Erin woke up in a cold sweat and heavy breathing. The 18 year old high school senior glared over to her alarm clock that read 4:30 am.
It had happened again. Erin had been 18 for a little over two months as the new school year was getting into the swing of things. Her senior year was set to be one to remember for all of the right reasons. Captain of the volleyball team, 4.0 grade point average, cute boyfriend, and college all on the horizon.
But as she stared at the ceiling of her room in her sweatpants, tank top, and ponytailed long brown hair she had to try to control her breathing as she reached over to her nightstand dresser to pull out her journal.
She counted the pages as her delicate fingers slid through the book. This would be entry number 27 of this type of dream.
This dream was so real and vivid that Erin could feel it rattle on inside her head as she began to put pen to paper. Somehow, she felt better when she wrote the dreams down hoping to find some sort of meaning behind them and try to figure out why they were happening.
The dream looked the same as before, Erin was herself but was different. Her body felt bigger. She wasn't fat in the dreams but it seemed like her breasts were much bigger. An image in the dream gave Erin the idea her ass was much larger as well.
Erin looked at the mirror in the corner of her room. She was a fit and toned volleyball player. No massive breasts or big ass for her. The mere idea of those on her seemed worthy of a laugh.
Erin continued to write in the journal that once again her soft and long brown hair was replaced with platinum blonde.
All of this was easy for Erin to pass off as a bizarre viewpoint in a dream. There was an incredible consistency to the dreams night after night but new details seemed to emerge as the nights went on.
Erin distinctly noticed time and time again there was a wedding ring on her finger. A large wedding ring.
As time began to pass in the dream, Erin realized she was on her honeymoon with her husband. Not only that but Erin knew in the dream she was deeply in love with her husband. A love she had never experienced before.
While writing the notes in her journal, Erin could almost feel her pastel colored bedroom begin to get smaller and more narrow. The words she wrote seemingly flowing onto the page of the book as more details became unlocked in her mind.
Erin was still a virgin and so what she wrote about experiencing seemed oddly foreign and also oddly alluring.
In the dream, Erin realized she was naked and having sex with her husband. The details of what exactly was happening to her weren't clear but her enjoyment was real.
Then in the dream when she looked down over her huge breasts down at the man who was enjoying her she saw...
Erin dropped the pen and gasped.
She had always expected to see her boyfriend Matt as the man who was her husband. The boyfriend that had asked her out three years ago. They had known each other for a decade as they went to the same church. They had sort of grown up together so it was natural for them to date. While nothing physical outside of hand holding and cuddling had happened, Erin and Matt were good Christians, the reality is it felt like soon they would become more physical. Erin cherished, rightly or wrongly, her virginity and had promised herself to wait until marriage to share her attractive, but reserved body, for her husband.
Never, ever did Erin think for a minute that all of the dreams she had been having. All of the wonderment and erotic feeling invading her mind would ultimately be about Alan...Matt's dad.
Erin's head went into her hands as tears began to roll down her cheeks. How in the world could this be so real and so constant?
Erin wrote the name and underlined the name "Alan" in her journal.
Seeing the name on paper was just as shocking as realizing he was the man she was married to in the dream.
Alan Watkins was the 50 year old father of Matt. His first wife Kay had left Alan about five years ago to run off with her boss. Nobody had really heard from her since and the "scandal" of the pastor's wife leaving overnight had rocked the church of around 300 people in the bustling suburb.
Alan had clearly gone through quite the down time but had bounced back a bit in the last year or two. Yet as Erin flipped through her journal of the other dreams she began to piece it together that the man she had dreamed about being with was Alan.
The tall man with a broad chest left over from days long gone as a college football player had dark hair with a few specks of gray beginning to appear.
Erin began to ponder everything she had written over the pages of the diary. As a believer in God, she had always believed God would call her to be with a man who shared her faith. In the years she knew Alan, he certainly was that as the pastor of the small and declining flock of people at First Baptist Church.