Nightmare

is back.

I am riding in an open top Land Rover through the African savannah.  The wind is blowing.  There is a guitar and a huge rifle in the back seat.  It smells clean and fresh.  I am laughing.

The wind changes.  The smell changes to something faintly sickly sweet.  There is a tree in the distance.  It looks wrong.

We get closer.  I see black cloth on the tree.

Lord Have Mercy

We get close enough to see the tree.  There are things hanging from the branches.  As we get closer, I scream.  There are 12 priests hanging from the branches.  Swaying in the breeze.  From the looks of the cassocks, they are Jesuits.  Sometimes in the dream they are beaten; other times they have the faces of angels, dead angels.

My guide drives the Jeep under the tree and we cut them down.  There is no where to go with them.  We decide to bury them.  I have Holy Water.  I sprinkle it on the soon to be graves.

My guide begins to dig.  He digs with an efficiency that he has done this thousands upon thousands of times.

Christ Have Mercy

I wash the priests and prepare them for burial as best I can.  There are sheets in the jeep.  I wrap them in the sheets.

As we work, we sing and chant Lamentations and the Office of the Dead.  I do not know what these are in real life, but in the dream, I know them all.  We chant the Litany of the Saints except all the saints are marytrs.

It is hot.  There is a sense of urgency.

We bury them.  I am sad they are not getting proper funerals but yet I am detatched.

Lord Have Mercy

I mistakenly told someone this dream.  She indicated that this was indicative of my anger with the Catholic Church and that I had 12 months to make a change.

But I am not convinced.  There was nothing in that field, that savannah to indicate that it was actually in Africa.  It could easily be the Kansas or Illinois prairies.

I wonder if I'm dreaming of things to come.

I am chilled to the bone thinking of it.