Dreams about Jesus I

Jesus is a semi-constant figure in my dreams, showing up more than anyone else save perhaps my mother and younger brother. At times he only appears briefly and in some sort of disguise, while in other dreams he is the protagonist and I am simply observing him. I am a religiously-minded person, having received a degree in Religious Studies at the University of Oregon, but am not myself a Christian or even especially focused on the study of Christianity.

Jesus is, however, perhaps the single defining mythological/spiritual figure in the western world, and I tend to remember every dream in which he appears as carrying some sort of metaphorical weight or special significance. Jung argued that the dream-Jesus represents the "whole man," the complete personality of an individual surfacing in their subconscious, but I feel that in my case he appears more as a incarnation of a single aspect of me, the part of me that quests for meaning and depth in the world.

The first dream about Jesus that I have recorded in my notebook is from about three years ago, in which he and I were playing chess against each other. All I wrote down was that single image, with no context if there ever was any.

In other dreams, Jesus barely appears or is only symbolically present. One dream involved me jogging down the streed where my family lived when I was 16, after we had come back from England and during the time of my parent's divorce. This was where I lived during a major transitional time in my life, a period in which I began to define my current identity. While jogging, I saw a repairman working towards the top of a telephone pole. I had drawn pictures of this pole before, in a series of pastel drawings of the neighborhood that I did for an art class. The otherworldliness of this man so high above the world and the cross-like shape of the telephone pole led me to realise that this man was, at least in some form, Jesus. I turned towards him and raised my hands, palms pressed together, towards the repairman. This was not intended as a volitional prayer but one of thanks and reverence.

The next dream about Jesus revealed that Jesus was, in fact, a zombie. In Haitian Vodou, Zombies are people who are considered dead and buried in the earth for three days, only to rise again as a slave to the Voudon.

Exactly who Jesus was a slave to was unclear in the dream, but I suppose that it could be interpreted a number of different ways. Perhaps this means that, though Jesus himself died, his teachings were only buried for three days and then revived by his followers. The message and character of Jesus then became subservient to the Christains who preached the story of the resurrection, many of whom have since gone on to use Christianity to their own ends. The focus of much of Christianity is no longer on the living aspects of Jesus- his message and ethical codes- but more on following the man himself, a corpse that is not being allowed to rest.

The second coming is, in itself, a zombie story. The Book of Revelation describes people rising from their graves and fighting against the living. Though I don't consciously consider it as such, perhaps this dream was expressing the unconscious thought that Christianity is something that is still walking long past the time that it should have died, an undead monster that feasts on the brains of the living.