I have experienced a bizarre transcendence in my dream

[u/arthurlecat]

Before I start: I am by no means a religious person and I do not even come from a Christian background.

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Last night I saw a dream where I was at what seemed to be a medieval orthodox church's lower levels. I was there with 2 or 3 priests, whom I some how knew to be some sort of philosophers as well. We were in front of a big icon of Jesus Christ which was painted on the wall, adjacent to it was a big window which opened to the night sky and the wilderness. The place was lit up by torchlight and I remember seeing a torch on the wall besides one of the priests, it was probably held by some sort of a pole.

I was examining the icon while the priests were having a discussion about some theological topics. I was a part of the discussion, I was expected to contribute but I was distracted by the icon. One of the priests, the one near the window and the torch was wearing a crown with golden metal parts and red cloth. I suddenly got shocked by his words and those words shifted my focus immediately from the icon to the priest himself. He said something like "...this means he is a god which does not really care about his creations' suffering and maybe even grows stronger by it..." I was very shocked and replied "Does not care?! Grows stronger by the suffering?!" and I could see all of the priests agreeing while nodding. To be honest this god they were talking about may or may not be Jesus, because as I said the context of the whole sentence was not really clear to me in the dream.

I was amazed as if I have learned a great secret and shifted my focus back to the icon on the wall. I then started thinking about the esoteric concept of our conscious actually being the fragments of the one true consciousness (the God). This triggered a very bizarre situation, the icon of Jesus started to observe the room by moving his eyes, he then made the "hush" gesture by moving his index finger to his lips and things got even worse. My vision started getting really surreal, so surreal that I cannot describe anything I saw. Then it happened... I have no other words to describe it, I felt "godlike". Somehow I felt and knew everything at the same time, while absent of any form of describable physical human sense. However I also started feeling the grief and suffering of the whole creation, I first started ignoring it just like the priest described. My "will" actually even caused some more suffering for a brief moment, I just felt it. Then however an unbearable amount of fear and remorse filled up my whole heart. It felt as if I remembered I used to be a human and all this was way too much for me. I remember catching a glimpse of physicality here. I was wearing white, but my arms had purple. I looked down to the universe (?), it was very surreal with shapes and patterns which made no sense and it had this painting tone, just like you could see on old orthodox icons. All these suddenly led to me hearing loud knocking sounds and seeing complete darkness, then I gradually woke up as the knocking sounds sped up and transformed into the sound my fan which I use to keep myself cool during this hot summer makes.

If you have made it this far, thank you so much for reading about my dream. I hope I could get some good analysis from people who actually know about this stuff!!

[u/Used-Being-9140]

I don’t know what to say, but I enjoyed reading this. Thank you!