I never watch horror movies. (I only watched Cabin in the Woods because it was written by Joss Whedon and I knew it would be a satire or critique of some kind.) The closest I get to horror is the X-Files, and probably nothing on network television should count as horror. I have never particularly liked vampires or zombies or ghost stories. I have either found them unbelievable, or or too gory, or fixated on death and fear--and who wants to be fixated on death or fear? Not only are they unbelievable, they are also undesirable--who wants anything in horror movies to actually happen? I am perfectly reconciled to the fact that part of my love of superheros, science-fiction, and fantasy is wish-fulfillment. But there is no wish being fulfilled for me in the genre of horror.
As such, I was rather surprised when I had a dream that was more or less about a zombie-apocalypse (even though that's the in-thing right now). Now, my imagination tends to be apocalyptic, but it doesn't tend to be full of zombies, so I thought it was unusual when I first woke up. But I will get on with telling the dream.
In the dream, I found myself at a fancy party on the top-floor of a fancy building. It was a large room, with low-lighting and candles. Later, I would notice the sun-setting, so apparently it was early evening. There were all sorts of important-looking people milling around--it was clearly a professional-class event of some kind. There were small tables dotting the room, bedecked with candles and wine-glasses. There were high-to-do buffet tables of some kind lining the far walls, perhaps just with hors d'oeuvre. People were busy talking, but despite the evening attire, it was all the talk of academics and professionals going about their business. No small talk. A current of anxiety was sweeping through the room--people were talking in small groups and they were problem-solving.
At some point, I wandered out of the room with my companion for the evening, into a front-room of some kind, the western wall of which was entirely made of slanting glass. I went out in the room to look for a mirror--something was wrong with my dress. But when I went outside, I could see out the windows over the western part of the city, and I saw the whole horizon of buildings aflame. Los Angeles, I think, was burning. And then I knew--the plague that had swept the world in a matter of days was finally here. It was here sooner than we had expected or hoped, and things did not look good.
My companion said something to me about the city burning, and I remember looking in the mirror. My eyes were starting to change color--one of the initial signs of the plague. Soon--perhaps in 24 hours--they would turn entirely red, and in the course of that 24 hours, I, too, would be turned by the plague into one of the raging, pillaging, burning maniacs out there trying to destroy the world. I remember praying in the dream for help--saying to God that surely if the 21st century ever needed divine intervention, it was now. I was met with a curious kind of silence--the kind of silence that feels like you're being deliberately ignored because you're asking the wrong question. I remember the feeling distinctly--and I've certainly had that sensation in waking life--but thinking how odd it was to have that impression under the circumstances.
I hurried back inside to find a group of professor-scientists talking. Everyone knew now--and knew because we were also changing--we could tell by eye color and by other signs. One woman, who was a biologist or medical doctor of some kind, was talking. "I have the cure," she said. She waved a vial in her hands. "I have it, beyond a shadow of a doubt, I have it. Now all we have to do is get the military to deploy it. We're going to have to do it in the water--in the oceans, but we have it, it will work."
Whatever the woman said, whatever her position was--we all believed and trusted her instantly. She was one of the few people in the dream I recognized--in real life, she's one of the most intelligent women I've ever met, an Indian woman and PhD I met at the University of Pittsburgh. But in the real world, she doesn't study life sciences--far from it. Here, she was playing a medical doctor, but I think she was a useful dream construct--because I believed her and believed she knew what she was talking about.
But by that time, we had another problem: Though we purportedly had a cure, no one wanted to use it anymore. The change had already begun, and even with the initial symptoms came a sort of giddy confidence and intense thirst for the rage, madness, and power that one could sense coming. I don't remember feeling that way myself--I more felt numb or neutral. I knew we had to stop the plague, but I didn't really care which way what happened. But the others were wavering. They had the cure, but they were no longer interested in using it.
At this point, our building was attacked by the front wave of the victims of the zombie plague. I remember the group of us heading outside on the roof--although no one wanted to stop the change, no one wanted to killed by the fully changed either. But outside on the rooftop I stopped everyone and got their attention.
"I know you don't want to stop this, but we have to do it anyway. We have to. Not wanting it to stop is part of the disease, but we just have to stop it no matter what we feel." I remember pausing for words, searching for something elegant or persuasive to say and coming up short. But to my surprise, they listened. They all listened. They listened and agreed, and then we were off to save the human race somehow.
Saving the planet involved going down to the Navy shipyards or the docks. I remember thinking the entire time that there was no way for this plan to work. It simply wasn't. The military personnel were waiting for us. Our doctor had the cure, and there were another few vials in existence, but basically our next few hours were spent preparing hundreds or maybe thousands of decoy units--so the zombies wouldn't be able to distinguish the real vial from the fake ones.
Finally, we suited up and went underwater. I remember diving underwater in deep-water diving gear with a metallic cylinder tucked under my arm. And there were hundreds of us divers and thousands of zombies following. I still didn't think this was going to work. I thought we were all going to die and the world was going to go out in a way I had least expected it to. I think there were some underwater fights of some kinds, and some of the fake capsules were destroyed. And maybe a couple of the real ones. But it didn't matter. By the time I surfaced, the sky and the water were already turning green--and green was good. Green was the sign that everything had worked according to our doctor's plans.
Before my eyes, things were turning back to normal. The change was stopping in me and my companions, and the zombies were turning back to normal. I think maybe I shook my head as the sky changed color and the world return to normal and Los Angeles stopped burning. It took less than 24 hours, and all was restored. I promptly woke up.
