The Dream
Last night I had a dream that Göran and I were about to embark on a tour of the Arctic. We were on the southern border of Finnish Lapland being briefed by our guide, a Saami woman. I was studying a map of the world that showed with colorful little flags the major settlements of Arctic peoples like the Saami and the Eskimo. I saw a trail of flags leading all the way from the Arctic region of Alaska down the west coast of North and South America to Tierra del Fuego in Southern Chile and from there to Antarctica.
Our Saami guide led us to an isolated town in Lapland, to a mansion. The mansion was occupied by two men, a black man and a white man. They had a huge book. The book was about four feet tall and about a foot and a half wide, and it was bound in a thick, black leather cover of extremely unusual workmanship. The pages were yellowed with age, and covered with strange, magical symbols in some exotic language. The two men had been studying the book, and had learned powerful magic from it. One of the men -- the black man -- had been possessed by a demon from the book, and his right arm had been transformed into a disfigured claw.
The Saami woman told me that I had to get the book away from the two men and try to destroy it. We arrived at the mansion just as they were trying to cast the ultimate spell from the book to unleash a powerful evil. They had the book on a dais on a landing of the main staircase leading up into the mansion. The book was bubbling like boiling tar, and looked like it might try to swallow the two men up or merge with them somehow. As I arrived, there was a confusing struggle going on. The black man had managed to fight off the demon possessing him. The demon left him and went into the white man, who went temporarily crazy and ran away. The black man, who had now regained his senses, handed the book to me, and told me to hurry up and destroy it before the possessed white man returned.
I took the book and ran back downstairs. The Saami woman led me down more stairs and through a series of corridors into a kind of kitchen. There, I met a friend of mine, with whom I had sung in a gospel choir for many years. The Saami woman told the two of us to take the book down into the basement and burn it in a wood-burning furnace. We ran down the stairs. The book was too big and the furnace too hot and the door too heavy for one of us to have accomplished this task on our own. But between the two of us, we were able to open the furnace door and shove the Book of Evil into it.
My friend cried out in dismay, when she realized that the evil of the book was so powerful, it was actually extinguishing the fire in the furnace. We realized that we would need a fire much more powerful and much more hot to destroy this book. Perhaps we could not destroy it on our own. But at least, for the time being, we had hidden the book away.
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The Interpretation
I'm actually curious to see what others think about the meaning of a dream like this. I have a few ideas of my own. When I have dreams that take place on or near the north pole, they're usually dreams about the end of the world.
I suspect this dream had something to do with the nature of evil...
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4 comments:
Wow! What a detailed dream! I wish that I could remember dreams more often. I have no interpretation for you at the moment though.
The dream means that you have to give up the sin of gay sex before you die and it's too late.
Anonymous - I was kind of waiting for somebody to leave that comment. But if that is the correct interpretation of this dream, then how does that fit with this dream?
I liked my Evil in the Arctic dream because it stresses the social nature of evil, symbolized in the dream by two men in a mansion (symbolizing social/political power) covenanting to do evil. Evil is fostered in social agreements. The social nature of evil is demonstrated in injustice, discrimination, and disregard for the poor. Also in organized crime (I've been reading lately in the Book of Helaman about the "Gadianton Robbers.")
This dream also stressed individual accountability. The possessed man in the dream is able to fight and overcome the demon possessing him.
This dream also stressed the social nature of the struggle against evil. I actually think the Saami people in my dream represented angels or the powers of goodness that assist us in the struggle against evil. Just as it took two to unleash the evil in the book in my dream, so it took two to fight the evil -- one person could not do it alone. So we need to work with and rely on others in the fight against evil.
In my dreams, the Artic seems to represent the end of the world, while the south in my dreams tends to represent the past, history. So if Eskimos and Saami people in my dream represent the angels of God, then the angels encircling the earth in my dream (from south to north) is a reminder of the finitude of the earth -- the beginning and the end of things, and God's control over the ultimate destiny of the earth.
My husband, Göran, was present with me in the dream. He was my traveling companion as we contemplated entering the Arctic together (i.e., preparing for the end of the world and the second coming of Christ). My love and care for him is a powerful motivator for me to strive for goodness, to do what is right. It was to protect him that I was willing to face danger in the dream.
So, no, Anonymous, I don't think the meaning of the dream is that I should abandon him...
Another thing I thought was cool in the dream was the fact that we could not destroy the book of evil ourselves.
Temptation is like that... I must learn to live with temptation. At some point in an eschatological future, God will separate evil so far from us that it can have no power over us. But for the time being, in our lives it is "in the basement furnace," or "at the gate." We have to learn to become good with the evil ever present in our lives.
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