Dreams, part one: The Third Way

Usually, my dreams are random bits and pieces, the clutter of my subconscious. But every so often, I have a dream that is really coherent, and that seems likely to stick with me for life. They don't require a lot of analysis to understand them, because the meaning of them is really pretty clear.

This is one of those dreams. I had it when I was eight or nine years old.



Background:

We had been studying the book of Revelation in Sunday school. I remember sitting in the class, in the basement of the church. The teacher was describing all of the horrible things that would happen, and explaining how Godly Christians would suffer along with everyone else. She talked for a while about the Mark of the Beast, and how people wouldn't be able to buy anything or get anything without having it, but that having it meant going along with Satan, and thus, being sent to hell.

I asked whether God would really send people to hell simply because of getting the Mark of the Beast. My example was someone who was willing to sacrifice their own chance at salvation so they could take care of their children. The teacher sternly informed me that it didn't matter what your reasons, if you got the mark, you were damned, end of story. This simply didn't make sense to me, in the context of my believe that God is loving. The teacher said I was being disrespectful and too argumentative, and should accept that she knew what would happen.

So, a week or two later, while all of this was still stewing in my head, I had this dream:

The tribulation was happening. Horrible things were going on all over the world. Christians were suffering even more, because they couldn't pay for anything and didn't have anywhere safe to live, and no way of getting food. People were running around in terror.

Then I noticed there was a space ship. I started telling people, "You don't have to follow either the Antichrist or old Christian rules. God sent this space ship, and if you get on it, you can go to a new world. You just have to make the choice.

Everyone from my church denounced me as a tool of the Antichrist. The people who were following the Antichrist thought I was being silly and said what they were doing was too important. Only a very few people went with me on the spaceship.


Obviously, there is more to the dream than the immediate context. It's emblematic of the way that I do usually try to see a third option when I'm presented with an either/or kind of choice. It's always seemed to me that there is more to the world than binary divisions. Of course, this isn't how I interpreted it at the time, at least not in these words. But I couldn't help but believe that the loving God I believed in would provide an option that didn't require quite so much suffering and despair as my Sunday School teachers predicted. In the context of that church, I did worry that there was something wrong with me, that perhaps my soul was tainted in some way so that I would rather go into space than suffer on Earth. But I wasn't willing to give up my belief in the third option, the one where people were accepted based on whether or not they chose to be saved, instead of whether they followed some rules that had been written down.

I could swear I've posted about how fairy tales and fantasy novels saved my life, but I can't find the post, so I won't put a link to it. Anyhow, I think they did help immensely in allowing me to continue to see myself as Christian, without having to force myself to believe the things that the church we attended insisted were required beliefs. I am so grateful that I was able to maintain the faith that I think I really was blessed to receive, rather than having it tarnished by the warped beliefs of my childhood religious training.