This morning, I had a dream. It was mostly hellish, but it took an unexpected turn at the end.

The dream took place in a small town, where things took a turn for the worse. Bad things started to happen. People died. Eventually it became clear that a criminal syndicate was killing people off. One of their own tried to betray them and stop them, but was killed. However, he had managed to alert me.

Toward the end, death machines were running in the streets, guns on wheels, shooting everyone who had not fled. I am not sure whether they were robots or remote controlled, but they drove through the streets killing people.

The leader of the criminal syndicate was a Lex Luthor type. Perhaps it was just his personality. The place did not otherwise give off a DC Comics feel. The criminals were all gathered in a building while their death machines roamed the streets. That’s where I came and confronted them in their lair. They wanted to kill me too, of course, but they were not in my league. I pronounced my sentence on them: I would swap the dead and the living. They would die, those they had killed would be resurrected.

OK, I assure you that this is not the order of magnitude I usually operate on, even in my dreams. My only excuse for the resurrection part is that I dreamed this on Easter Day morning. Even in my dreams, I don’t usually aspire to resurrecting other people, certainly not hundreds of them.

There is some variation in how much magic I can use in my dream, but it normally lies within a certain boundary. If I use too much, I wake up extremely tired, even more sleepy than when I went to bed. And if I do something too spectacular in one go, I wake up gasping for breath and my heart hammering in my chest. Like the time I blew up a hill, or the time I tried to teleport someone backward in time. Usually I can teleport myself 2-3 times in one dream before I am exhausted. This time, while I did not actually get around to resurrecting people, I teleported the whole building, a piece of the street and a neighboring building to Antarctica. That’s normally out of my league. Evidently my dreams have been upgraded or something.

(It bears mention that I was not Magnus Itland in this dream. As is often or even usually the case, I had a completely different body, life history, name and memories, but the same spirit.)

So anyway, there was some disturbance and the Luthor type, the boss, killed several of the others with an improvised grand cudgel type of weapon, before they put him down.  I woke up so I did not see them all die, nor did I see the townies resurrected.

***

I have seen people as different as Ryuho Okawa and Philip Sherrard (Orthodox Christian philosopher) say that our dreams are a hint of our afterlife. Sherrard says that after our physical body dies, we will continue to inhabit the (inner) world we inhabited while we lived. Okawa says that upon death, dreams and waking life will be switched around, so that our dreams will seem to be our real world, and the world will seem like a dream.  People who have happy dreams about being together with friends are likely to have a happy afterlife being together with friends, because they have a life-content of love. People who dream about hate and fear and enemies are likely to have a hellish afterlife, because this is the content of their soul.

I reserve judgment on this theory.  Somehow I find it hard to believe that I will be a godlike avatar of justice in my afterlife…