Just over a decade ago or so, I came to understand how to have lucid and vivid dreams. Both tended to occur towards the end of my sleep, when there was enough physical stimuli in the real world that made me aware that I was sleeping. For instance, the alarm radio could be playing, or the TV still on and blaring. In the case of lucid dreams, I could control a part of the dream by selecting what I did. In the case of vivid dreams, I'd wake up with incredible, clear memory of it, even if I did not control it.
This morning, I could hear the TV still on, with some sort of evangelist preaching to his flock explaining how to go to Heaven. With my subconsciousness latched onto this, I spent the next 15 minutes or so, in an odd and vivid dream.
The first event that I could remember, is finding myself in some church, going through a non-denominational Christian service with my friend, having dragged me into it. Jumping past the service, I was exploring the place when I stumbled into my uncle and began having a crazy conversation.
At first he made me jump as I wasn't expecting him to be around the corner, and told him so. In his usual jovial manner, he started laughing and then remarked that I should be, that he actually died the other day. I was laughing with him, and...say what? Dead? What the?
In a split moment I had gone from being startled to having a good laugh, to being really sad.
As I looked at him, though, I was reassured as he wasn't sad but with his usual, content and happy face. So then as we sat down, I asked him what I think anyone would have asked, "What is Heaven like?" It's the $1B dollar question, after all.
He explained that when you die, just about everyone gets into Heaven, and your self is just the same as when you were living. I was keenly amused at that, because it meant that all of Jehovah's Witness followers would be absolutely surprised and disappointed at all the time they wasted, upon realizing that the limits to get into Heaven were rather minor.
So who didn't get into Heaven? It turned out that only the really bad, as in sufficiently evil as to being impossibly irreconcilable with God, were sent to Hell. To which, my uncle pointed out that this had created its own conflict in Heaven in that in this vast world of everlasting life, a very large group of people had formed an alliance and had been causing trouble.
It was at this point, having gotten to the answer of the $1B dollar question, I realized that I was sleeping, and thusly woke up to the sound of a TV evangelist going on about how people have gotten it wrong about who can get into Heaven: You cannot simply be a good person and striving to make yourself better. How odd, that my dream was exactly the opposite of the message of the TV evangelist!
But here's the oddest part of the dream: my uncle has been dead for several years!
Spooky? Not really. Being able to talk to my uncle was a comforting memory of my dream. In life, I'd always learn something interesting when I stayed over at my aunt and uncle's place.
Anyway, thought I'd share this vivid dream. The best part of waking up to such vivid dreams is that I don't feel tired or lazy to get out of bed.
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