The Outlaw

MORNING OF APRIL 25, 2009

First I recall visiting a church. It was really huge, and I was walking around through the various corridors before the services began, basically just trying to find my way. I came into one circular room which basically served as a terminal of many elevators. I saw three pretty girls from a distance; each wearing gray dress with white stockings.

Though these girls were actually fictional, I recognized them in the dream to be distant relatives--sisters to each other, cousins to me-who I hadn't seen in a long time. And in my dream-knowledge one of the three girls had recently taken very ill and was bedridden. So when I saw the three of them walking around happily in the church halls, I nonchalantly thought to myself, "Oh, this is a scene from the past, before she got sick". And I hid around the corner until they got into an elevator and left, because I didn't want to disturb the past.

After then taking an elevator of my own, I finally located where the main sanctuary was. Services had already begun, and the place was packed out, so the ushers were keeping us late arrivals in a vestibule in the back, and were seating us a few at a time as they could locate open seats for us.

A kindly, older man ended up seating me in one of the balconies. The odd thing was, there were walls--plain, white plaster walls--entirely encasing the balcony, so you couldn't see the service, you could only hear it. I noticed that if I contorted myself into the right positio I could catch a very limited glimpse of the goings-on below through the opening that was the entrance to the balcony.

After a short time, the service abruptly stopped. We could hear the person leading the music tell the congregation that the pastor had asked him to stop everything for a moment while he took care of something. Everyone waited silently, wondering what was going on.

Suddenly I felt nervous. I left the balcony, trying to go back to the vestibule I'd entered from, but ended up in some strange hallway (it looked like a hallway from the Alabama Theater--an beautifully refurbished, turn-of-last-century theater in Birmingham). Suddenly, at the other end of the hall, appeared a big, burly man dressed like--and in all other manners appearing as--an outlaw gunslinger from the old west.

He approached me aggressively, introduced himself as the pastor, and began accusing me of practicing satanism, and bringing evil into the church! Though he was an intimidating figure, I felt more incredulous than scared at his accusations. There was some kind of altercation here that I can't really recall, but I think I somehow figured out--or at least suspected--that this wasn't really a pastor, but was the devil himself in the guise of this old west outlaw.

It's all a blur how I escaped the church and the gunslinger devil unscathed, but I did. I just remember suddenly arriving back at my "new house" that I had supposedly just bought and moved into. A lady who is one of my coworkers was there when I walked in, and she made her way to leave as soon as she saw I was there.

The said something like, "Well, now that you're all moved in, I'm leaving. I wont' be staying around to do the cooking and cleaning anymore!" I was just as perplexed in the dream as I would have been in real life, because I didn't know she'd every been doing chores to start with. I saw her out the door, feeling a little disappointed that I'd had a maid to keep up after me, and lost her just as quickly!

My last memories are of just being inside the big, empty house that I wasn't yet fully moved into. It felt odd. I was also thinking about some CD's that I had supposedly left in my parents' car or something.