"there is no such thing as religion"

[svance22]

Background info: I am a recovering addict of an opiate addiction. My fiance is in jail, hopefully getting out soon, and has been studying and practicing Islam. I looked into Islam, as I looked into many religions, finding them all very interesting. I fully believe in God, one God. But on other subjects I am "if-y" at this moment.. I have been though military training and in army reserves, graduated high school. and have been to jail "for a few days only". My dream.. (in the begining i was with my bf, holding into him, happy, joking, he had to go somewhere, and i was going to meet him later when i arrived at the location, but idk where it was) (So the part of my dream that i remember scared me very bad, woke up with a panic attack, felt like an apocalypse dream and took me a second to realize it didnt happen) Me and a group of others were walking through a hallway in what seemed to be our high school. We stopped and ate dinner in the cafeteria, but one girl asked me if I can come back with her later, because she has to do something in the gym now and doesn't have time to eat. I said I would. The group of us is walking through the hallway again and we see a large machine, with a satellite, which there were two scientists standing beside, taking notes, and making adjustments to the dials. "Back away from the machine" they said, and explained how it emitted a certain level of radiation which is very dangerous to us. (at this time i realized they were wearing protective gear while we were just dresses normally. We were also being lead by someone who was dressed the same way as they were.) After walking past them, i heard them talking about how this experiment had to be done due to the fact that there is no such thing as religion. The group of us then walked into another hallway, and big metal doors shut and locked us out of the hallway with the machine, (like a jail door or a heavily secured hospital) There was a man at a little wooden table with a notebook, and the group started signing out two by two, and walking to the exit all the way down the end of the hallway and getting on buses (i didn't see them leave but i assumed they were buses) and heading for somewhere "safe". (at this point i felt like the people who worked there were keeping something from the group of us. it felt very eerie.) When it was almost my turn, the girl who missed dinner came up to me and said to hurry up, she has to go get her food now. I felt like i was being rushed, and we didn't have time to do all that. She ran off. I started running, but it felt like i was running in place and the walls were moving, but my feet weren't. Eventually I got to the cafeteria. Waiting for the girl to return, I looked at a boy i know and asked "do you think that there is a direct correlation between the machine in the hallway and their talking about there not being such thing as religion?" he said "yea, are you kidding, look around" and i looked around the cafe, people sitting down eating from trays. All the same food and portion sizes, the same drinks, all set up the same. he said "What if everyone was sitting here and one day someone says 'stop. do you hear that?' and people stop and listen and look around, and someone notices that the juice they gave us isn't really juice, but they gave us ice water" what they heard was the ice cubes, but we didnt see them?? this though had made a big impact on me.. i was thinking that maybe he was right, and how we viewed reality wasn't real they way things were, but maybe they gave us medicines or tricked us somehow to see or hear things that weren't really there.. My vision got blurry and i felt like "reality" was slipping away from me, and was starting to have an anxiety attack.. I tried looking around the room.. and i woke up.

[JoannaB]

I will try to look at your dream again when I have more time. However, for now, your dream made me think of some of my own spiritual journey recently: I have been questioning reality or rather my previous perception of reality and forming new theories of what reality is like, what is real and what is not, what I believe and what I do not. I have come to the realization that maybe it does not matter what one's religion is, as long as one does believe something, and continue to move on one's spiritual journey in the way that seems best, with the understanding that eventually one may come to a different cross road and take a different path, and also one might look back on the road one had been traveling on and realize that from one's current perspective the path one took before looks wrong, but that perhaps it was important to take that wrong path too because of the lessons learned, and one could not have come to this point if one had not gone that way. And as long as the current point in the path is consistent with one's best understanding of the best path at this point in one's journey, all is well with one's world. And if one looks at one's current beliefs or current direction that one is moving in and thinks that something is wrong, one needs to correct that. However, I believe that there is no one correct path, and no one correct religion (all are correct in some ways), because many paths and many religions can lead one closer to understanding the truth about God, about humanity, about oneself. I know that this is more about me and my beliefs than about your dream, but based on your comments, I had the sense that you might find this pertinent. If you do not, please disregard my comment, and as I said, I will try to find another time to reread your dream to see whether I can come up with a more pertinent response. EDIT: Ok, I had a couple of thoughts that might be pertinent to your dream. You may be comparing conversations with atheists to radiation poisoning experiment: perhaps you are worried that you will become convinced by their words that there is no religion, because you are without your protective gear right now, vulnerable. I would like to reassure you that someone who is looking at different religions and finds them very interesting, like you, I think may not be as vulnerable to atheism as you fear. Personally, I have found conversations with atheists on DreamViews to be worthwhile for me though at times frustrating of course, but they have helped me reexamine my beliefs and reformulate them in new ways as well, however I am at a point in my spiritual journey where I am quite confident in my faith though redefining what I believe as part of spiritual quest so that may be a different point than yours, and thus what is safe for me may well not be safe for you, because yes words can be harmful like radiation, sometimes one can get hurt badly before one realizes what happened. The scene in the cafeteria, everyone is eating the same food, though it is very much a scene like your on the fence dream scene of loss of individuality. However, your guide in this scene points out to you, what if someone became aware, and realized that things are not what they seem, got a new individual outlook on life. I think this is about self awareness and becoming more aware about reality, that things are not what they seemed. And I think from all you have said, you are at such a point in life, where you have awakened to this greater understanding and are now looking around you more aware. I am in a very similar situation myself, though in my case my awakening was not from drugs, but from depression and self esteem issues and self censorship, but then I started examining my life and started becoming aware and redefining who I want to be. So while we got to this point from a different path, and in many ways our current situation is different, but we are both on a self awareness and self improvement path. I recommend to you sticking around DreamViews. It is an interesting community of excentrics, and I feel like I have grown a lot through interactions with others here. Have you considered learning how to lucid dream or are you already lucid dreaming? I would recommend that as well. Lucid Dream practice is a great set of tools for self exploration and self improvement if you want it to be. A lot of this site is about lucid dreaming.

