I am standing in a meadow at the edge of woods. The trees are very tall with fresh spring foliage
glowing in the sunlight. One of the tallest trees is an elm. I try to take photos but even zoomed
all the way out I can't quite capture their beauty. I hike up a broad green hillside, mostly open
pasture with scattered groves of aspen trees. I try to take photos of the aspen groves but cannot
find a good composition. A dog appears, a tall and slender breed which is all white with somewhat
curly hair giving it a rumpled appearance like a well-loved stuffed animal. Contributing to the
stuffed animal impression, it moves stiffly around me even as it playfully runs towards me and then
bounds away from me again. I give chase and we move down the hillside because I need to go in.
At the base of the hillside is a structure which is like a drive-through fast food place or an
mobile amusement park ride, the kind that folds up onto a trailer so it can be towed from one fair
to another. With the dog, I climb over the platform and through some crossbars, trying to take care
not to get grease from the skids on my clothing, and end up in a narrow hallway which gets smaller
and becomes a lighted tunnel ahead of me barely large enough to crawl through. An employee of the
fast food place comes in and retrieves the dog, but I remain trapped in the tunnel and wake up
feeling a bit panicked.
My best guess is that this dream is a brief and highly selective synopsis of my life with God. It
opens with me seeking to capture the beauty of nature through photography, as I did in high school
when a few American Elms still survived in the wild. Aspen groves on the hillside suggest a
subsequent context of college in Colorado. There follows a dalliance with a dog, which has
generally represented my belief in God in other dreams. The dog appears alive but resembles a
stuffed animal, a child's comforting toy. When I find myself facing a difficult situation, trapped
in a tunnel which in another dream represented death, the dog is withdrawn. For no particular
reason other than perhaps the context, the fast food place/carnival ride, which are both alien
environments to me, may represent the church. If so, then the employee taking the dog away may
represent my acceptance of the continuing ownership by the church of the idea of God. Another way
to put that is that in the situation in which I now find myself, I have been unable to come up with
a believable concept of God now that I have rejected the God promulgated by the church.