So here we go with Dreams of WCG and what they still tell me. These are repetitive dreams with some having been experienced dozens of times until "I get it."
Lesson: You don't belong here any more. Fly away.
Dream #2 The sky is full of commercial jets. They are dropping like flies and crashing all over the place.
Lesson: You're world is crashing
Dream # 3 I am the co-pilot of a commercial jet. Every time, and I have had this dream scores and scores of times, we try to take off, a canopy of trees starts growing over the runway. I tell the pilot to hurry and he never does what I say nor does he ever acknowledge me. We crash every damn time.
Lesson: If you don't fly your own plane and only let others do it for you, you'll never get off the ground.
Dream #3b We start down the runway and here comes the canopy of trees growing over it. Screw this...I take over the controls and fly on out of it.
Lesson: You can't be the co pilot. You can't depend on others. They aren't listening and can't help you. You have to be the pilot if you want to take off.
Dream #4 This dream I have at least 50 times. I'm in Buffalo, NY trying to get to Rochester. I have a hard time figuring out which way is East and have to climb through stores and peoples backyards to get out of town. Once I get free of Buffalo and pointed in the right direction I start for Rochester on either a tricycle, a go-kart or even a skateboard. I never get there.
Lesson: I am trying to get "home" but I am doing it with an inadequate vehicle.
Dream #5 I am on a bus to and SEP camp somewhere. I get there and everyone is packing up to leave. Several times I have to climb on the bus roof because the ground is covered with snakes. I pack up an leave.
Lesson: You're too late for camp. Let the snakes be, take the bus home and get on with your life.
Dream #6 I am back a local church I pastored to give the sermon. Last night , the elder who smoozed me to my face and stabbed me in the back by telling the church I was the worst thing that ever happened to the church etc, was also there. I asked him if he was going to speak and he said no "but you better speak the truth."
Lesson: The elder still doesn't like me
I am at the feast. Sometimes it is packed full and other times it is nearly deserted and people are coming and going from rival sites. I have to speak and am up in the balcony when I am introduced to speak. I can't find my Bible or my sermon so will just go without. However, I can't find a way to get from the balcony to the stage ever.
Lesson: It's over. There is no way back and you don't need your Bible to live your life
In NONE of these dreams have I surmised that I am a prophet, an Apostle or have any business back in church. I get it!
What about you? Has your church experience haunted your dreams as your mind sorts itself out over the experience?
23 comments:
Not that I can remember. Maybe closer to my leaving, but I dont recall any. Then again, I've always been a lucid dreamer with the tendency to "switch channels" on dreams I find disinteresting or annoying, so maybe Ive just never paid enough attention to dreams of COGlodytism.
It really sounds to me like someone hurt you and I'm sorry for that ...
I dream about naked women. I bet Bob does too. I think it's a message from God. Go forth and multiply!
It is common among pilots to have dreams about wires or trees blocking their path...I've had them for years...that and dreams of being back in college taking the final exam and having no idea what it is about....
I usually don’t have any Armstrong-related dreams, well over 40 years into my recovery. But when I did, they were pretty horrifying, and not unlike the PTSD related dreams which I understand that soldiers returning from a battle zone typically experience.
At one time, I used to have vivid dreams that I had been levitated from sleep supernaturally, and was being propelled by demons at a high rate of speed towards a wall. Just as my head was about to hit the wall, I would wake up, profusely sweating and gasping for air, and realize that it was just a nightmare.
I also would dream that I was a teenager living at home again, and was being savagely horsewhipped by my parents who would not listen to any explanation or defense.
For years, I also dreamed that somehow I had gotten reinstated as a student at Ambassador College, and as I arrived on campus and began reestablishing a daily routine, I realized that I had made a horrible mistake, and wondered how I could escape this time.
Sometimes when I dreamed I could flap my arms and fly, I ended up inadvertently flying over a group of church people coming out of sabbath services, and before I could fly away, someone would notice me and yell out, “Hey, look, there’s Bob up there! He must be demon-possessed!”.
Finally, I used to dream that our old bindery crew had somehow been reassembled, and we talked and reminisced as we set up the machines and got ready to mail the Plain Truth, but the rollaway bins of magazines never came to us.
Most of my dreams these days are pleasant and refreshing. I take that as a good indicator.
BB
Interesting.
I am more into Jung than Freud.
Never had any dream about church during sleep.
I'm usually in control of my dreams and am actually able to program them like Netflix. I believe it is called lucid dreaming as RSK said. As a kid I usually programmed to be a car racer to impress the worldly girls and for church I dreamed I actually could sing very well while sitting next to that cute girl during services who actually turned quite worldly too.
