warned not to touch them.
The Trick
In the dream, I found myself standing with someone like my uncle (one from my old generation) on a high structure, a platform of some kind.
The structure is hard to describe. It was like a pyramid made of glass and wood frame. The frame became wider at the bottom and smaller upward. We were able to stand on the very top, hardly having any room to move about. It seemed that my uncle had an experience before. He knew that he could do something to connect together the two thick lines of wires, which were hanging down in the very middle on the two opposite sides of the glass structure. If he gets it right, the wires would catch high volt electricity and make the whole structure explode with light.
In the dream, I never learned why this had to be done. It was more like a magic show to him to awe others.
The Fall
On this occasion, he did it in order to help my family. So father sent me to help out and to learn the trade. With a sense of pride and unwarranted confidence, he began to carelessly pull the heavy wires. To him, the danger of our postion and the fragility of the structure were nothing to be concerned about. I was a bit stressed out, yet I knew I’d better not to say anything. Without a word of exchange, I silently watched him doing his routine yet magical trick. To our surpirse, as he yanked hard on the wires, trying to make the connection, the pegs holding the line on one side somehow got loosed. The heavy weight pulled the top end out of its fixture and then the whole line fell out of balance. And this caused the whole structure to tumble. Then quickly it collapsed.
Surprisingly, nobody got hurt. My uncle, after recoverd from the shock, felt quite embrassed. He offered me a quick peek. Then silently he walked way.
The Mess
With no time to lose, I hastened to the site, trying to rescue things from the ruins. As I began to pull things aside, most of them smashed or caught on fire now, I found that the site had changed into something else. It was as if it had morphed into the “bed blocks” of our old shabby house.
We were so poor, so we never had real bed as I was growing up. Like most northern Chinese people, we built a flat platform empty inside, serving as a cooking pit, while using the top as our resting and sleeping place. We used straws, leaves, or tree branches for fire, especially during winter times in order to keep us warm. As you can imagine, summer times, it always got unbearably hot and smoky, had we have to use fire for cooking.
Now before me were three boxes. I had to choose which one to rescue first because things were quickly caught in fire. I do not remember what was in the other two boxes. But the middle one contained study materials for for certain test, good grade of which was prerequisite for better education. And higher education was the only way for our young people to get out of the hard life of a peasant. So I decied to savage it first.
With a hard pull, however, the books fell out. As I hurried to pick them up, something strange happened. It turned out they were not books anymore, but all kinds of noodles, scattered on the ground. I began to scratch around, trying put them back into the box. Father came to my help. I felt a bit shamed and clumsy, aware that it was my mess.
The Repair
Again the scene changed. Now it seemed that the ruins had been cleaned up, so the foundations of the house/structure was revealed. I could see it was full of wires, which now were terribly damaged.
Standing beside the foundations, I watched my second elder brother, the only one in our family knowledgable of such things, was working closely with my father to fix the wires. The lines had to be redone, so they were busy with wiring, reconnecting, and bundling. I watched and helped with few other things, but I was not supposed to touch the wires.
The Name
As we all working together, I overheard father talking with my brother of a very interesting thing. It seemed father had a daughter, a virgin. Somehow she had been hidden away and secretly cared for. Now it was time for her to come out of her hiddenness, time for her to get married.
I do not know exactly who was advising to him, I guess it was my second brother, speaking in Chinese: “别把她嫁给那个姓狼[Lang]的，要把她嫁给那个姓羊[Yang]的。”
In English: “Do not marry her to the one with the family name Wolf, but to the one whose family name is Sheep.”
I was quite confused by what I heard. In China, no one uses Wolf as a family name. Who were they talking about? And in real life, I knew no one who is named after Sheep.
With that, I woke up, left only with an impression that the Lord had spoken to me something very meaningful. Still swirling around in my ear and head was the sounds of “wolf” and “sheep” (spoken in Chinese).
I knew I had to recover the dream. Thanks to the Lord, I did, at least with this portion.
