The Writing Machine

Stories by Christian Cloud Abraham

My Dreams are the Devil’s Dreams

MEMOIR PROJECT ROUGH DRAFT

The church I was raised in was, by the description, “the faddish and fanatical devotional following of one man’s teachings,” a cult. And the leader we followed was an excommunicated preacher from Southern Ohio named Dr. Victor Paul Wierwille. Dr. Wierwille was a self-proclaimed prophet for the 20th century who taught speaking in tongues, rejected the trinity, and proclaimed that dreams, much like the appendix, once served a function, but now were no longer needed. It was taught to us that in the Old Testament, when a person dreamed, it was a message from God; however, due to the cryptic nature of God’s dream language, it required a prophet to decipher the message. But times changed when Christ died on the cross, rose from the dead, ascended into heaven forty days later, and the apostles spoke in tongues shortly thereafter. Now, according to Dr. Wierwille, every person had the ability to become born again and have a direct line of communication to Christ, therefore making the need for God to use dreams to communicate to his people, obsolete. However, the feature was not removed from the hard coding in the human psyche and so we still dream. As an explanation for dreams in this day and age, Dr. Wierwille offered on the light side that some dreams can be a way to cast our cares to God, to relieve the soul of heavy burdens, and let go of our troubles. But on a more sinister side, the other dreams—the nightmares and the disturbingly absurd dreams—these dreams were the work of the Devil. And these dreams—these Devil dreams—these dreams were my dreams.

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© 2006 Christian Cloud Abraham

Posted on September 24, 2006 in
Emotion: Fear, Type: Creative Nonfiction