Flight of the Gargoyle

Have you ever had a nightmare so horrific that the dream-producers weren't allowed to show it to you without your written consent and photo identification proving you to be at least 21 years of age?

I exaggerate. Slightly.

Last night I was meditating on Nephi's High Mountain Vision (1 Ne. 11-14) and had the idea that the dreams I would soon have might shed some light on it. I was thinking particularly about the Man Among the Gentiles and the question of whether he is Christopher Columbus, some future spacefarer, or someone else entirely. My dream chose to focus on a different aspect, though. Shortly after I entered the dreaming state, a voice spoke like a preacher reading the text on which he is about to sermonize ("Beloved shipmates, clinch the last verse of the first chapter of Jonah"):

And it came to pass that I beheld this great and abominable church; and I saw the devil that he was the founder of it (1 Ne. 13:6).

Before me on a table, I saw 21 rectangular pieces of iridescent metallic material, the size and shape of Tarot cards, laid out in a triangular pattern (a hexactys). These glowed and shimmered with kaleidoscopic rainbow-colored scintillations and were very hard to look at clearly. My attention was drawn to one of them -- bottom row, fourth from the left -- and I knew intuitively, just as in real life I often know intuitively what a card will be before I turn it over -- that it corresponded to the Devil. I started to reach out my hand to turn it face up.

I was stopped by the voice: "It is evil.  Are you sure you want to see it?"

I felt that I should.

"Do you understand the full meaning of the word abominable? You must choose whether you prioritize knowledge or peace of mind. Take as much time as you need."

I woke up, about two hours before my alarm. I understood that the dream was not over but had been paused. The voice was serious. I was  required to consent, in a state of full and unimpaired consciousness, to see whatever it was I was about to see. I went to the bathroom, splashed some water on my face, and returned to bed. It didn't take me long to make  my decision. "Peace of mind?" I said to myself -- thinking of the Boston song which, ironically given the situation, ends with the lines "Take a look ahead / Take a look ahead / Look ahead" -- "My peace of mind comes from God. Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me. No true knowledge can change that. I'm in."

I went back to sleep and, after a brief hypnagogic prelude in which I felt as if my head were physically expanding, the dream picked up where it had left off. I picked up the shimmering rectangle, and it became in my hand a DVD case. The title of the film was Flight of the Gargoyle. I understood that it was originally a German movie but that this was the English version. It had been banned all over the world. I was told that once I pressed play, I would experience the movie as if it were reality, and there would be no way to stop or pause or fast-forward.

I pressed play.

It was horrific. Beyond horrific. Levels of horrific I hadn't previously been able to conceive of. I think I'm considerably closer than I was yesterday to understanding "the full meaning of the word abominable." Though the dream can have lasted no more than two hours by the clock, I subjectively experienced it as much longer -- eight hours minimum,  maybe closer to twelve. Several times I thought that it had reached the end -- that the entire world had been profaned and destroyed, and there couldn't be any more story after that -- only to discover that, no, the world was still limping along and had plenty more degradation in it.

With the exception of one detail I must note for sync purposes, I will not describe the specific content of Flight of the Gargoyle at all. Upon waking, I found myself unwilling to commit any of it to writing even in my private notebooks, let alone on a public blog. I did take some notes; however, they were not about the dream's specific content but about what I felt it had taught me about the nature of evil:

I must resist the temptation to describe it is "absolute" or "total" evil, since the whole production seems designed to demonstrate the truth that there can be no such thing. Evil is a process, not a state. It is not the absence of Good or the opposite of Good, but rather the process of the destruction, corruption, and perversion of Good, and specifically of Love -- and as such it is totally parasitic and dependent on the continued existence of Love. A world without Love would not be hell; it would only be meaningless chaos. Dante's antechamber at most. That is the fundamental reason evil can never fully triumph -- not because "Good is more powerful," but because it is strictly, logically impossible for it to do so.

The "gargoyle" of the title -- I will give the bare minimum description to make the sync that follows intelligible -- was a gigantic bird-like monster artificially created from, among other things, human body parts. At one point in the dream, I thought to myself, "Why do they call it the gargoyle? Roc would be a more natural name."

Upon waking, I found Flight of the Gargoyle so convincing as the title of a movie that I wanted to do a Google search to see if there was by any chance a real movie with that title. (Not the first time I have had this reaction to a dream title; cf. "How can these books not exist?"). When I typed in flight of the ga, autocomplete gave me garuda. Apparently it's the title of a Tibetan Buddhist book:

Garuda is the king of birds, the Hindu equivalent of the roc, so that seemed like a bit of a coincidence.

Just before writing this post, I was reading Whale Music. The eccentric Desmond Howell (Brian Wilson) is trying to get rid of a psychiatrist who has been sent to his house by his mother.

"Desmond! Let me in."

"If you're really Dr. Tockette, use the secret password!"

"Desmond. For your treatment to be successful, it's imperative that you allow me to enter without this password nonsense."

Desmond keeps insisting, and finally the doctor caves.

"This once then, and never again. Garuda."

"Garuda?"

"Open the door."

"No. You've alarmed me. You conjure in my mind this terrifying image of some mythical beast, half-bird, half-human, and then you ask that I open the door?"

Any mention of Garuda at all -- in a novel about the Beach Boys, of all places! -- would have been a sync. But Desmond specifically describes it as a "terrifying image" that is "half-bird, half-human." Garuda is depicted in religious art sometimes as a huge bird and sometimes as a man with wings and other bird features. The "gargoyle" in my dream, which is what led me to Garuda, was "half-human" in a rather different sense.