Have you had dreams about non-belief?

[cynatnite]

I do think the dreams we have is our subconscious at work. I think that's what happened in my case, but trying to understand it...I just can't. It's really bugging me.

I had a dream that I was with my granddaughter at a outing of some sort where there were a lot of people. At some point we got separated.

I was looking for her and trying to find help. I remember being horribly frightened. One man volunteered to help me.

I don't know if he was a preacher or what, but I distinctly remember him saying that I should pray for her return. I remember saying back to him that I don't give a damn about praying. I wanted to find my granddaughter. He was very insistent on it as I tried to follow him.

He disappeared up some stairs and a dead body fell to the ground a few seconds later. I do also remember begging for people to help me.

Yes, this was a creepy dream...a nightmare, if you will, but I am more bugged by the fact that this character was insisting that I pray.

This is bugging me. Opinions appreciated.

Have you had dreams that involve your atheism/agnosticism?

[Warpy]

1. I haven't had any dreams about belief since I was a little kid

and those were mostly nightmares. Ugh.

[TxDemChem]

2. I'm sorry that happened to you.

I haven't had any dreams like that before. I can imagine it was quite startling though.

[defacto7]

3. I had a recurring dream over a few month period

some 20 years ago. It always started as I walked into a large church reminiscent of a protestant fundi church much like I attended as a child. But as I walked into the sanctuary the people were all dead, as a matter of fact they were piled up waist deep throughout including the isle. I continued walking into the sanctuary and with every consecutive recurrence of the dream I ventured farther up the isle climbing on the dead corpses and walking over them. I was never scared nor did I wake up like in a nightmare but I was very disturbed and hated being there. I noticed some were half dead just laying there looking up at me. Finally after many recurrences I got all the way to the platform where the ministers were dead as well. I turned around and looked at the bodies in the audience and said with a very calm but deeply moved heart, "I do not need to be here". The dream ended and I have not had it since.

Over time, I think my psyche was struggling with a deep seated unsettled issue that played out in this dream. It was my past, growing up in a religious environment, attending churches like this as a child, struggling with the religious teaching that never satisfied my curiosity about reality.... and that it was no longer necessary to be confronted with it. It was the point where it was finally put to rest. The past was dead and I no longer needed to connect to the contradictory religious teachings of my past childhood. I was finally free of it.

[frogmarch]

4. In a sleep paralysis episode I had,

Jesus appeared at my bedside with a knife, meaning to cut out my brain. I wanted to fight him off, but I was paralyzed. I couldn't scream obscenities at him, either. All I could do was make guttural noises. To escape, I made myself fall asleep, and when I awoke he was gone, and I was no longer paralyzed.

I wasn't traumatized by the episode. I thought it was funny. Jesus wanting to remove my brain so I could be a good Christian....

[deucemagnet]

7. Jesus, that's funny and terrifying at the same time.

I used to get waking sleep paralysis as a child, too. I never had hallucinations, but they still scared the hell out of me.

[stone space]

5. I don't recall ever having such a dream, but then again, I don't remember...

...most of my dreams, and even those dreams where I remember waking up with a memory of the dreams intact, I rather quickly forget the specific details.

[LeftishBrit]

6. Not in the last few decades; but when I was about 10 or 11, I had been exposed to the idea of hell..

Not from my family (mostly atheists; and most who weren't were Jews, who aren't usually preoccupied with the afterlife); and not from school, where we did have daily Prayers, but no hellfire preaching; but from some of my reading.

I still remember dreaming that I was reading one of the volumes of 'Uncle Arthur's Bedtime Stories' - certainly one of my sources of fundie religion, and scary cautionary tales, but not, I think, of Hellfire - and that one of the stories was about a boy who didn't believe in God, so when he died, he went to Hell and the Devil put him into the fire. The story, in my dream, concluded: 'We must all be sorry for him. He came from a good home in a good neighbourhood.'

But no, not since then, unless you count the time when religious right-wingers contributed to the defeat of my MP, and I had a dream that the election in my constituency had been hijacked by the thieves who had stolen my handbag in Amsterdam the previous year! Not sure that I wouldn't PREFER the Dutch handbag thieves to the likes of Christian Concern for Our Nation.