Dream: Why Am I Dreaming About Jesus?

I've been thinking about various dreams I've had over the years that have an divine erotic gay male theme to them, and to that end, I managed to dig up this old dream from 2000.  I've included it here with the tag dream-knot for personal research reasons.  Segment Three of the following had stayed with me (for reasons that will become obvious), and those readers whose sensibilities are offended by a non-traditional Jesus may wish to skip this post.

May 20, 2000

OK.  I guess I shouldn't drink margaritas (it was only one, I swear) then think about religion and queer spirituality before going to bed.  Oh, and No, I haven't been reading C.S. Lewis in quite some time.

I'm also not clear on the segments' order.  I saved the weirdest for last (which may offend some religious sensibilities, so consider yourself Warned).

Segment One

We had arrived at a fancy restaurant, in a litter [editor--or palanquin or sedan chair] for four to the buffet table.  I am not sure how the litter was carried there.  We were all dressed up, I was in some kind of black tuxedo.  One of the women in our party was trying on the cheesy gold paint and glitter crown I have, but she had it on backwards and Marg P and I were trying to convince her to switch it (although it kind of worked the way she had it on).  Our litter for four sort of took up the entire isle it was in, and so we had to fold it up out of the way and just walk to the dinner salad.  I think Arcosanti somehow worked its way into this. . .

Segment Two

I was walking down Ridgewood hill from my parents' house to the bus stop to take to school.  Someone was helping me carry a large spot-welded log down the hill.  It was really huge.  Unknown to us, we were also carrying a bear in the log, which had somehow snuck in while we were halfway down the hill.  I think it was a polar bear.  When we were three quarters of the way down, I realized there was no way it (the log) was going to fit on the bus.  There was a discussion of how we could take the log apart and then re-spot weld it together when we got to school.

Segment Three

It was a warm day, and I was at the beach.  I was walking through the surf.  I think I had sandals on so I didn't have to worry too much about rocks or glass or jellyfish.  I looked up at the dunes and there was a figure in white walking towards me.

"Oh man," I thought to myself.  "This is going to be like one of those cheesy 'Footprints in the Sand' posters, isn't it."  The sun was behind me, so the dunes were very bright.  The figure on top was lit up very well and His clothes were whiter than the sand dunes He walked upon. 

I guess there was channel I stepped into because He disappeared behind the dune's crest, but eventually I came up out of the water and we met.

He was wearing a white turtleneck and white slacks and had a dark, suntanned complexion.  He had a very short, masculine beard - almost like He hadn't shaved in three days.  Wordlessly he showed me His right and then His left hand so I could see the stigmata.  I thought to myself, "Blessed are those who have not seen, yet still believe."  I felt a little like doubting St. Thomas.  He lifted up his shirt so I could see the spear wound over his hirsute and tanned abdomen.  With a bit of a shock, I realized Jesus was a stud.  [Editor-I suppose the closest parallel I can come up with is suddenly discovering that one's friend's parent is Super Hot which is A) Unexpected, B) Exciting, and C) Awkward.]  (I don’t know why Jesus would appear to me like He had just finished a photo shoot out of an International Male catalog, but He did. [Editor-I don't know why Jesus would appear before me, a Neo-Pagan, and not, say, Apollo or Horus or Pan or some kind of Greenman.])  

Without a word, we embraced and He kissed me on both cheeks in a way that managed to have equal amounts of Agape, Amore, and Eros. 

[Editor-Around 2000, I was interested in exploring male-male Agape, or spiritual love; Amore, or romantic love; and, Eros, sexual love.  I think it would take a divinity to have equal, harmoniously mixed aspects of all three.  Jesus's washboard abs and that perfect, divine kiss -- which wordlessly said "Oh child of man, how could you not love with your spirit, your heart, and your body?" -- was the part of the dream that stayed with me, and re-reading it has reminded me of the next parts, which seem to be more and more from some crazed lost works of William Blake; I blame that long-ago margarita.]

"Look," He said, and pointed behind me.  I turned around and there was a wide river.  On my left, swimming upstream, was a white lamb.  It really had to work hard to make any progress.  "Gee, that's like what Leslie said about Pisces," I thought to myself.  "If they just go the right direction life is much easier for them."  I looked again and there were now five or seven lambs swimming in the water.  They were acting more like dolphins than lambs, swimming around in a bunch and playing, but still slowly working their way up stream.

Then I looked across the river to the other shore.  Huge (oak?) trees stood, leafless and covered in snow and ice.  "Oh," I said, realizing that on our side it was still sunny and warm, "this is important, and I need to remember it."

[Editor-at this point, the dream turns into crazy Book of Apocalypse stuff...]

Jesus then went on to explain that the world was going through some earth changes.  "There's actually one Power and three Intelligences for Earth," He said.  I had the impression that Jesus was one of the Intelligences, and that they took turns rotating jobs.  I had a vision of the globe with three lines - one green, one purple, one blue -wrapped around it.  I don't remember His words exactly, but somehow humanity's minds were going to be hooked up to a kind of computer network.  The blue line wrapping Earth lead off to a celestial background, and by small technological bugs, was routed into somebody's ears and nose.  In their eyes were bar and binary codes.  

Jesus continued to explain that the Internet would become a new technological Book of Judgement, and cyborg angels would judge one's acts.  Further wires lead out of the person's head and into a hovering, winged metallic figure -- who looked like something out of the Japanese animation, *Voltron*.  (No, I only saw *The Matrix* once, and it's been weeks since Mark and I watched *Voltron* on our way to Jackson Hole.)

