Dream as Truth

Francisco Goya

Mark and I are sleeping in cots in a big room filled with other cots, and people we don’t know are sleeping in them. The cots are placed in tight, organized rows barely two feet apart, side-to-side and head-to-toe, filling up the room.

The blinds are closed at the several windows, but the outline of dawn is visible at their edges. I’m awake, and several others are waking up, and a few are sitting on the edges of their cots or have gotten up. I get up myself, and walk to a door on the side of the room that is opposite the windows. The door is open, revealing a staircase. I know that at least one person has already walked up the staircase, possibly more. I arrive at the doorway but stay inside the room.

I look up and see that the stairs go up for quite a ways, and all the way at the top there is a diffuse light. I can’t see people at the top of the staircase, but their voices are easily audible, and it is easy to identify a plangent, pleading quality in the voice of a man I don’t know. The man is speaking to someone whom I soon recognize as being Jesus Christ. The man is saying, “But I lost my body!” It’s not the first time he’s repeated this statement, for he is trying to convince Jesus that it is not okay that he’s lost his body, that he misses his body, and perhaps he might want to go back downstairs in order to regain his body. He regrets having gone up the staircase. Jesus seems to be trying to get this man to understand that things will be better without his body, for when he’s in the presence of God, the feeling will be much better than any of the feelings the man felt while he had his body. I understand the man’s fear, and the man’s regret, at not having his body anymore. How can pleasure, especially sexual pleasure, ever be approximated, or equaled, by the supposed ecstasy of being in the presence of God?

I lurk in the shadows next to the base of the staircase. I’m afraid to go up. I for one certainly don’t want to lose my body. Besides, I would never leave Mark. I turn to look at him and see that he is still asleep in his cot. The love I have for and from him is so strong and powerful, so consoling and reassuring, that there is no way I would ever exchange that for a promised eternity of bliss next to God. In the first place, Jesus has numerous times turned out to be a liar, a charlatan as slippery and elusive as a snake oil salesman. He promises numerous times, but he doesn’t deliver. In the second place, why would God have given us the gift of human love, with its profusion of feelings and emotions, with its concomitant thrill and balm, only to see it wrenched away and substituted by a neoplatonic, abstract and spiritual rapture, which, for all its ethereal qualities, for all its promises of being able to linger in perpetual and divine joy, in comparison seems like a forced peregrination for all eternity in an unfeeling, celestial apathy?

I turn away from the open door by the base of the staircase and return to my cot next to my beloved. I shall wait until he wakes up, and together we shall seek solace inside the dark room. Somebody should open up the blinds to let in the growing light of day. If no one else will, I’ll be the one to open them, as soon as my true love wakes up. He prefers to sleep in total darkness. But as soon as he’s up, I’ll open up the blinds.

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About the author

Roy Luna: Roy Luna is a retired French professor who dabbles in the arts, tinkers with music, reads heavily in fiction and history, but does not neglect biographies or science. His main efforts these days are devoted to writing a trilogy of novels based on events occurring during the years between the death of Voltaire (1778) and the French Revolution (1789-94), years rich in both enlightened human progress and dark, evil terror. Three times a week he volunteers at Dunbar Old Books, making sure orphaned books find their way to other readers. His library at home may have surpassed the 10,000 mark, and he valiantly tries to read them all… The one important thing to retain about Roy is his horror at the sins, the injustice, the atrocities, the crimes against humanity that are perpetrated and justified in the name of religion. Any belief system that condones such savagery has discarded its humanity, abandoned its compassion, and forsaken its principles of empathy, tolerance and love of one’s neighbor.