On Dreams

I've always been fascinated by my dreams. My brain seems to go into overdrive at times when I'm asleep, creating fantasticly unbelievable worlds of surrealism that are, at times, so real that I lose sight of it being a dream. On rare occasion, I remember enough of the dream to record the details in writing the next morning. Following is a dream as it was rcalled in the early morning hours of October 9, 2008. This account is unedited, and appears exactly as it was originally written:

Death Be a Hotel

I saw a car pull up, like an old VW rabbit, Nathan Eller and his father were in it, possibly Craven. Nathan looked young. Nathan invited me to come with him to a lake.

Nathan tied a rope to his car, and drove it into the lake and plunged to depth of 600 feet to get a rush – he comes up telling me how he never went that deep before.

A girl on the shore tried to seduce me, and as I was about to give in, I pushed her away – she had a friend come up behind me to shoot me, then she pulled out a gun to shoot me, but instead she got shot. I threw her body into the pool/lake and scrambled to get away before anyone saw what happened (Trying to escape from the consequences of sin?) and got into my car (parrallel parked, but easy to get out), drove away.

Took a right turn, and began driving somewhere unfamiliar, like across a bridge or something. Once I began down that road, there was nowhere to turn around. Before long, I found myself driving down a circular hallway in a hotel. Eventually I found myself in a hotel lobby filled with people wandering around lost. I stepped out of the hotel lobby and saw that I was on a beautiful beach. Somehow, the location was still Raleigh, or at least NC, but I seemed to be in some removed land that was no longer physically connected to the rest of the world. I think it was at this point that I realized I had died.

I began to worry about what to tell Cheryl or how I could even get in touch with her to let her know where I was. Later, a man comes up to me and, with a smile of assurance, tells me I’m going to the room of the saints. As the door of elevator opens to carry me to the room, there is no elevator – nothing but an empty shaft that looks like nothingness. Almost like glass with nothing behind it – not dark, not light, just NOTHING. I am told it’s Satan. The man tells me I have the power to rebuke Satan, so I try. He keeps coming back, eventually coming out of the elevator in the form of the people at the lake, I begin to worry that someone will know what happened there, but then realize he’s playing on my fears. I rebuke him anyway and he’s cast into the shaft and disappears. There is celebrating as the elevator opens to reveal an elevator car, but small, only enough for me and my companion (whoever she was).

Later, as we’re waiting to check out of the hotel, I go out on a balcony and there is a group of large black gangsta-wannabe’s on a balcony above me yelling at others on another level and throwing beef jerky to them. I remember feeling a real sense of lost-ness in this scene. Like the people are just there and unaware of the dire situation they’re in.

When we go to check out, the girl I am with puts it on her credit card, her bill was $58. The desk clerk gives me a bill, but I have no money, so the girl puts it on her card (I think it was a Citibank card) but the desk clerk cannot read her signature, I look at the receipt, and it (the signature) is gone. We realize it’s time to leave, look outside and instead of nothing there are lots and lots of people – we’ve returned to life. And for some reason, I think the two of us are going back to New York city.

Before we leave, we’re sitting at a table near the exit of the hotel, Doug Currin (pastor at Lake Waccamaw UMC) walks in, looking very confused. I ask him if he saw people out front and tell him that’s how he can tell whether or not he’s dead or alive: no people in front of the hotel, you’re dead; streets filled with people, you’re still alive.


The dream is fantastic enough in scope and message that someone decides to make a movie of it in order to serve as a warning to people regarding the devil and eternity.

In the movie, there’s a scene where we’re involved in tug of war with the evil one’s army. The ropes are tied in the middle around a red pickup truck which is being pulled primarily between our side and the devil’s side. But there are also two ropes pulling perpendicularly towards the right and the left (like a N/S and E/W configuration), but these are basically insignificant – it’s like they represent anything that pulls at our hearts or desires that we might think is irrelevant to the battle between God and Satan over our souls, and in fact they ARE irrelevant, because you’re ultimately going to end up with either God or Satan winning the tug of war. We get pulled across the lake, climb into the bed of the pickup truck with some large ugly man; the truck gets pulled over the edge of a bottomless shaft, but instead of falling we instantly find ourselves where we’re going to end up. The process of dying (in the film) is very frightening, but the death itself is instantaneous and peaceful.

Something about phone number of the hotel as being all 6’s – like 666-6606.