I am at a rustic summer camp, in the dining hall. John McLarty is cooking meat at some folding tables on a stage at one end of the hall. I have to leave but he assures me that there will be some left when I return.
I am at a Y in the road not far from the camp. A white pickup truck drives by and takes the left fork but I don't catch a ride in the pickup because I am going down the right fork. I walk down the road to the grounds of the camp and I need to pee but there are no bushes to go behind. I enter one of the buildings but it consists of a bunk room with no bathroom, so I stand on the bed and get ready to pee on the wall behind it when suddenly I hear somebody coming in. I am embarrassed that I even thought of peeing inside and fortunately I do not get caught. I leave the cabin and walk a short distance over to the dining hall.
A girl is standing at the foot of the steps up to the dining hall. When she sees me she says "You can pee like this" and she squats down so that her skirt forms a little tent around her. I walk past her along the side of the dining hall to look for a place to pee but people can see me from inside the dining hall so I give up trying to pee.
Entering the dining hall I am disappointed to see that there is no more meat left, only pancakes and some chili. I go up to the stage to get some food anyhow. A rambunctious but friendly Golden Retriever charges in from a side door, races past the stage almost knocking some people over then disappears. John Pepper calls out from a table near the door from which I had entered and says that the chili is too hot. I am not very interested in the pancakes but since I have a higher tolerance for spicy food then John does, I might still like the chili.

The dream is a narrative about my experience with Christianity during and after college when I was in my early 20s. Seeking to become a more loving person, I became a Christian during my freshman year but my my beliefs were derived more from the student-led Christian group to which I belonged rather than from a particular denomination, and as such were compatible with my interests in and knowledge of biology and geology. Unfortunately I imagined God as being similar to my biological father, whom I had internalized as a critical and demanding virtual parent. In hopes of outgrowing that parent, I left Christianity after college but returned a few years later, believing I needed help making the transition into adulthood. Despite leaving God behind, I had retained the belief, reinforced by that critical virtual parent, that my problem was that I was not good enough and I hoped that the transformation promised by the God of the Seventh-day Adventist church would finally make me acceptably good. Unfortunately my problem was not insufficient goodness, but rather a paralyzing fear of failure which prevented me from acting on my own behalf.

In the dream the summer camp with the dining hall symbolizes some combination of Christianity and the church. John, who is a pastor and a friend in real life, is on the stage up front; the meat he is serving represents my Christian beliefs in college, a symbol referenced both by Scripture as well my personal experience since I took up big game hunting in my senior year. Leaving the camp represents abandoning Christianity after I graduated. The white pickup truck which takes a different road is a reference to my friend David Sawyer who became a Christian that year and joined the Presbyterian Church.
Returning to the summer camp, representing my becoming a Christian again, I needed to pee. In my dreams peeing seems to be associated with personal self-expression, living in a creative and meaningful way consistent with my desires, values and beliefs. In the context of this dream though, it may be more accurate to think of peeing as exercising agency, deciding and acting on my own behalf, in my life. Either way, I cannot find a suitable place to pee in the summer camp. In the dream it is not the camp itself or other people but rather my own shame which prevents me from peeing, just as in reality, it was not God or the church but rather my own sense of inadequacy and fear of failure which prevented me from taking responsibility for my life and beliefs. Others (the girl in the skirt, which I associate with conservative Adventist friends) could live with agency (be themselves) within the church but their experience could not alter my own.
Back in the church (the dining hall) John and the meat were gone, symbolizing my relinquishing my authority to believe and live as I chose, though I did of course choose to do that, as symbolized by my taking the chili. My parents no doubt found my new belief system (the chili) unreasonably restrictive (too hot). I would once have agreed with them but to accommodate the belief in God symbolized by the Golden Retriever (and as a consequence of yielding to others responsibility for my own life) I changed my life in significant ways. I gave up hunting and eating meat. I forsook my secular friends and replaced them with fundamentalists. I married someone who was "not my type". Instead of birdwatching, I went to church on Saturdays. In perhaps the most egregious violation of myself, I rejected my understanding of geology and evolution and became a Creationist.

This dream incorporates several symbols which in other dreams have represented God. Both the Golden Retriever and John McLarty link this dream to my first dog dream, in which the Golden Retriever gets John and me out of the bed where we had been sleeping intimately together. That and subsequent dreams, including this one, clearly indicate that both John and the dog represent God, or perhaps more accurately, my belief in God. This dream sheds more light on how those two God-symbols differ.
John has been instrumental in helping me take ownership of my beliefs about God. From the time I became a Seventh-day Adventist up until my conversations with John a few years ago, I believed that the church was the authority regarding correct belief about God and how to follow Him. I effectively let the church tell me what to believe and how to live (although what I really did with the church, as I noted in the conclusion of my interpretation of the earlier dream) was to use the authority of the church to endorse my own negative view of myself. John on the other hand permitted himself to hold beliefs about God that made sense to him personally and that fit his own experience. Unlike me, he did not feel constrained to accept what the church said about God simply because the church said it. The difference between us was not just in what we believed but also how we arrived at those beliefs. John exercised agency in choosing what to believe. I relinquished my agency in making the church responsible for my beliefs, thereby preventing myself from changing them.
In this dream, John (and the meat he is serving) represents a belief in God in which I retained the power to choose for myself what to believe and how to live. That was the sort of belief I adopted during college, a belief informed by Scripture, by my peers and by own experience, which included my emotional need for a virtual parent through whom I could work out my sadness and anger about my father.
The Golden Retriever symbolizes the belief I adopted when I became a Seventh-day Adventist following my vacation from Christianity after college. A Golden Retriever is an amiable and appealing breed but in my dreams it does as it pleases with little regard for my situation. It seems harmless but robs me of responsibility for my own life. During that time after college when I wanted to be relieved of that responsibility, I found the Golden Retriever belief appealing. Through my experience in the church and the influence of the wife whom he believed God chose for me, I entered adulthood, selected a career and acquired a family.
In my dreams, the Golden Retriever does not occur together with John. The belief it represents cannot coexist with the belief symbolized by John. In the first dream the Golden Retriever separates me from John and in the second dream when it shows up John is no longer present. In the first dream I associated it with Guru Maharaj Ji who required his true disciples to completely reorder their lives around following him. Several of my high school friends shocked me by doing just that. In the second dream the Golden Retriever shows up as an unwelcome guest as I partake of the chili being offered in place of John's meat. Once I made it through the transition to adulthood, I began to suffer the consequences of having relinquished the authority to adjust my beliefs to fit my experience. Those consequences were primarily psychological. I had given my internal demanding and critical parent the authority of God and I could not take it back,