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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17 comments:
Thats a pretty intense dream. Any further thoughts?
Self-analysis perhaps? :^)
Why not!
The first part involves a tornado and playing basketball which places it firmly in my "growing up years" in Southern Indiana. During that time my family was involved in a church culture that was very much driven by fear. Tornados could be the physical metaphor for this.
My Dad took me with him to Grant City when I was ~5yrs old to distribute food collected at church to this community devastated by a tornado. I remember driving into this small town and everything was completely flattened. We took the groceries into an old ladie's house and stood in her kitchen under a wide open sky!
There seems to be a mixture of this and destruction from war in the middle part of the dream where I wake up on the blackened earth and see the burning helicopter. I think this is significant b/c the 101st Airborne is an "air assault" unit that uses the helicopter as its vehicle of choice. And the fact that it is resting on Jennifer's legs might say something about her fears about the possibility of deployment to Iraq.
The elevator part seems to infer that I somehow died from my injuries in the destruction and I am accompanying others who died as well. The "descent" and flame-like images describe a classic Western view of Hell, but it is the last part that has me so intrigued. It would seem the Eastern Orthodox view of "the river of fire" being, in fact, the love of God has permeated my unconscious (it has been in my conscious mind for several years now).
The ending would seem to support this b/c the sea of fire and mystical creatures are affecting people with me differently. Are we in a "cage" or some mystical contraption (deus ex machina?) made of some incomprehensibly beautiful substance? Why is what I feel terror (in the sense of some kind of crazy exhilaration) and awe, but not fear/despair (which is what I'd expect with being in the presence of the holy, a feeling dependent on whether I meet love with love or love with unlove).
Are you sorry you asked? :^)
Are you sorry you asked? :^)
Not in the least. :) I must revisit River of Fire.
In discussing this dream with my training psychotherapist, a few more interesting things fell out.
Concerning the "culture of fear" I grew up in, it was during the 70's when apocalyptic fears abounded and "the rapture" could happen at any moment. I remember being taken to see a film that was being screened in a gymnasium for the local church community when I was ~6-7 years old. The film was absolutely terrifying! It was set before, during, and after "the rapture" and into "the tribulation." There were scenes of people being "left behind" and even a scene in hell with worms crawling out of a guy's eye and a devil addressing one of those who had missed the rapture and died (I think in a motorcycle accident).
You just wonder how things like the Soviet expansion, Sexual Revolution, and Energy Crisis (among other things) played into this phenomenon. The fact this was all occurring during my formative years... well I'll just leave it at that. :^)
i like your intepretation, aaroneous. i don't have anything to add after thinking about it for the past few days.
Interesting and very vivid!
I used to have dreams about the Apocalypse and I wasn't even a churchgoer- people getting the mark of the beast and not being able to buy and sell without it, etc. That's the Baptist line but I have no idea where I picked that up.
Maybe it was an unconscious wish to be Baptist.
:^)
You don't mean that. ;)
I shared this dream with one of my supervisors who is a Harvard-trained psychoanalyst. She said that it was a dream about my research project that she is helping me put together.
In a nutshell, the project is an attempt to find an association between those Army psychiatrists who participated in "training psychotherapy" when they were residents and successful coping with deployments as measured by continuing in the military after such traumatogenic experiences. They would be compared to those psychiatrists who did not participate in TP and also internal medicine doctors as a control group. She saw the "descent into hell" as me being deployed into the "hell" of Iraq and finding that my training psychotherapy experience is protective, as I hope to find in my project outcome.
Of course, dreams can have multiple meanings and I think we've come up with at least two good interpretations.
I'm blogging again!
Are you?
:)
Aaron you need to update your blog more often. :) Your public is crying out for it.
Nah, she's just harassing me in retaliation. You and Jim are my only tried and true readers. :^) "Thank you for your support" (remember the winecooler guys?)
:^)
Harass? In retaliation? Me?
Well I never!
*stomps away in a huff*
*peeks around the corner, whispers just kidding! and tip-toes back to her blog*
Too late, you are officially persona non grata on this internationally recognized blog with its thousands of avid readers.
*slips note under polderpalooza blogdoor* which reads: actually, could you hang around a bit?
*scrawls following on back of note and proceeds to slip note under door to Monk's chamber*:
I'd be honored!
Since I don't seem to have the time or energy to create blog entries de novo I'll just keep revisiting these old ones. :^)
In re-reading this entry today, it hit me that the imagery of the glowing sea comes from having read "Solaris" by Stanislaw Lem. The feeling of wonder mixed with terror approximates the experience of encountering the living surface of Solaris in the book... for what it's worth.
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