I had two dreams.  One about Abinadi and the other about a bloodline aristocracy. (more…)

I dreamed an old-fashioned general of the French type and his intelligent friend were seated at an outdoor cafe, talking.

“Young officers who are wild are better than young officers who are spiritless,” the general said  [I think I read this somewhere recently].  “The wild ones you can sometimes teach self-discipline too.  The spiritless ones cannot be taught spirit.”

“But wouldn’t it be better if you could teach them spirit?  That would be wonderful.”

The general is shocked.  “Why?  You don’t like the wild officers?”

“No, no, that part is fine.  But if you could have *all* your officers have both spirit and self-discipline, what a fantastic force you would be.”

The general is deeply shocked by the suggestion.  “Absolutely not.  It would never do.  The great mass of bland officers, we rely on them to keep the spirited ones checked.  A whole force full of self-disciplined officers with vigor and dash and self-purpose, it staggers my imagination.  It would be chaos, sir.  Chaos.  The Army would dissolve.  The nation would dissolve.  The world, sir, the world would dissolve.”

The friend is deeply disappointed in what this reveals about his old friend the general.  “Yes,” he said, and then certain words of remonstrance that I do not now recall.

I still recall a dream on the eve of my conversion (this would probably be in 2008) in which I saw a globe being covered by darkness; with the darkness being added like black pieces of jigsaw to cover the nations and oceans.

(I knew what was implied by this darkness from my own life and work.)

I saw that Good and evil are sides in a war. And I realized that I had to choose one side or the other: either that Life which was valuable, or incrementally-expanding darkness and spiritual-death.

At last I recognized that the we either take the side of Good – or else we are evil.

And I knew that I personally wanted to take the side of Good.

There is a paradise place where the grass is lush and soft; the dew sparkles; the trees whisper in the wind.  There is a farm there.  The farmer and his family have a routine.  Every morning, for example, he or one of his children go to see the ducks to make sure the fencing for their run is still well, to check for predators, and to collect eggs.  The land is beautiful and so is the routine.  But to make sure they avoid stagnation of the mind, each time they go to the ducks they recite a poem or a passage.  They do this for all their many ordered activities.

It is not necessarily a poem about the activity.  It is often just a poem they like.  But it is the same one for each activity.  They find it more beautiful that way.  At the ducks, Dover Beach.  Cutting cabbage for sauerkraut, Out Out Brief Candle.  There are a thousand or more that they recite.

At nights, they play together doing geometry proofs.

If you go past the influence of the farm and its people, past the woods they log, past the hills where they pursue game, past the event horizon of their lives, you find a wasteland.  It is dark and roiling with chaotic forces, with an anarchy of brutal energies.

The farm family doesn’t know it, but that roiling darkness is what underlies their farm also.  Only it is guided and tamed and brought into order by their poetry and their passages and the harmony of their lives.  It is what makes everything so lush and green.  The lush farm is the natural end those forces were meant for.

Here is  a story in which you are the hero.  Well, the sidekick.

There is a hero and his group and the villain and his group.  But you must not imagine that you are in a superhero story.  The hero is a suburban dad.  You are, well, you.  The rest of the hero’s crew are neighborhood people.  The villain is a rangy, rawboned young man in a wifebeater who operates out of a collection of trailers out in the sagebrush.  His crew are trailer park people.  One of his sidekicks is a woman in her 30s who looks like a cafe-waitress: a bit the worse for wear, stringy mouse brown hair, prettyish if not so unkempt, face a bit lined, a little too thin.  There are no superpowers.  Maybe minor powers, the woman can possibly do a few spells or something.  There are devices that work better than they should.  You are definitely a sidekick in a pulpish or cinematic story.  But no superpowers.

There is a backstory by the way.  Act 1, before the story starts, you and the hero tangled with the witchy woman.  You of course prevailed.  Now, in Act 2, she found this villain and helped him put together a group. (more…)

I dreamed of a temple built only by hand, and lit only by sunlight.

In it, for each new ordinance you did for yourself, you started back at the beginning and did anew every ordinance.

A young man came for his endowments.  He brought with him a building stone and his family.  He and his family had hewn out the stone themselves, and hauled it themselves.

This is the story that came to my mind.

The hero is one of us. An American in our world. Probably a teenager or young adult.

Something happens, and he is called out of our world into a land of villages. It is a real world, but it is also something like a game. He is a Level 1 Hero with stats. He gets little notifications and can see popups giving basic information about the people he meets.

He starts doing small favors for the villagers, fights animal pests, and grows in level. He unlocks achievements and new skills. He becomes more capable and faces larger and larger threats. The villagers cooperate with him and eventually he even acquires the ability to recruit them as militia and watchmen. But it bothers him that so much depends on him. Granted, he is a Hero and they are Villagers, but they aren’t just props in a game, they are real people, and it bothers him that they are so oddly unconcerned about their own safety. So willing to just leave it to him.

But one Christmas Eve he is out in the lonely moonlit snow on patrol. And he looks down from the slope he’s on, and through the firs he can see one of his villages, windows lit, the people spilling out into the streets singing and rejoicing together, the little church, post out over fires cooking good things, and he feels that it is all worth it. He feels their happiness, and he wants them just they way they are.

Achievement unlocked: love.

(more…)