I notice a lot of flying. One of my female friends once presented me with a part of the meteorite that smashed that huge crater in Arizona, to represent her presense in my life.
Re reading this stuff I should dismiss Jung and turn to Freud again. But Jung is so much better in story telling, I am confused.
My worst nightmares are like True Bread's. About not having passed that crucial exam in highschool. After discussions on this blog I sometimes dream that I did not pass into the ranks of the alumni of my ancient and distinghuished alma mater for having commpromised my IQ.
I am pretty sure that tonight I will be binge watching "the dreams of Byker Bob".
They will start with the amblin logo, not with the ET bycicle but with a real Harley reaching for the moon and a lot of people pointing at the Harley screaming, "Look there is Byker Bob" he must be demon posessed." Then he lands on the BS airstrip and starts cranking out 3 million PT magazines.
As a matter of fact, thinking of it, this dream would be kind of an amalgamation of the 1985 "Behind the Work and Young Ambassador" video's. They used a hot air balloon, not a Harley though.
nck
I have never had any dreams about that cult.
nck, were you raised from youth in wcg like BB?
5:37
Sir/Ma'am.
Would it serve a purpose to divulge that information? I am curious. For some that information might serve to proof that I have been permanently damaged by the experience in relation to my eccentric unconventional postings. Others might perhaps be asking about the combination of a wcg upbringing and my choice for an ancient institute of learning. Where would it serve you to know?
I see you seem to make a connection with BB. I will divulge for now that his upbringing was substantially different from mine. As if we lived on different planets. It took me a while to understand the reality of his upbringing which is surreal to me and my entire region.
Nck
The only recurrent dreams that I've experienced about the WCG have always been associated with the FOT. It's the same damn thing over and over again, we've been at the feast, and its time to get ready to return home. But the motel room is a total chaotic mess; we brought along so much stuff that I am finding it impossible to get everything gathered up and placed in our suitcases. Things from home that had nothing to do with the FOT are littering the motel room, and no matter how many things I pick up, there's always more stuff that I can't possibly find a place for. And then there was the problem of lugging everything to the car. I remember feeling so much frustration in these recurring dreams over my futile attempts to get everything packed away and I'd say to myself "never again, never again". The dream never ends with a successful resolution to the problem. It's been going on for years, and I swear I'll never get all that stuff packed away and the motel room cleaned up.
I don't think I have had any church specific dreams, but I did have a dream recently that had a woman in a bit part in it who I knew in WCG. I haven't seen her in 40 years until recently. We are FB Friends and she has been having much health issues and I pray for her.
I have 2 re-occurring dreams though that happen every 6 months or so with variations. One involves College. I keep dreaming it is the end of the semester, and the big final exam is about to happen and I haven't studied for it and/or missed an entire semester of classes. Another variation is when I was working on my MBA, I was taking graduate classes without the prerequisite undergraduate degree. I get these types of dreams involving my education at least once every 6 months.
Less frequent are the dreams that I have from my previous telecommunications career. I traveled a lot in the 1990s, and my dreams involve missing air flights at airports, and therefore missing important business meetings. I have had several of those. The most recent one involved me at the airport in Washington, D.C. missing a flight to Los Angeles for an important meeting, and me trying to figure out how to get there. The odd thing was that in all my travels in real life with my telecommunications company, I had never flown to Los Angeles.
I am sure there are deep emotional reasons that trigger our dreams, but some of them can be very strange. For whatever reason, I don't dream about the Great Tribulation or Germans landing in my neighborhood in January, 1972 - my deepest fears growing up in the Worldwide Church of God.
Richard
Oddly, WCG was a big part of my life for 30 years and I have had only two dreams that I can recollect. Both very early months of my contact with the WCG.
I dreamed that I married what I thought was a pristine AC girl and she ran away with a former classmate.
I dreamed that the Millennium was established and nothing really improved. People talked about it being the Millennium a lot but it was really just as bad as what we have now.
I think these two above are Kafkaesque distortions of real anxieties. The question that occurs to me: If someone is brain washed by a cult, do they have bad dreams related to the cult? Or does brain washing make they believe that "All is well, All is well with my soul." Hence, no bad dreams.
I feel favored that I did not have bad dreams - my waking experiences were enough.
I suspect I am an Empath with most of the associated traits and thus the recurrent WCG dreams I'm not hearing most have.
One point of clarification. The first nine years of my life were normal, because my parents had not yet heard “the program”. At that point in time, if you had looked up “family” in your Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, you probably would have seen a picture of ours, because it was normal and highly functional, with all members from both sides participating and getting along. Then, one sunny Sunday afternoon, our lives changed forever, because my parents read to my brothers and I “1975 in Prophecy” as we all sat on the front porch of our home.
