Stairway to Where?

ShadowStairs 3
Originally uploaded by Aaroneous Monk.

I had a vivid dream last night:

I was playing basketball in a free-standing gym with some guys when I sensed something was very wrong. I pushed open the double doors at the end of the court and saw a massive funnel cloud approaching, cutting a wide path of destruction. I yelled for everyone to run across a large parking lot to a grocery store for cover. As I ran I could see the tornado out of the corner of my eye getting closer and closer, wondering if I’d make it into the store in time. I burst into the store yelling, “there’s a tornado coming, get down!” I found my wife there and we hunkered down in a small room in the dark. The feeling was like being back in my mother’s womb as I felt the room lift and begin to rotate…

I must have blacked out because the next thing I remember is waking up beside my wife on the ground. There was complete destruction all around us and the earth was blackened as far as the eye could see. I noticed a burning helicopter was resting on JB’s legs, so I put my foot on it and kicked it off of her. We both got up and found that we appeared to be OK, but our clothes were charred and we had a lot of scrapes and bruises. We somehow found our way to my parent’s house which had survived the tornado.

At this point I am not sure how the transition transpired, but I found myself in an elevator with several other men who all looked like they’d been through what I’d just been through. We were all a little shaken and apprehensive about being in this elevator. It began to descend and as it descended it started to pick up speed. I heard someone say, “it’s taking us to hell!” With the elevator in freefall, I began praying to the Theotokos to protect us. I felt myself trying to mentally detach myself from the situation in order to speak clearly to her and plead our case. I believed with all my being that she could hear me, even in the depths of the earth in such a hopeless situation.

The elevator eventually stopped and a sense of trepidation seized us. An unbearable few moments later the doors slid open and I saw a red flickering glow playing on the other’s faces in profile. The next thing I knew we were in what appeared to be a small cage-like room made of beautiful cut crystal suspended over a glowing reddish-yellow sea. Other such rooms hung suspended around us like fabulously coruscating chandeliers. We were slowly being lowered down and I could just make out huge fiery serpents and dragon-like creatures glowing bright yellow as they swam in the sea. Some of them would intermittently rear up out of the sea towards the suspended rooms and then fall back in. The faces of some of the others were of complete and utter horror, but the terror I felt was more like a feeling of overwhelming awe and wonderment…

When I woke up I thought about the tornados that used to threaten us in Southern Indiana when I was growing up, the recent hurricane disaster in New Orleans, of being assigned to the 101st Airborne next year and the possibility of eventually being deployed to Iraq, but most of all I thought about The River of Fire.

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