Detective of Dreams

Which parable is the last dream (the one where the woman watches her husband fly to pieces when he orders the Stranger shot)? -Rostrum

04/03/98 14:19 RE>Detective of Dreams

Sorry, it's been too long since I read this story to remember the particulars, but I'm sure somebody else on this list must know. It may be a reference to "Judge not, lest ye be judged" or something similar, in which case it would have been more acccurate of me to say "teaching" rather than "parable".

That seems kind of a stretch to me. This story has always been unsatisfying to me because I can't find a good fit for the third dream. The other two dreams are straight re-tellings of two of Jesus's parables. This third one has echoes of Pilate's wife being warned in a dream to tell Pilate to "have nothing to do with this man." And, as you say, some of Jesus's sayings have a slight similarity (woe to those who are happy and oppress others, for they will weep and mourn, or maybe those who live by the sword will die by the sword). Maybe the parable of the vinyard where the tennants who kill the son will be put to death by the owner, but even there, the emphasis of the parable has more to do with Jewish failure to recognize God's messengers than a tit-for-tat, if you kill you will die violently. None of these options are so close that I can see the Detective saying, "Aha! That dream is actually about Jesus!" In fact the dream almost seems a reversal of the Gospel message. Instead of Jesus dying so that the guilty might live, in the dream, he who tries to kill "Jesus" is instead himself killed. Pilate isn't zapped by God in the Gospels for killing Jesus; for all we know, he might even have repented and been forgiven. Anyone else have thoughts on making the last dream fit? -Rostrum