This dream was primarily about two things I have discerned thus far. The first is about the genre of horror itself, and the second is about the curiously unanswered or curiously answered prayer in the middle of my dream. First things first: horror, etc. As I said in my introduction, I don't really like horror that much and I really don't like fear. I'm probably one of those counter-phobic persons you hear about: I detest being afraid so much I usually try to run out and both meet and master my fears before they can get the better of me. The sooner confronted, the sooner conquered, and then you can go back to your peace of mind. But I don't normally go courting superfluous stress or anxiety or fear, especially in my leisure life of reading or t.v. and the movies. So I've always looked down on horror as the one obviously pointless and irredeemable aspect of contemporary human entertainment. God can meet people anywhere but here, I thought. Surely God is not interested in the imaginations of those preoccupied with enlarging our fears and bringing them to life.
But he is. Or at least, he is interested in meeting and engaging every aspect of human experience, and what humans do with fear is certainly an important aspect of human experience that God will engage. I never expected my imagination to engage with fear very much, and I especially never expected God to engage with me there in a very imaginative way.
The truth is, I suppose, the further one goes in acknowledging the darkness in human life, the more things appear monstrously or supernaturally bad. Evil disfigures the human psyche and deep down inside most of us are afraid of some aspect of the mystery of iniquity--but what if that evil and disfigurement were made physical--the opposite of sublimation, which is deposition. (In chemistry, sublimation means moving from a solid to a gas without stopping over in the liquid phase of matter. Deposition means going the other way.) In any case, for the first time I felt in my flesh and bones how the genre of horror is capable of speaking to or about our fears by embodying them. This is something worth doing.
But there was also the issue of my curiously answered prayer. As I said before, when I prayed in the midst of my dream for a supernatural deliverance from the zombie horde, I had a curious sense that God was smiling wryly at me, letting me know with a glance that my prayers had already been answered, had already been provided for through normal means. What I thought needed supernatural attention, God had already attended to naturally. Sure enough, through the gifts and talents of our medical doctor, a cure was given though hope had seemed like folly.
This was a helpful reminder to me. In our age of complex problems, where difficulties that surround human life seem on the surface to be such complicated jangles that they can hardly be solved through normal human effort (I think of international conflicts, ecological difficulties, fossil fuels, the national budget, cancer, AIDS, etc), things are not quite so impossible as they seem. So often we hear anxious reports, or reports so anxiously given, that this or that issue or calamity is of such and such a difficulty level that we can hardly have hope of solutions to problems. No doubt some of this is reactionary against the optimism (at least in the United States) of the 50s and 60s. Technology did not solve all ills nor even the ills it promised to resolve (since it promised time-saving, making life simpler, making life "easier"), so there is some pessimism in response. There is a greater pessimism, though, from the collapse of the cheerful Enlightenment ideologies of clear and distinct ideas paving the way for universal peace and concord among human beings, and a complete mastery of nature. Having realized our goal to be untenable, we despair of it, and despair not only of a sure and certain victory, but also of our own competence to vie with our difficulties at all. We have come of age in the cosmos, and found ourselves unequal to the challenges of adulthood, and thus we dither in anxiety and fear and security-mongering and despair.
But I think there is a middle way, or at least, a third option of how we ought to conceive of human fitness and capacity to deal with what comes our way. Hubris and cynicism are both false paths and false idols that lead to the shipwrecking of cultural wisdom and identity. A Christian, I think, ought to be properly confident that human beings were made by God to fit well with the universe around us. It is neither too big nor too small for us, with God's help. But his help doesn't have to be what we generally think of as supernatural. God doesn't actually need to rescue us from every skinned knee--or even from global epidemics. He will provide, as he always has, and the human race will go on, and he will provide, most of the time, through natural means--through the natural application of human intellect and wisdom to the problems of the world that confront us. This does not mean that God is not active. Rather, it means that most of God's activity is providential rather than miraculous. (Which in turn is why double agency matters as a theory of causality, but I'll write about that some other time. Hopefully.) Recognizing the power of God's providential care is just as important as recognizing when God acts miraculously, and if you aren't grateful and attuned to the former, you won't be spiritually prepared for the latter--which is the story of Israel and the story of the human race in general. The example par excellence of this occurs in Moses's admonitions to the Israelites concerning gratitude in the early chapters of Deuteronomy. When Israel segues from miraculous provision (manna in the desert) to general provision (normal food from the Promised Land), he warns them not to take the latter for granted or think of it as something they had earned for themselves, rather than a gift given to them from God.
Naturally, this is all complicated by the presence of sin and death in the cosmos, which makes the universe a much more difficult place to live in. (This essay, of course, is not at all an attempt at theodicy). But this isn't because human beings' natural capacities are not fit to take on the universe--of course they are, they were built to be--but rather because these capacities are warped and distorted by sin. So, instead of a "comfortable fit" with the cosmos, we have an uneasy, toilsome fit--our work in the world is marred by hardship and tragedy that need not have been there. But we were meant to be reconciled to the cosmos as well as to God, and wisdom and knowledge concerning the natural world can do a lot to bridge the gap. But it is not that the world is too big for us, it is that we are at odds with it, and it with us, and all of us now subject to futility and loss.
So my prayer was answered, and had been anticipated by God's provision. And so much of our prayers are both answered and anticipated by God's provision. We don't always have to look for miracles or what we think of as divine intervention, but we can expect to see the hand of God everywhere.
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