Dream of November 22, 2013
My sister is urgently calling our mother on a black phone while I watch and listen. We are crouching in the open door of a large building akin to a barn or a stable. It's daytime, and we're looking out at an open expanse of packed dirt, around the edges of which, in a rough horseshoe shape, sprawls an old town. I don't know the whole story, but I fervently agree with my sister as she speaks urgently into the phone, saying, “Mami, please come home! They're intending to practice black magic against you! You're in danger!” 

Even as we're warning our mother, a man walks across the open space toward us. Stopping a few feet away, he stares at me with undisguised anger and hostility. Looking back at him, I become semi-lucid as I plan to keep him away from us with an invisible force-field. But already his partners in crime are lining up to his right, and now there is a group of hostile men facing me. 

I rise from my crouching position to confront them, yet as I begin raising my right hand, intending to project a defensive force against their leader, I abort the gesture. Instead, I stride fearlessly toward them, and opening my arms wide declare in a voice that carries through the town, “My brothers! I welcome you in love!” I am intensely conscious of being filled with the invulnerable light of the Holy Spirit, with the love and compassion of Christ, as the line of men slowly backs away from me. I don't remember everything I say to them, but moving forward as they continue to retreat, I notice birds being drawn to the confrontation—large black birds like vultures coming to rest on the roofs of the surrounding buildings. 

My ringing voice effortlessly reaches a crowd of people, who have also gathered to watch, as I cry, “Why do you do this when eternal life is yours, freely given? You need no magic or spells! Life eternal is yours already by the grace of God! Why do you turn against your Father? It is as foolish as little children turning against their father!” 

The man who had first approached me retreats into a single-story building, and when the man closest to him turns his head in that direction, I quickly step up to him. As he glances back at me, I draw a short bright-green line on his right cheek. Then smiling as I back away I declare, “Fire burns!” Immediately, a flame burns across his cheek. 

At this point, the man cowering in the dark building sends two floating spheres out toward me, one slightly bigger than the other. They look like models of the earth and the moon, and as they drift closer, I know they are filled with a poisonous energy that will attack me. I raise my right hand, with my palm held up, and the spheres simply dissolve, falling in a soft rain of ashes to the ground. I wake slowly.  ★ End of Dream ★

I still remember how astonished I was by my actions in this dream, and by everything I said. The words welled up from within me, as did the precise authority with which I spoke them;  I didn't need to think about them, I simply knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that everything I said was true. 

The rule was laid down by the apostle Paul when he wrote, “But as then he that was born after the flesh persecuted him that was born after the Spirit, even so it is now.” Differences of moral standards between the once-born and the twice-born, and their opposite ways of life, may be contributing causes of this hostility; but the real cause lies deeper. There are two spirits abroad in the earth: the spirit that works in the children of disobedience and the Spirit of God… The spirit that dwells in the once-born is forever opposed to the Spirit that inhabits the heart of the twice-born.

A.W. Tozer, Man: The Dwelling Place of God, Kindle Edition, Location 164-170

The life of the once-born revolves around the pleasures and concerns of the physical world just as the moon, trapped in its orbit, revolves around the earth, but it is a dead existence, and in the end all that is left is ashes.

. . .The gospel is pervaded by a sense that the brokenness of the fallen world is the work of rebellious rational free will, which God permits its reign, and pervaded also by a sense that Christ comes genuinely to save creation, to conquer, to rescue, to defeat the power of evil in all things. This great narrative of fall and redemption is… a real consequence of the mystery of created freedom and the fullness of grace.

David Bentley Hart, The Door of the Sea: Where was God in the Tsunami?

At the beginning of this dream my sister was calling our mother on a black phone and begging her to “please come home! They're intending to practice black magic against you! You're in danger!” I don't doubt our Mother in the dream is our Lady, the Mother of God and of all His children, whose souls are endangered by the wiles, temptations and attacks of the serpent Satan, whose head she is destined to crush in the end. There is no one Satan hates and fears more than Mary, Queen of the Holy Angels.

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