Not fully awake nor fully asleep, I made myself come to full consciousness. It was late, the sun spun lights upon the polished hardwood floor of my bedroom. Outside my window, parents kept up with their kids to the elementary school in the next block, with toddlers plodding along next to their strollers, with dogs yapping at their heels. Yet, the makings of a significant dream were being dissembled the more I tried to make sense of it. Left only with the impression of a frothy cathedral, its gothic arches lost in the clouds, I put it aside, took my medication, and prepared for the day.

Later, it occurred to me that upon awakening other mornings, I had glimpsed other medieval cathedrals, but no stories to accompany them. Only that I was alone and hushed by the beauty, that silence spoke eloquently of Presence, that centuries of prayer molded the wooden kneelers placed in front of the marble altar. Questions flooded me. I yearned for an interpreter to open up the historical significance of where I was and why I was there, but none occurred in the dream.

As a younger woman, travel to European medieval cathedrals certainly fed my psyche with their soaring spaciousness and my time, there, spent in prayer. And yesterday’s YouTube study of the German Holbein father and son, religious artists of cathedrals, saddened me; reformers of Martin Luther destroyed their renderings with knives, hatchets—whatever they could lay hands on. Such images were forbidden in religious settings. Such impressions certainly provide dream material, at any time.

So, what do I make of this series of frothy—the specific word given by the Dreamer—to describe these medieval cathedrals? Perhaps the spirituality implied by such historical landmarks is unsubstantial: Here in this moment; then pop, it’s gone? That my greater need is to rely upon God’s plan for my purification than upon my own practices? That I really don’t know what any of this is about?

So, I begin and end with questions …