Friday, May 26, 2017

Three Dreams About Sin

Last week some time, I had three nightmares in a row, and I understood that they were about sin. Later, I thought I should share them with my family. Since my kids refer back to this blog like a family journal, I'm going to post each dream with the moral here so they can find them again if they need them.

Here were the three dreams and the messages from each:

1.  I dreamed I needed a shower, and I wanted desperately to get clean, but I had to undress to get clean. So I took my shirt off, but there was another shirt underneath. I pulled that off, but there was another. I pulled three off at once, but there were three more. The harder I tried to get undressed, the more shirts there were to take off. 

The moral: We cannot remove our own sins to clean ourselves. We have to use Jesus for that.

2. I dreamed that Mom was a vampire because she’d caught a vampire disease. Every once in a while, she would suddenly turn into a vampire and come after me, blood dripping from fangs. I chastised her once, and she stopped. But it happened again, so I invoked Jesus and admonished her to use Jesus, and she stopped. But it happened again, and I put my hand on her forehead to hold her off and invoked Jesus again. She stopped. 

The moral: We cannot impose Jesus on someone else and have them healed. We can use Jesus to protect ourselves from the effects of other people’s sins, but we cannot make Him cleanse others from their sins. That’s between them and him.

3 I dreamed I was trying to escape the crazy city with too many shirts on everyone and random vampire attacks. It was full and crowded and crazy and somewhat Escher-esque. I searched and found a glass door leading outside. My brother Jon was standing there with his daughter Eve, but he had no head. He opened the door for me, and I walked outside and only then I could see not only his head, but the beautiful gardens outside and that there were many people, going and coming and doing business. They were relaxed and happy (especially compared to the city where everyone was wearing too many shirts, and everything was crowded and nonsensical, and there were vampires).  Before I walked out, though, I couldn't see his head or hear anything he might have been saying. This was scary, but I knew it was Jon, even if I couldn't see his head, and I trusted Jon, and Eve stepped forward to take my hand and reassure me. After I joined him, then I could see his head, and also hear what he was saying to me. There were no vampires and nobody wearing too many shirts out there. It was fresh and clean and you could see the sky.

This last dream had two morals. 

The first moral (which follows the other two dreams' morals nicely): You don't fix sin or just work harder to stop or take it off while living in it, you get up and leave it behind. (I'm not sure how to elaborate on this, but it was a very clear message that it was a moral of this dream.)

The second moral (I'll try to explain; this makes perfect sense to me simply from the imagery, but it's hard to verbalize): We cannot always see how the prophets/faithful members of the church are thinking--their thoughts don’t always seem to make sense, or even appear to be there at all (thus Jon’s missing head), but we have to step into their world first before we can understand (vs what most people want: to understand both viewpoints and then choose). For example, if we are caught in a social/intellectual world where women seem entitled to the priesthood or Joseph Smith is a jerk, any other ways of thinking make no sense--especially since everyone standing around us, whose heads we see and whose voices we hear and understand, agrees (darn echo chambers!). To understand how other people could possibly accept the "other" way (women not needing the priesthood, etc), you have to leave behind the wrong ideas first, even without understanding what to replace them with, and move toward the right ideas even if you can't see or hear them at all at first. After you step through the door, then you can see their heads and that they aren’t brainless, stupid ideas. But until you leave behind the other ideas and walk away from them, you can't see the heads of the people outside, or that there are lots of them out there (meaning, of course, that their ideas don't make sense and you can't even really "hear" what they're saying, even if you process and can repeat the words back.)

So. Three dreams about sin. You can't take it off yourself (you need Jesus), you can't take it off other people (they need Jesus but you can't force the issue on them), and you just have to leave it behind (rather than living in it and expecting things to change). Also, people following the prophets sometimes seem to have no head, but if you go toward them, you can see and understand. But you can't see or understand if you hang back (even if it's because headless people rightfully seem quite scary).

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