Do you believe in the future?

11:00 a.m., and I'm just waking up. I'm a late sleeper, and as far as I know, all of my lucid dreaming happens between 7 and 11 in the morning. I don't know the exact implications of this one, meaning I don't know how deep it goes, but I think it's important.



I'm a reporter on Earth. It's Christmas Eve, and all I want to do is get the hell off this planet. The future has become the neo-technological space-age era of information predicted by the science-fiction writers. There are no trees left. Nature is totally gone, subjugated, used as a foundation for this new Age. I want to go explore the stars, see if there is anywhere else in the Universe I can be happy.

I'm standing on a balcony overlooking the main spaceport of Earth, and there's a couple standing there next to me. Young, about my age, dressed the way those on the fringes of society would dress (I can't explain it any better). I must have been thinking about Rent (I've been watching/listening to/reading about it a lot lately, and I can see thei influence in this dream), because they said to me how ironic it was, this was their last year on Earth.

"What do you mean? Are you leaving too?"
(laugh) "It's Christmas Eve, man. You're not going anywhere on one of those."
"So where are you headed?"
"The next world. We're going to kill ourselves."

I immediately recoil from the idea. It goes against everything I, as a reporter, believe in, eveything I can see, everything I was taught to see, to think, to understand. But these two don't seem crazy, and they don't seem depressed. They are, in fact, very casual, calm, and happy. I don't even know them, but it makes me sad to think of such a thing happening.

"Can I hold your hand while you die?"
(smile) "Yes, of course - on one condition."
"What's that?"
"Come with us...."
"Why?? Why would you want to do such a thing?"

They turn from the balcony and walk into what appears to be an old-fashioned general store. The store is filled with people, mostly people like them, like us, people too independent to feel comfortable in a world like this, people on the fringes of society, the bohemians, the punks, the artists, the dreamers. They are dancing, laughing with abandon, and as they pass, they all answer me, each voice melting into the next:

"THE GODS. The Gods, The Gods, The Gods, The Gods........."

I don't understand. What are they talking about? Don't they know how much knowledge we've gained in history? I follow them, trying vainly to make them understand:

"We have science now! We've mapped the atom down to nothing! Look at the technology! We know everything now! It was microscopic bacteria that created the universe!"

And suddenly, someone says to me (or I say to myself, in a dream I suppose the two are one and the same), someone says:

"Everything is energy. The gods created the energy. We can only manipulate it."

I stop dead. This thought hit home for me like very few others have in my dreams. Would it be better to go straight back to that implicate order than to search the stars, possibly in vain, to find what I'm looking for? I woke up soon after, and my dream self was still trying to hang on to his conviction that science is supreme. He never made a decision as to what course he was going to choose.



I know enough about myself to know a few things about this dream: This is a future I don't want, and am afraid will come to pass; the people are, like me, lovers/worshippers of Nature, of a pantheon of Divine influences; I may think I know what happens after death, I believe we go back to our source until we want to come back to this level of existence, and I'm not afraid to die, but at this point in my life, I don't exactly relish the thought. Perhaps there is something more to this, perhaps not. Either way, I had to get it out of my head.