Dreams...

I had a particularly disturbing dream tonight. In it there were religious people defending portions of their religion. This is all well and good, except they wanted to perform publicly two portions of their ceremonies, one was called a "creping" (pronounced crape-ing) and another ceremony for which I don't remember the name or the things associated with its ritual.

The "creping" seemed simply to be a unique form of a wake where the priest ran a long metal rod against the face of the person who had died. The person was on the alter rather than in a casket. This is the image that flashed through my head when "creping" was being discussed in my dream and at the end of the flash the priest figure turned and glared at me. He was old, thin and a bit malevolent looking with long stringy unwashed hair.

The other ceremony escapes me as to what it was, but it was what I was most offended by and afraid of. It had something to do with the refusal of an extreme orthodox group to recognize the blatant faults and inaccuracies in their ceremony which completely contradicted acceptable scientific arguments.
I believe it may have had something to do with "religious therapy" using religion and belief in the miracles of God at the complete echewment and abandonment of modern medicine.

I can only imagine that this dream partly stems from my existing issues with the Catholic Church and my inability to reconcile that which is believed by religions that is definitively refuted by science. Also factoring in to this was an episode of "Judging Amy" that dealt with a mother whose child was autistic and who stopped bringing her son to physical therapy. She brought her child to a church that said they would cure him of his affliction. Rather than accept he had a neurological disorder they felt he was possessed by a demon and that he could be cured by releasing the demon within. The episode ended with Maxine (who place a Dept. of Children and Families social worker) entering the ramshackle establishment of the "church" with police escort to take the boy into custody. It seems she got there just in time. The people were sitting in circle while the “pastor” had bound the child’s feet, laid him on his stomach and were whipping his back while reading bible passages. When Maxine arrived the child was either passed out or almost there and his back was raw and bleeding across its entire surface.

Obviously a very powerful image that may have contributed to this dream.

The other odd thing was that at the end I was told that it all had to do with "nom, supernom" which in my best efforts to translate is French meaning "name, super-name" or "name, greater-name". I have no idea the significance of this phrase but it was repeated to me several times and was important enough that I remembered it most of all as I woke up while tossing and turning. I was told that I just didn't understand and the key to it all was simply "nom supernom". It stayed with me enough while the fog of sleep was lifting that I went online and tried to find any definition of it. It also prompted me to write this entry to record my thoughts on this dream before it went away.