It was just a dream
Written by Dan McDonald
I haven’t ever been too creative
writing stories, especially Gothic tales, but I had an actual dream a few
nights ago which almost qualifies for one.
I was in a room. Someone like a tour
guide, seen or unseen I don’t recall was describing how there had once been
here a thriving community. But now most everyone was gone. It was a ghost town
with only a few people remaining.
I said to someone next to me. “I
think I will talk to some of these remaining townspeople.” He said “what
people?” I am not sure if every conversation was actually said in the dream.
Some things in a dream are hazily implied in brief sensations of what is taking
place. We later or even at the moment fill in the blanks. To poorly paraphrase
a passage somewhere “we know in part and assume the rest.”
I said to person standing next to
me, seemingly on the same tour with me, “Don’t you see these people.” His
answer or lack of one seemed to confirm me to me he didn’t see any of the
people in the room with us.
I was a bit upset with his failure
to see the people before us. I turned my back on him as I said to myself
probably more than to him, “I am going to speak to the people here. I want to
know their stories. I want to know about this community.”
The person directly before me was a
young girl, maybe high school age. I took a couple of steps forward and asked “Tell
me your story, why you chose to stay here?” She said sort of bluntly – “I was
murdered when I was fourteen.”
That was when I noticed that the
people the other guy hadn’t seen were a shade paler than we had been.
I wrote about this a few days ago,
and tried to give my explanation for it all. I won’t do that again. This is
where the dream ends.
Still it makes a good story for Halloween
and for All Saints Day. On Halloween we remember the spirits of the dead, often
in an almost Druid manner. We are haunted. We are haunted by the spirits
seeking to be made whole, sometimes writhing with anger. Sometimes they are
pulling chains behind them as if in a purgatory. The dream didn’t actually end
when the girl said she had been murdered when she was fourteen. She tried to
say more. Her voice became garbled and confused. She grew frustrated. She seemed
helpless to communicate. A sense of her seeking to communicate and being unable
to washed over me. I felt her helplessness. I felt the helplessness of seeking
wholeness and justice in a world where injustice is both random and pervasive.
I am analyzing I guess. I ruin every story with endless analysis. I was already
analyzing or trying to when I felt the helplessness of seeing the girl beginning
to break down before me with garbled speech. I was unable to hear what she was
trying to say. The truth, or at least one truth, was that I was waking up. I
was leaving the world of the night. I was leaving the mystery of the dream.
After waking up I began analyzing
again. For me Halloween is not some dreaded event that is somehow unchristian.
For me it is remembrance of living in darkness, of knowing there are realities
in our Gothic dreams. But for me Halloween is the remembrance of our living or
our death in sins and trespasses before we were granted to taste life. Now we
awakened from the Halloween night into All Saints Day. We recall that though we
do not see them, when we are called to worship, we are extended an invite to
the holy city above which every holy city on earth simply tries to illustrate.
We are surrounded by living witnesses whom we are told are the spirits of just
men made perfect in the city above with which we have fellowship, where is
seated the Great High Priest. The worlds of seen and unseen are distinct in our
minds, clashing in our fears, and calmed in reality to the degree they are
calmed by the one who spoke to the clashing waves on the Galilean Lake and told
them to become calm and they gave way to the calmness. There is something real
about the Halloween Night and also about All Saints Day. My haunting dream
belonged to Halloween night and yet All Saints Day doesn’t erase it, but gives
me hope. For somewhere in reality there is quite likely a girl who murdered
when she was fourteen and unable to communicate to us is waiting the day when
all things are made right.
Happy All-Saints Day
