The Parable of the River

[Anonymous]

I had a dream the other night. I was sleeping in a friend's house, but I didn't know how I got there. I left the house in an effort to track down my car. However, I was in an unfamiliar neighborhood and didn't know where I was going, so I started following a river. The river ended at a giant church with tremendous stained-glass windows. For reasons I couldn't explain, I got an uneasy feeling from the church as though I had stepped into a horror flick and was staring at a haunted house. That was my cue to walk against the flow of the river.

By this time, the river was gaining strength, and I was walking in it. It was pushing on me like a tsunami, and it was taking the life out of me walking against the current. However, I had a choice--walk against the flow of current to get back to my friend's house or let the current suck me up and force me into the giant church with the windows.

There was an overpass. A whole bunch of people--it looked like a giant parade--were standing on the overpass. All of them had halos surrounding their heads, but they were spitting at me from above and telling me I should "go with the flow." I shouted back to them that I needed to find the truth, and the river would kill me before I could find it.

Can anyone explain this dream?

[Mastermind]

Apparently, dreams are a way for our brain to deal with our daily problems in our subconscious, and as such, dreams will usually be "parables". Knowing this, I'd say you've read the Da Vinci code too many times.

[Mastermind]

And btw, since the only person who could ever hope do understand your own subconscious is you, i suggest you think about it. My opinion is that you're trying to find too much knowledge for your own good, but don't feel right about letting yourself into a religion because you find it silly or crude. Again, it's your subconscious, and I'm just making a guess based on your previous posts.

[Kurieuo]

No, I can't tell you. But from what my mother has told me, who is a professonal counsellor (especially in the area of narrative counselling), dreams are from our deeper consciousness and they can tell us something about ourselves. So it could be said everything in your dream stems from within your deeper self trying to tell you something.

It would appear that you find Christianity (especially your perceived religious side of Christianity) as something very daunting, and something you must fight against at all costs. It appears as though you've had some bad experiences with many to proclaim themselves a Christians, especially religious types, and that this makes you all the more want to go against them. What if the people above who were spitting on you, wanted to hide the truth from you? They certainly didn't seem on your side, and so if you are looking for the truth, and they knew where it was, then what could they do to make you run even further from it? Let's say they said, "Continue fighting against the flow!"—what would this have made you want to do? Perhaps they knew some truth laid with the church, and so their telling you to go with the flow wasn't really to get you to go with the flow, but to persist against it all the more. And the more you persist against it, the more your life becames drained out of you.

I think it would have been interesting to see what would have happened if you decided to go with the flow, and then face up to any fears at the church, and then continue your search there.

Kurieuo.