Newsgroups: alt.dreams
Subject: Re: Metaphysical Dreams
From: comjohn@ccu1.aukuni.ac.nz (Mr. John T Jensen)
Date: Mon, 23 Nov 1992 00:30:26 GMT
Organization: University of Auckland, New Zealand.

I will tell the substance of mine, the memory of which still troubles me at
times.  I have found it somewhat difficult to talk about this.  I have also
found it difficult to convey exactly the sense of overwhelming dread that
accompanied the dream, and that still accompanies its memory.  Perhaps this
expresses my own weakness of faith.  Anyway, here it is.

I am a Christian, and an adult convert, having been raised nothing in
particular.  I became a Christian in 1969.  The dream happened in 1973.  At
that time I had just moved to Auckland, having lived the previous seven
years in Honolulu, and this is relevant as the dream recognisably (part of
it) took place in Honolulu.  I was newly-married, less than one year, when
the dream took place.

In the dream, my wife and I --- only there was some simultaneous feeling
that she was my sister, and though we were adults in our mid-20's (as we
actually were at the time), we were also, perhaps, young children, perhaps
late pre-teens --- were walking up a long, winding, tree-shaded street in
one of the pretty wealthy parts of Honolulu, up alongside of the Nuuanu
Valley for those who know the city.  We seemed to be trying to get home, or
perhaps to someone's house, and I was anxious because it was getting late in
the afternoon and we were a bit lost.  Behind us in the distance we could
see the freeway and the city but I was very much aware of how wooded the
area we were in was, and there did not seem to be many houses, just woods.

Then a big car came up the street with a woman in it, and I think she
offered to give us a ride to wherever we wanted to go.  This thought was
somehow terrifying and we said 'no' and continued to walk, quite fast.  The
woman drove the car slowly, as if following us.  This was really
frightening.  So finally we decided to go into the woods, as if to pretend
that we had arrived where we wanted to go, so that maybe she would go away.

Now we were in the woods.  I won't describe details (although they have
remained in my memory for nearly twenty years now), but we now wandered for
a very long time in an area peopled, to our astonishment, with savages.
Occasionally visible were normal suburban houses but we could never reach
them.  The savages were really savage, lawless and (we knew somehow) cruel,
and we knew that if we perished or were captured we would never be found or
even missed from the normal world.

I came then to a realisation that the world we had always thought existed,
that of normal, natural laws, of right and wrong, and even of logical and
illogical, was only a sort of clearing in an infinite forest of chaos.  That
the motorway (which we could still occasionally glimpse, and which I yearned
to reach as symbolising order, normality, God even) and the whole of
Honolulu only seemed to us its inhabitants as the real world, that in fact
all 'round us was the everlasting Night waiting to close in, or to capture
us.

We finally managed to come out of the forest, somehow, on to the edge of the
freeway.  Even then, which was about the point where I woke up, I continued
fearfully to look back at the hills, dreading to see some more bands of
those savages coming to drag us back into chaos.

I concluded that this was an attack of the Devil, an attempt to make me
doubt God, and to believe that God is made in my own image rather than I in
His.  But this dream has had a very powerful presence with me ever since,
and when I am attacked by conscious religious doubts I often think of it.
So I just if anyone else has had dreams that similarly were involved with
their fundamental beliefs about reality, and what conclusions they might
have drawn from them.  Has anyone had a dream which affect his (or her)
basic beliefs?  Has anyone had a dream which changed what he believed?

jj

John Thayer Jensen                      64 9 373 7599 ext. 7543
Commerce Computer Services              64 9 373 7437 (FAX)
Auckland University                     jt.jensen@aukuni.ac.nz
Private Bag 92019
AUCKLAND
New Zealand