[Wakinyan]

I agree with JoannaB’s views but would like to fill in with some details. The dream starts out with you being together with your boyfriend, and you will meet him again later. So the starting point and end point is at him, so the journey has to do with him, but it is your own inner experience. The fact that the journey is at a school emphasize the fact that it is about learning something. Central in this dream is food. To eat is to integrate something. So you need to, or want to, integrate somthing, perhaps knowledge (it being a school and so forth). There’s an expression I come to think of: “Food for the soul”, which I believe this dream is very much about. You go to eat (integrate food for the soul) at this school, but someone says: Not right now, we need to do this and that first. And what you need to do is see the scientists. (I know that that is not how the story was told in your dream, but there is a certain dream logic in my point of view that works this way.) Because you cannot integrate this without additional knowledge. The scientists works with a satellite, and they doing it because they don’t believe in religion. They’re sending satellites to heaven, there’s no god there, that’s quite obvious to them. They represent the modern, rational man who believes what he can see; but also that part of the dreamer who sometimes doubts. The radiation is “dangerous” to the dreamer – I presume – because the dreamer’s identity is of a religious person; so this other world view is dangerous to that self image, and so to the ego (which the dreamer represent). This world view is locked in, and persons of the other world view is taken to a place “somewhere ‘safe’”. On the one this is good because the effects of the other world view does not threaten the ego so to speak, but on the other the result is one-sided. One-sidedness is something the psyche cannot stand, and that is the material for many dreams, and so the dreamer have the eerie feeling that they are keeping something important from her, perhaps something she needs. Now you can eat, now there’s something to integrate. The same girl who took you from the cafeteria now makes you go back, so even though she does not behave like one, she guides you through this experience. You ask the boy about the correlation between the satellite and the non-religious attitude. Satellites are up in heaven, they look like stars, and they allow humanity to communicate through different mediums, and so they are a good symbol for enlightenment and works (as a symbol) as a good replacement for religion. So the question is on target, of course, and summarize the dream, the food for the soul of this story, which we try to integrate. The boy says of course there is such a correlation, “look around”. What he wants us to see is the fact that everybody is eating the same thing in the same sizes from the same plates and so forth. So the food for the soul is all the same; one cannot it this and another that, one little, another much, one drink water and the other Coke – everybody is to eat the same, to consume the same food for their souls. That can be a critical image of religion. If that is so, why would the dream show us a critical view of religion – because the dreamer’s ego has a positive view of religion; dreams compensates and that is one reason we are disturbed by them, they never tell us what we want to hear, it gives us the other side. Everybody eats his collective food until someone like the boy in The Emperor’s New Clothes says: “This isn’t true!” We have agreed upon a reality which are not there. And perhaps reality is nothing but a general agreement between the conscious minds of humanity, because it makes thing much simpler. But turning inward, journeying into the depths of ones own being blurs the boundaries between the perceived reality and other reality, and this I think is what this dream is about. It is an existential dream about what is reality and what is my understanding of it, and of course if reality is not what we think it is, it would be difficult not to panic. I’m in a hurry and I got to go, but I must stress that I do not – and I do not think the dream does either – question religion as such, and definitely not questioning anybody’s beliefs; but it is a unconscious reaction on a conscious aittude.

[svance22]

Perhaps I should tell you about the experience I had a while ago. aprox, a year or so ago.. I was still in active addiction, but had cut down A LOT on the amount I used, might as well have quit then.. The guy I was dating at the time was also an opiate addict. He no longer had to go to probation and decided that means he can smoke weed again. I used to smoke all the time, for about two years before i was introduced to other drugs and then gave up smoking. But since I have done it before I figured It was harmless. Instead of marijuana, he packed a bowl with "Cloud 9" a type of K-2 or spice, synthetic marijuana. As he was packing the bowl I did one pill, a Oxycodone 30, which was a very small amount compared to what I had gotten used to, and I took one hit from the bowl. I handed it back to my bf, and laid down on the bed beside him and closed my eyes. Still, to this day, explaining what happened next brings tears to my eyes, because it is filled with so much indescribable emotions, and indescribable views. But long story short.. I was in a tunnel of light (indecribable colors) ans pulsing through...until i got to this light orb..that i tried to reach out and touch.. but ass soon as i almost touched it, i got sucked back.. into the darkness..that was complete emtiness and darker than blacker than black.. and pulsed all the way through that to the light and all the way to the orb ..and got sucked back again..but even further back than before.. and this happened like 5 times.. at one point in the light part ..there was a word made of what seemd like greek characters..and i realized everything was made from this word..and it was "good" all meanings of "good" just awesome..everything amazing and feelings like love and peace and rest.. and in the darkness there was a word..the opposite..just evil.. but it was made of the same characters just mixed up.. but the last time i went to the darklness..as soon as light started to appear again, i opened my eyes and was in my room since then my perception of reality and religion has been questioned by myself..and it is an experience i would not want again just simply because of my fear of the darkness..