Well, on Wednesday night I had a dream that was not so much a dream as a trip to the dark side. I have never had this kind of dream before. I am not given to having visions or angelic visitations, and it’s kind of sad that my dream Wednesday was my first extended trip to the spirit world. It was terrible, and I have recorded it in slightly more detail in my scripture journal. But so my posterity doesn’t have to go dig that up, here’s the slightly edited version:
It is 2:30 am in the morning, and I just had a series of spiritual experiences. Abe and I spent three hours before bed discussing the Church, and we argued. I went to bed feeling really depressed.
As I began falling asleep, in between sleep and wake, a voice came into my head and offered to show me the world. I followed the voice and was surprised and rather pleased to discover that she was taking me on an aerial tour of the neighborhood. We left my house and went up into the air, looking at the houses. As we moved left, further and further, the neighborhood turned into a bunch of new neighborhoods that I had never noticed before.
At the same time, the voice began narrating to me. I thought she was going to tell me about what we were seeing, but instead she started to tell me negative things about myself. The first things she said seemed to be totally true, so I listened to her harder, thinking she must be enlightening me. Then she started to speak faster, and her voice grew louder, so much so that I became frightened. Her words started to stop making as much sense, and I could tell the things she was now saying were untrue, but she sounded desperate to say them. Her voice kept getting louder, and as she spoke I started to feel a terrible, physical, burning sensation in my actual brain. I felt certain I was about to see an actual demon step out into this vision, and I was terrified. I became aware that Abe was next to me, and I tried to ask him for help. He tried to help me but could not speak over the voice of this female demon. Just as I was about to despair, I woke up.
As soon as I woke up, I woke Abe up and told him what had happened. My brain still felt like it was on fire, and it was very clear to me that this was no ordinary dream. The veil has been thin for more than a week now, and I had had premonitions earlier in the week that I was about to have a spiritual dream.
This is how I interpret the dream: For years I have struggled with overwhelming feelings of shame and low self-esteem. It has gotten progressively worse over the years, to the point where my inner voice is quite terrible. What I learned from the dream is that this inner voice is not my own. It is an evil spirit, and this spirit wants to harm me. As I fell asleep, I was struggling with suicidal ideation, and I realized when I woke up from my dream that if I keep listening to this evil spirit, I will be physically harmed. I will harm myself.
I asked Abe for a blessing, and he gave me a long blessing. I don’t remember most of what he said, but at the beginning of the blessing he told me I was to still give my Mother’s Day talk. I assumed he was talking about the talk I have already written. Then he said some more things– I think they were about all the people who love me, and he included both my heavenly parents and my earthly parents, mentioning my dad by his name, Benjamin. He included our children in the list (which is always reassuring to me to hear!).
Then, Abe stopped and said with great emotion, “You will write a new talk. This talk will be called, ‘I am a child of God,’ and your experience in writing this talk will be even more spiritually rich than the experience you had writing your first talk. You will rely on this talk throughout your life, and it will help heal you. There is nothing more important for you to learn right now than your own worth as a beloved, cherished daughter of God.”
(This is now me blogging again):
I am back blogging, so it has been several days since I had this dream. And still, I can say that the dream was the absolute scariest thing I have ever experienced. Up until that dream, I believed in evil spirits, but I didn’t think much about them. I read about them in the scriptures and had read prophetic accounts documenting their existence, but all of that felt ancillary and fundamentally irrelevant to my own mortal experience.
But after that dream, my world view is quite different. I know that there was an evil spirit talking to me. That knowledge is terrifying, but it is also a blessing. It means that the horrible thoughts I often think about myself might not–probably are not–my own. They are planted. I don’t need to own them, to identify with them, to assume they are true. This knowledge is a beautiful gift.