Caught in a tutu & living your bad dream

One of our four daughters interrupted our fitful sleep last night to ask for prayer. I don’t know what you guys out there who don’t put much stock in prayer do for night terrors, but personally I like prayer. Anyway, she awoke me from this bizarre dream.

You know how you’ve got that dream where you show up for something and you’re unprepared? Maybe it’s a race and you’re just wearing underwear or something. Still worse is the dream where you’re being asked to race in front of a big crowd of people. And the worst thing of all is when you have absolutely no clue how to do the thing you’re being asked to do and you look ridiculous.

I was having one of those dreams when our daughter knocked on the door. I was on stage performing a ballet with a host of ballerinas. As bad as that was, I knew nothing about the ballet we were performing, whereas they were all complete pros! I was just trying to keep my tutu on, balancing on the balls of my feet, and they were all pirouetting on their toes.

It was horrible! A nightmare, really. I had this feeling of a being woefully inadequate in front of an audience that was ready to bust out laughing at any second.

So, it was actually a relief to be awakened. “Thank goodness I got out of that dream alive,” was my first thought.

You know, Woody Allen made an entire career out of placing himself in situations where his ineptitude was forever being discovered by others. What I’ve recently learned is that most of humanity is like that – living in fear of being discovered as a fraud or as incompetent. They are experiencing that feeling I had in my dream on a regular basis. So what they do is play it safe. They hedge their bets so that no one will discover them to be the frauds that they know themselves to be.

Granted, being caught in a tutu and tights in front of a large crowd would be horrific, but living in fear of such moments is ultimately no way to live either. My advice: stop hedging.