Wednesday, May 19, 2010

dreams

Last night I took a good, solid, after-work nap (which I needed - you know, cause I stayed at El til midnight the night before because I am a crazy party animal).
Anyway, I was tired. So I did this nap, went out, came home, and decided to try to go to bed early-ish.  And that then that thing happened, where if you sleep too much, you don't sleep well, and then maybe you have bad dreams.

Last night I had this dream that was a new (urban) twist on an old nightmare.  When I was a kid, we switched from a very conservative Lutheran church to a wacky Pentecostal church.  So, from maybe age 7 - 12(?)  I was exposed to all the things that those churches do, including this play:
A lot of churches do this play.  If you don't know about it, it's this play/evangelism tool where all these different scenarios happen, and good people and bad people make life decisions and end up in Heaven (a sparkly set playing the Hallelujah Chorus), or Hell, which is (for a seven year old) graphic and scary and dark and strobe lights, and metal.  You invite your friends, and they get scared into getting saved.
Anyway, it wasn't even the "Hell" part that was scary (for me), but this one scene, about "bad" teenagers (who were played by youth group kids wearing leather jackets and bandanas) who are shooting up with an unnamed drug, and overdose.   I was SO SCARED about this part.  Not the part that one went to heaven and one to hell, but the actual sticking a needle in your arm, and the psychedelic light show that followed.

So, I used to have these nightmares, where I was running around, playing in the creek near our cottage, and these scary teenagers would come up, and chase me down with an ENORMOUS (like 3') syringe, squirting drugs all over, and trying to stick it in my arm.  Sounds dumb, but really scary.
Anyway, last night, I had kind of the same dream, but darker (as in it was night out, it was under the El, and it wasn't teenagers in leather, but instead was actual drug addicts that I wouldn't be surprised to see in real life).  Same giant syringe and everything.  There was a plot too, but I won't bore you further.

I guess two things are the point.  1) I need to work a little bit at getting the right amount of sleep, because graphic dreams like that seem to only happen when I sleep WAY too much.  2)  Are churches still making this play?  It was pretty bad.  Like, production value is one thing, but even if you're inclined to believe in the heaven/hell thing, this play can't be portraying it in any sort of way that God would be okay with.

2 comments:

s. said...

that story reminded me of that hell house thing churches do at halloween. there's a documentary about it called, um... 'hell house' i think? you can netflix it.

marilyn said...

if you were me, we'd all have woken up dead.