I'm not sure what happened next, but I found myself in a café with my Black Book of Art, trying to find a place where I could write this all down.  It's possible this lead to the other dream segments.

Dream: Rhyton Priest

I had this dream October 16 of 2012.  I thought I posted it to the blog at the time, but apparently, I hadn't.  The dream was part of a FaceBook Discussion.  I'm posting it now because it's a particularly meaningful dream for me.

Just before I went to bed, I read a post about a Christian straight man from Tacoma who pretended to be gay for a year so he could write a book about his experiences.  At first I had several conflicting emotional responses ranging from, curiosity as to what he had did, cynicism about writing a book about his experiences, and a sense of betrayal and cultural appropriation.  But... I haven't read his book and I wanted to wait before responding to the [FaceBook] post [by David Raines, I think, asking for reactions].

As I expected I might, I had a dream which I think addresses this... (and no, I still haven't read the book).

The dream started out about rentals and insurance, and then transitioned.

I was in a dry land, with lots of large stony blocks.   I have an image of a river emerging from the fallen stones.  Somehow we were either performing "Jesus Christ, Superstar," and/else we were living in the historical time of Christ as an adult.  I have a recollection of togas or white robes.

A group of about six of us formed a procession into the shallow cave from which the river issued.  There was some sort of ritualistic taking of water or wine from a rhyton.  I'm trying to recall if the rhyton used was carved or not.  My sense was that it was plain, and gently curved like a horn.  I think it was stone or ceramic.  It was large and heavy with the liquid inside.  

(Here's some examples of non-plain rhytons)

http://www.metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/30005340

http://www.metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/130017295

http://www.metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/130007897

http://www.metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/130011051

We passed it around, squirting the water into each other's mouths.  Having taken the waters together, we processed outside into the bright morning sunlight.  I had the full, heavy rhyton (I have a sense of it resting on my shoulder), and was taking its contents back with me to distribute (I'm not sure where or to who).

A woman (a religious Christian person I know from real life) with a kind of crown of nails (points outward from her head -- in waking life she reminds me of Mary Hansen's painting of The Queen of Swords) was at the gathering outside on the stone blocks.  

She was of a different faith, but my sense was that we were all priests and priestesses together, so I offered and she accepted the spurt of liquid that shot from the rhyton when I removed my finger from its opening.  I have a sense that there was another woman there in brilliant white robes (there was a short conversation, or the brilliantly garbed woman explained something to the other woman).  The water shooting into her (the Christian woman's) mouth was a thin stream, as if from a garden hose spigot only slightly opened or an atomizer.  In waking, this seems wildly Freudian (it could only be more so if milk came out of the rhyton instead of water), but in the dream the emotional emphasis was the satisfaction of sharing water in order to quench another's thirst.   

To interpret this dream... If you want to understand the message of the waters, you can drink from the source, or you can (less immediately) drink through an intermediary.  Also, this dream is a metaphor for my understanding of the male expression of deity...  

So, yay for Tacoma guy for trying to experience what it's like to be discriminated against for being perceived as gay, and yay for this guy questioning his religiously-motivated intolerance, but his message of the grace of queers would have been stronger had he actually been queer.  

When John Dreams Wagner...

This is what I get for reading A.S. Byatt's entry from "How I Write: The Secret Lives of Authors," which included a cover of Norse Mythology....


My sense is that this dream image occurred several times, or that the actions repeated from different dream perspectives. Sometimes I watched a stage with a Wagnerian-style opera on it. Sometimes I was in the opera.

On a traditional precenium stage, figures stood on small platforms before a cobalt blue and purple scrim. The platforms were difficult to see, so the figures appeared to be floating in the air. The precenium was blue shadows. Wavy bars of of yellow light passed like flames over random figures; it never illuminated more than half a face or part of an arm, and never for longer than a few seconds. The setting was the formless, disconnected chaos before the cosmos. People, animals, and irregular planes floated in a disconnected tableau.

Odin stood on a platform hanging in the middle of the stage. In the versions of the opera I was participating in, I was Odin's apprentice / assistant / Fricative (not quite the title used in the dream, but it works in waking narrative). I might have been Baldr (I don't know why). Other times I was in the audience watching.

My job was to urge Odin on his work while messaging his back and stomach to raise his heat or "frenzy" (again, not the right word, but neither is berserkergang). Sometimes I think we were both clothed; sometimes I think (only) I might have been shirtless, the spotlight making stage glitter sparkle on my white shoulders. (Cue pensive oboe and flute duet like an aurora over the string section.) I remember Odin's solid abdominal, back and shoulder muscles. In any case, we were on stage performing an opera. Because I was raising Odin's frenzy, I was getting hot as well, and I cried out in some kind of prophetic, erotic trance (no, I don't remember what I said).

At last, Odin reached out and grasped a cosmic serpent writhing over our heads. The flitting yellow lights focused on him. The serpent straightened and turned into Odin's rune-covered spear. (Cue orchestral surge led by the horn section, probably with kettle drums.) Stage left, the shadowy figures coalesced together; their strangely shaped platforms spinning around a common center to come together as a circle. Yellow and green light illuminated what was the Earth (or Midgaurd), with various heros standing on a circular platform. Odin and I stood in the center, at the top of a tree (which I can only assume was the World Tree). Other areas of the stage came together as locations from the Norse cosmology.

And I woke up with the overture to Tannhauser in my head.

No, I'm not usually drawn to Norse Mysteries. Yes, I went to bed asking myself for dream guidance. No, this isn't the first time I've drempt an erotic encounter with a deity. Yes, Jesus is a better kisser.