Revelatory Dream?

I entered a gloomy, dark, building, perhaps a derelict church. An older woman was sitting there, not exactly in a pew but in a large wooden chair. She said to me, "We help dying people."  Was she a nun or a sister of some sort?  I said, "Like hospice."  She was adamant. "No, not at all like hospice." I said, "Can you help me?" When I said those words I realized that I had frightened her. "Do you plan to murder me?"  I assured her that I was not a murderer. To make her more comfortable, I said, "Why don't we go outside where you will feel safer."  But just as we opened the heavy wooden door, a heavy, threatening man appeared.  I killed him without a weapon, with my bare hands. So I was a murderer after all. The woman whom I was trying to protect, said, "Now I know you're planning to murder me."  I objected: "I'll prove to you I'm not a habitual murderer. Go directly to your car and get in it and drive away. She did so (it was a blue Ford Focus). That's when the dream ended.

In real life, I'm a peaceful person. In my dream world, I'm occasionally (not often, but often enough) a killer. Why?  Is it some deeply suppressed inner anger that works its way to the surface during the night?  Or I am simply a member of a species (homo sapiens) that has a millennium-long habit of violence?

Or perhaps the dreams are meaningless? Just the flotsam of badly-wired synapses? If so, I wish they'd give it a rest.

Comments

[Don Z. Block]

I'll opt for meaningless. Dreams may be evolution's clumsy way of trying to keep us sleeping. If I had had a similar dream, the nun would have been Mother Teresa, I would have been there to kill her, and the weapon would have been an unsterilized needle.