A Dark Dream

I just awoke from perhaps the darkest most disturbing dream of my life.

After a long awaited reunion with my family and a bit of fanfare, we began to get into the normal swing of our lives for the rest of the day. But there was something telling about the subtle comments and eye motions my parents made as they made presumably casual conversations with me. Their deep religiosity is not generally of much concern to me, as to the best of their knowledge, even by their own moral standards, I have made few transgressions. After a while, the topic of some personal friends of my parents came up, and my mother almost instantaneously was swept into a horrible spell of crying. As she wretch agonized with tears, my dad told me that their friends would marry, and that it had been decided the marriage ceremony would be held as an orgy. Given that a marriage, in my parent's world, is primarily a religious sacrament, to hold an orgy at one's marriage would be one of the most blasphemous acts possible. Participation in such an activity would sure bring eternal damnation upon ones soul. Through my mother's tears, she turned to me and said, "WHAT HAVE YOU BEEN DOING ? We received a letter last week filled with black ashes, and a small note which said 'These are the ashes of your son's soul, for it burns now in the fires of hell.' "

I didn't sleep enough last night, so after a 5-6 hour hiatus from sleep in which I attended class and ate, I was able to return directly to an extended REM period. Though I slept little more than an hour, I felt certain as I awoke that I had been sleeping for 8 hours or more. This is what I dreamt. Given that our dream states can control our emotions beyond the extent to which they might be affected as a consequence of the actual content of the dream, this dream was profoundly disturbing.