The Dream

I had a rather remarkable dream last night.  I dreamed that my wife and I were looking out the window...somewhere, and we saw two people outside.  The man suddenly disassociated into two images, rather like the way that a flexible mirror can break an image into two parts.  The images were similar, but not identical; one was coarse, crude, and angry; the other gentle and peaceful.  The coarse and angry image evaporated away, and the peaceful image suddenly rose into the sky.  Then the same thing happened for the woman, although the angry split image was not quite as angry and coarse as for the man.

Next, a couple that we knew came into our house, and both of them suddenly split into two images, one peaceful and the other angry -- and the angry images became quite aggressive and threatening, then evaporated, and the peaceful images lifted off into the sky.

And then the same happened to my wife and me.

I have never paid much attention to apocalyptic ideas of the Rapture, but it does fit that model rather well, along with the curious "splitting" into sinner and saint.  This was a very odd dream.

I think perhaps this is because I am coming to grips with the fact that I will be at my current job a very long time -- there is no prospect of retirement or changing careers to something that involves public policy until the economy recovers mightily, and I can't imagine that President Clinton is going to allow that.  In a sense, my current day job is rather like the Catholic notion of purgatory: an opportunity to free myself of all sinful desires to do work that I enjoy and that I am good at doing.