Friday, November 24, 2006

Jesus scares me

I just woke up from three nightmares. Three. That was some crazy turkey Luther cooked up, I guess.

In the most recent, the one from which I could not escape without an incandescent lightbulb and a computer screen, I was among a band of survivors in a surreal wilderness. It was one of those dreams in which I wasn't actually me, Becky, but rather shifted POVs from one character to the next. Near the end, I was a teen daughter, and I was on watch, and I couldn't keep my eyes open anymore, I was so sleepy, but the dark had gotten so close, and there were small animals getting more and more brave.

Just typing it, I feel the danger. The word for what I'm feeling is... Menace.

Before the daughter, I'd been her Dad. I got a message on my cell phone from a girl that I thought must have been one of my daughter's friends from school. She was leaving the city too, she said, and was coming to freedomland. There was something odd about her having called me instead of my daughter, and the thought flitted through my tired mind: Is she trying to hook up with me? It's hilarious now that the light is on, but in the dream it evoked a strange mix of feelings, a little arousal, a little added menace as I-as-the-Dad felt there was something inherently dangerous about a teenaged girl's sexuality, and horror and sadness both as I looked out at the wild counties that had failed and gone dark in this experiment gone horribly wrong, and I pictured her coming into this thinking she was coming to a paradise, and she'd be ripped to pieces by something before long.

It was a pretty wicked dream. That was just the tail end.

The one before it was like an appetizer, all the threat without any of the substance. Wil was powering up one of his video games, with some sort of oracle and lots of little text dialogue on the screen that you just click through. Somehow or other I agreed to play a round, and I had to climb and swing and try to escape moving structures while animals tried to get me and alligators circled below. It was still a game, mind you, not "real," except I had to actually climb around and stuff, and finally I swung wide to avoid the stupid squirrel that was attempting to run up my arm and bite my neck, and I missed the grab of whatever it was I needed to grab, and I fell to the alligators. I knew it was a game, but I still closed my eyes.

Then the crew packed up the game, but I still had the costume, and I tried to return it, and the guy at the counter made some crack about it being a secretary outfit, maybe I could use it, and I said, "yeah, okay, I can picture me going to work in red and black satin. I AM a secretary."

Which was probably supposed to be witty and ironic, but it sure looks lame now.

The first dream --am I trying to erase the disquiet by working backwards or something?-- was the most unsettling. Jesus was in it. I have to say, I have never before had Jesus in my dreams. That alone should have been enough to wake me up, shouldn't it?

It started with me walking down a rainy city street with my coworker, Olivia. From there, it gets pretty confused, but we were trying to get somewhere, and she had a coffee machine, and we did reach our destination, and I was glad to be with the person that could make coffee.

And then Jesus was there.

He had his loincloth and his thorns. He looked pretty skanky to be honest, and gray. He wasn't exactly a white guy, more like a little bit of everything, but sort of dusty and gray all over. He had eyes like a husky or a malamute, and kept doing that "looking into your soul" look at me, and I just kept frowning at him and reminding him that I'm an atheist.

The dream has faded a lot, so I forget what we were trying to accomplish. There was some danger, and there were a whole bunch of us together, a little like the wilderness dream. We were holed up in this building, we and Jesus, and some of the guys wanted to prove that Jesus was actually Jesus, so he did stuff like say my full name and birth date, even though he'd just met me. Stuff out of my wallet. A parlor trick, that's what I called it.

Only the weird part was that I was quickly certain that he was in fact Jesus. I just felt like the quest to prove it was a bit futile. And I didn't see any conflict between this being Jesus and his being the son of God, and my being an atheist. Now that I'm awake, I can sit here and wonder exactly how that works, but in the dream, that wasn't the problem.

The problem was that I was having a nightmare, so it had to get ugly, and it did. We reached out to other communities, trying to band together against the common threat (whatever it was). And the two Muslim guys that looked and acted unfortunately like every cardboard cutout terrorist of American movies were not convinced and were leaving, and they pushed by a friend of mine, and he fell down and hit his head, and he died.

I went into emergency mode, said to dial 9-1-1, got down there with the body and did... well, I don't know what I could have done, but Jesus was standing there and he said, "What's the point?"

What? I looked at him, and he was looking half bored and half annoyed at the whole thing. I said, "They can do something. They can start his heart again." And Jesus said, "No they can't. He's dead. Forget it." He was really dismissive, you know? And I was a little desperate about my friend. And Jesus made this move, with this whole attitude of being tired of parlor tricks and annoyed by the whole drama of the scene, and he said, "You want me to start his heart? Great." And he put his hand on my friend's chest, kinda clenched it, and my friend started breathing.

But then there was a seam that opened up lengthwise on the body. He was breathing, but his body was opening up. It was held together by Jesus's hand, clenched there, holding the skin together. And Jesus looked at me with his husky (or malamute) eyes, and he opened his hand, and the body fell open and all the guts started spilling out. And Jesus said, "See?"

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

...and I actually like to sleep with this woman? Help! LOL

J/K!

Becks is always interesting!

Heather said...

and kept doing that "looking into your soul" look at me

Maybe Jesus was hitting on you.

bekbek said...

So you're saying, Jesus loves me?

You know, just yesterday a coworker suggested that I had earned my place in heaven by memorizing the minute details of the Board of Regents' Testing Policies of the college.

I replied, "Yep, that's what God's going to say. 'Sure, you've been saying you're an atheist for almost 40 years, but you know about the Regents' Test, so... you're in!'"

Maybe if I date his son...

Anonymous said...

In my opinion, the dream was not about your friend but rather about you. Jesus is saying "Why bother pursuing you as one of His own, because you are dead inside." All who do not believe in the son of God do not have life. But those who believe in Jesus have eternal life (John 3:36). I believe Jesus was searching your heart to see if you would be a worthy recipient of His mercy, but He did not find your heart as one that is seeking Him (Jeremiah 29:13). I am a former atheist who now believes in Jesus because of a near death experience. I refuse to die without Christ as my Lord and savior and I sincerely hope you come to know Him as He really is through the word. He is God and God is love.