On Another World

My daughter sent us an email sharing an unusual dream she'd had the other night about a purple bicycle that seemed alive, hunted people down and ran them over. It was like a horror movie, she said, but she found it "fun and scary at the same time."

What's interesting is that my wife noted how she does not dream in stories per se, but has more of a boring jumble of images, whereas I dream in the surreal story style that this dream epitomizes.

As early as seventh grade I found many of my dreams so interesting that I began keeping a journal of my dreams. In fact, I kept that up for six years and had hundreds of pages of details about my night life, which was far more interesting than school. (What I wouldn't give to put my hands on those documents today!) I could remember up to five dreams in detail.

Since that time I have occasionally recorded my dreams and sometimes turned them into short stories. Or, I simply share them as a form of thought provoking entertainment. Some have been quite unusual, each in its own way. Here is one such dream, recorded exactly as I dreamed it.

On Another World

In this dream I was being held captive on another planet. The people of this planet were in bondage to false ideas about God.

Early in the morning I was taken to a private meeting with the leader of this planet. We were alone in a large, clean unfurnished room. A single guard stood outside the open door.

By some means I had been paralyzed so that I could neither pray nor speak nor think straight. I was standing in the middle of the room in this strange, paralyzed state. I had no consciousness of the passage of time.

In the dream, Dr. Spock (of Star Trek fame) came to the door of the room and requested permission to enter. It is possible that I was captain of the Enterprise, though I do not know this for certain. I do know that I was from earth, as the following dialogue will attest. After obtaining permission, Spock entered the room carrying a bucket of what appeared to be a powdered cleanser. He stumbled and pretended to spill the cleanser on me accidentally. Immediately, I found myself released from my paralysis and I started to pray, standing by a wash basin with my eyes closed. (It was one of those chrome sink basins that you find in painting studios at college with multiple nozzles spraying water.) Upon seeing my fervent attempt to pray the leader of the planet was in stitches with laughter. He asked what I was doing.

I said I was praying to God.

"This is hysterical!" he said. "We would never pray to God like that," and he wanted to know how I got the notion that I could talk to God."

God came to our planet once," I said.

"God came to your planet? What was God like?" The leader was suddenly interested in hearing this new thing. "What was God like?"

"He came to our planet as a human."

"A human? A weak, pitiful thing like that? A human! God came to your planet as a human?"

"He took the form of a human, a man, actually, and lived on our world, on earth."

"And what happened?"

"We killed him," I said.

I woke.