The Day the House Fell Down

   Dream Journal

I WAS IN A KINGDOM HALL OF JEHOVAH’S WITNESSES. It was a wooden hut and I was attending the annual Memorial of Jesus’ death. As the bread and wine was passed around the room the skin on my hands started peeling off like a glove. I was shedding my physical body and becoming a spirit! Someone in the audience began to challenge my anointing. I was desperately trying to find a Bible to prove them wrong, but every book I picked up was a dictionary. Eventually I found a King James Bible and read 1 Corinthians 15:53 from the platform: “For this which is corruptible must put on incorruption, and this which is mortal must put on immortality.” Then I left the Kingdom Hall and went to a home where a small group of Jehovah’s Witnesses were having a meeting. My ex father-in-law (who I can’t stand) was there. His skin had peeled off and his face was now just a skull.

I went outside and the person who had challenged me earlier was there. He began following me and shouting at me. Try as I might, I couldn’t lose him on foot so I found a brother called Mark and got into his flying car. We took off and flew away but when we landed the man was still there, shouting at me that I was not anointed. I took two tea towels, a red and a blue one, and flapped them. This allowed me to fly high above the ground and escape from the man. Then I found myself with a young man in his dad’s (non-flying) car. I explained to him that even though it was just a normal car, together we could use our minds to make it fly. This we did, and we took off. It was foggy and there was no visibility. We flew to France.

I was on lunch break from school. I had gone home and I was sitting in the garden on a patio swing. My dad was there. We were watching TV together. I was eating Kit-Kats. I went indoors. My mum was in the kitchen. She was in her 40s. I told her I didn’t want to go back to school that afternoon but she said I had to. As I left I saw some bottles of blue medicine by the back door. Then I realised I was 53 years old and didn’t need to go to school anymore! I got in my Volvo 240 and drove up the road. I parked up, got out, and walked up a gravel drive to a small, glass-walled summer house where I saw my mum again. She was now about 90 years old and was being helped into bed by a nurse. I told her I wasn’t going to school anymore and that I had just remembered I had a full-time job at Gamston Airport. I got back in my Volvo and began driving to work wondering how to explain to my boss that I had forgotten to go into work that morning.

I was on field ministry. There was a sister called Charlotte who seemed very upset and anxious. I told her I would work with her. She said she would take me on one of her Bible studies. We climbed a spiral staircase in an ornate, Gaudi-esque tower. We reached the roof and I fell off, but it was okay because I could fly! I gently levitated to the ground and found myself in a long corridor with doors on either side. I opened the first door on my left and walked through into a tunnel dug out of snow and ice. There was a Ukrainian man called Oli hiding in the tunnel. He was scared. There was a bomb in the tunnel which was about to explode. I left the tunnel and walked along the corridor, opening each of the doors. Most of the rooms were empty. In one of the rooms there was a man asleep in a bed. Eventually I found a room with a Russian man in it. I told him Oli didn’t deserve to die. I returned to Oli and we began tunneling through the snow. After digging for a while we exited into a snowy landscape. I told Oli we were “behind enemy lines” and that “the Russians [are] coming.” We walked down to a road and jumped into the back of a large, black, military truck. There were lots of refugees on the truck—men, women, and children—all dressed in black. After a while the truck stopped and we all disembarked. As we walked down the road I handed out carrots to the refugees.

I found myself in a room with the refugees. I was trying to type on a Commodore 64 computer but the keyboard was broken and wouldn’t type the correct letters. One of the refugees told me I was making too much noise. I told him to shut up. The 8-Bit Guy from YouTube was there. He had a Commodore 64 user manual. I asked him to help me fix my Commodore 64.

I was in the house I lived in as a teenager. I was asleep in my bedroom. A young woman arrived with her mother. She woke me up told me she was there to inspect the house with a view to buying it. I showed them around and suggested that the young woman turn the house into two flats. That way the rental income would pay for her mortgage. I suggested she add a door at the top of the stairs to make the upstairs flat self-contained, and a partition wall and door in the downstairs dining room to create a bathroom. Every time I said the word “door” the young woman’s mother rolled her eyes and mumbled something. After a while I realised she hated doors and preferred open plan living. Then I noticed my mum as sitting in a corner. She was sewing a yellow, fabric lampshade that had come unstitched. I asked her, “Why don’t you just glue it together?”

I took a hi-fi amplifier to a music shop and asked a member of staff to fix it for me. I told him the PCB was not working. While I was waiting I tried out a selection of guitars that were hanging on the wall. Some were too big for my hands. Others had an unusually large number of strings and were unplayable. After what seemed ages I asked the man if my amplifier was fixed. It wasn’t. He didn’t seem to know what he was doing so I grabbed him by the mouth and threatened to beat him up if he didn’t fix it immediately. 

I found myself back in my teenage bedroom. My dad and mum were there along with my (now ex) wife, my children, and several other children from the JW congregation. Just then, the walls began to ripple and the room began to rock to and fro. I realised the house was about to collapse so I told everyone to get out quickly. After everyone was safe I went back into the crumbling building to save our cats and dog. I made my way upstairs where I found our pets. I opened a window and passed the animals down to my family below. As I tried to exit the house the walls and ceilings collapsed and I was buried under the rubble. I managed to dig myself out and as I escaped from the wreckage I saw my white rabbit lying motionless on the ground. It was dead. Then the ground opened up and swallowed my (now ex) wife and daughters. I spent the rest of my dream yelling at people to “Stay away!” and rummaging through the rubble for my personal possessions.