Last night, I was contacted during a dream by these sort of soul-priests. They told me that in order for a soul to be redeemed when passing between this life and the next, they must be offered unconditional compassion by a living person. They asked if the three of us would be willing to participate to redeem someone for them. We said yes.

We were in my car driving around Portland, OR when we turned down a street we had been down before. Instead of the normal end of the street, we came to a dead end with an old brick warehouse that had become a temple. Several people were standing out front as though waiting for us. They wore long robes with rope belts, like monks. They asked if we were ready. We parked the car and got out, and went into the temple.

Inside the temple, we stood waiting in turn to offer this gift of compassion. We were in a sort of church, standing on the altar facing the sacristy rather than where the congregation would be. There was a sort of balcony running around the edge of the altar. We stood before it, and in front of us by several yards was an enormous fish tank. When a person crossed into the world of the dead, we briefly saw their ghostly outline before they became one of a number of different kinds of goldfish.

The priest prepared a concoction to drink. By drinking this, he said, we would be offering redemption to one soul. We were being called upon to offer complete unconditional love to this soul, and through that it would be cleansed and ready for a new life.

Fox went first, and drank from the cup the priest offered. Then it was my turn. The drink was a sort of thick and frothy hot cappuccino, hot and bittersweet, full of grounds. It was hard to drink all of it, and the metaphysical sensation was indescribable. Tears rolled down my face, and do now as I vividly recall this to write it down so I won't forget.

When my turn was over, I waited with Fox while Sierra drank, and then we stayed silently sitting in chairs near the altar thinking about what we had done.

I asked the priests how this worked. They said they drew on random people they knew had enough love in them to do this. Like jury duty, they would call us up in dreams to offer the redemption that could only be granted by a living soul. Groups of us would flow through this place and others like it, each in turn cleansing one soul before it could move on. They said they called it Friday Gifts.

It is likely that, having done this once, we will be called again.

*****

I remember holding onto threads from this dream hoping to fix it in my (poor) memory. My alarm went off before it could slip away, and I immediately got the computer to write this down.

In the Christian religion, it is belief in Jesus that cleanses a soul for the next world. In other religions, it is usually judgment and punishment that redeems, or occasionally the unconditional compassion of a god. Not sure what to think about this, but I kind of like the idea that redemption might be granted by a single living person. If nothing else, what a blessing to live in a world of redeemers!

I'm still not very awake, and lost in ideas from this dream. So many spiritual practices seem to be about cleansing the soul, church as weekly soul-bath or something. Lots of the occult practices I am familiar with involve cleansing. Many are staunchly anti-materialist and view the physical world as inherently unclean. I'm not sure what I think about this, and I suspect I'll be thinking about it a lot for a while.