Many of my friends are atheists, and they ask how I can be a Christian. My answer is that my mother took me to church, and church formed me. Faith fades from time to time but returns in reconversions. The conversion never occurs because arguments convince me. Arguments about religion matter, but conversion happens from the experience of the presence of God. It's different from experiencing truth in mathematics. It's like the change of your heart through music. It's like coming home, and not to a home of trauma, but to your true home.
I had a nightmare on December 4, 2021, that I wrote down in my journal. I was 18 months into my illness, and we knew that the radiation treatments had failed and my cancer was returning.
In the dream, I was in a windowless room with iron bars, rough concrete walls, and a bare incandescent bulb. If you have played a dystopian video game, you have been in this prison.
Guards pulled me out of the cell and beat me with fists and clubs. I tried to flee but was dragged down a hallway and hit again. Again and again, I was beaten, and each time I was dragged deeper into the prison to crueller, more brutal jailers. They mocked my helplessness. I knew that soon the beatings would kill me.
Then there was a moment in which the jailers were distracted. I stood up out of the pool of my blood. We were at the crossing of two corridors. I staggered down an empty hall. The guards did not notice; I knew that, soon, they would, but I kept going.
I passed endless locked steel doors. Then I came to a wooden door that I knew, somehow, might be open. I pulled it open, passed through, and closed it behind me. Now the walls were rough stone. Then dirt braced with wood: a tunnel. Other prisoners had made the tunnel, but I didn't know whether it led to escape or a place to hide. The first wooden door led to door after door. There was barely any light, and it wasn't clear what the source was.
The tunnel led to a dark room roughly hewn from stone. My dream had created this room from the memory of a 4th-century crypt I had visited in Milan. I found a crude stone stairway leading out of the vault and entered the nave of a church.
I wasn't safe in this church: the jailers would find me here; death was still close. But I could die here, not in a concrete cell. You have to die, but you don't have to die in the dark. You don't need to understand where the light comes from, just that it is.
What a life-altering, soul-jarring dream. Thank you for sharing it and it's palpable horror / redemption with such impeccable clarity. What I hear in this is that even in the depths of horror, move toward the light. The light will not alter the outcome, but in light, there is comfort.
Bless you as you move through this day.
Have you read C.S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces? Dream visions near the end have a similar sequence and feel.
It's an amazing retelling of the Cupid and Psyche myth -- the romance of the soul.