This was explained to us as being precious truth that our friends and family were not privileged to know, making us some of God’s chosen people. Soon, we withdrew from our loving family because they were not part of “God’s True Church”, we moved two hours away to a little inbred redneck town, and my parents learned from the church that they hadn’t known “the truth” about spanking, and as kids, our own personal holocaust began as this segued into horrendous abuse. (If something doesn’t work, practice it more vigorously!)
My point in sharing this, is that during the second half of my childhood, I had the first 9 years as a frame of reference for healthy normalcy. Thank God for that, bigtime! I realized that there was something terribly wrong about the cultishness, naive acceptance of the weird, and the abuse. But, I had also bought into the teachings of the church as being “the truth”, even though I dearly wished that we hadn’t been so “privileged” or “chosen” to know it in advance. Seemed like the second rez would have been more merciful. But, I held them accountable. There was no equivocation about 1972-75 or about fleeing to Petra. Those were taught as being certain and ironclad. Although my parents and some siblings allowed the church to backpedal, to ridiculously claim that they had never set dates, to reprogram them, and to continue to follow, when 1975 failed, I did not believe that God would allow His mouthpieces to be so flagrantly wrong about such a huge thing. My eyes were suddenly opened to so many things about which I had always had questions and reservations, and I’ve spent the past four decades working towards recapturing (Oh, Herbie LOVED that word!) normalcy, balance, and a healthy outlook to life. Armstrongism is a very powerful modifier, and although some of what was lost cannot be gotten back, I’ve done the best I can, read widely, obtained therapy, and have become pretty darned functional. Unfortunately, in this case, when you realize that the Wizard was bogus, you can’t just click your heels together, repeat “There is no place like home” and suddenly wake up in your bed, surrounded by friends and family.
To me, part of recovery is not leaving any of the dead behind. It involves helping to open the eyes of those who are still deceived and suffering abuse at the hands of the cult leaders who have been drawn into ever deepening levels of craziness as the Armstrong prophecy mold continues to fail. We’ve all heard the phrase “unrequited love”. Armstrongites suffer from unrequited prophecy, the prophecy which in fact has been the lynchpin of their lives, and has altered their personalities and behavior in such a way as to make the bizarre appear totally normal. This, I’ve come to realize, is a form of intoxication, and is an addiction which destroys lives every bit as much as drugs or alcohol abuse. Nck seems to see some goodness left in the dunghill of HWA’s activities. I don’t. Even if there were some good, the corresponding evil is of such magnitude that any goodness cannot possibly cancel it out.
BB
I don't think I have dreams associated with my time at AC or WCG, maybe that is because it only occupied 12 years of my life, and like BBob I had a fairly normal life in the world after I left.
But I do get bad dreams and they are mostly to do with going on a journey and just not being able to get ready in time. Like I can't find my passport, I can't find clothes to wear, I spend too much time getting ready and miss the plane. Is this a subliminal reference to all those going to Petra ideas?
Then another dream I have is going somewhere and getting lost, not finding my car in a parking lot. I know where I parked it but it totally disappeared, or my house has dematerialised, and everyone says there was never a house there. Is this some kind of subliminal reference to losing my way to God and religion, or is it just a foretaste of getting old.
Dennis I have no clue as to the validity of the article beneath. I was just triggered by your last remark.
www.spiritualunite.com/articles/empaths-and-dreams/
nck
nck said...'Would it serve a purpose to divulge that [being raised from youth in Armstrong Doomsday Cult-(ADC)-] might serve to proof that I have been permanently damaged..'
I knew of one case of someone who was raised from youth in the ADC and he turned out to be a wife-beater (though he was never prosecuted by cult or civil authorities afaik as his family had good ADC leadership connections)(I only learned about it by chance from her outsider family members.)
I have dreams about going to feasts, usually with a host of problems or being in college again. They seldom make any sense, and i don't try to remember them. They get less as the years go by.
Dennis haunts my dreams!
I want reparations!
1:01
Only one wouldnt be statistically correct. The topic is do you dream about it?
5:37
You see what people are about here! Hardly encouraging for sharing personal information. Too many twisters.
Nck
Though I was in the WCG for about 16 or 17 years, I have had one dream that may be related to the church.
In that dream I was part of a group of people being moved through the air, with islands below us. The dream was short but the meaning of it could, perhaps, be related to a sermon on the place of safety?
I've learnt over the years that dreams don't mean much. Its just movies being played in the mind.
I don't have dreams about churchy stuff that I know of. But that's okay, because I have enough actual memories. I enjoyed the feast, believe it or not, however, all the church services are only bearable if you really believe. As soon as you don't anymore, they're something up with which you cannot put.
I didn't mean to imply any individuals here are messed up by early exposure to the ADC, just a general principle.
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