I am crossing a stretch of frozen rutted ground with a snowboard on my left foot, feeling a little foolish that I look like I am trying to snowboard on that terrain. I come to a wide snowy four-lane highway which I need to cross. There is quite a bit of traffic and at first I don't know how I will be able to get across but a break in the stream of cars allows me to make it easily. On the other side I am now wearing cross-country ski on my right foot along with the snowboard on my left. A ski lodge is in front of me now and John and Mom are sitting at a table in the sunshine on the deck out front. When I walk up to their table John stands up and hugs me. He is healthy and strong and in his embrace I feel the warmth of his love.

I am in the backcountry with my snowboard, hiking around in deep snow looking for a slope suitable for riding. I look down one slope where others are riding but it appears too risky because it has cliffs here and there. I look up another slope but it is too steep, and yet another one but it is too flat. I post-hole down the gentle slope to see if it improves but it doesn't so I follow my tracks back up. My track has somehow been packed down into a path through the snow, as if I had walked up and down it repeatedly. Finally I am looking down a steep slope, frozen but almost bare of snow, reminiscent of the final pitch of the old Polecat trail at Wildcat Mountain. A skier takes it fast, the way we used to in order to be able to coast to the base of the gondola, but I don't think I can do that on my snowboard.

I associate crossing the highway in the first dream with crossing over from life to death, that is to say, with the act of dying. In that process of dying, I suspect that external expectations of oneself fade in importance and one's "true" self emerges. Snowboarding is an activity which was essentially my own, free from any external constraints or influences, and as such may represent my "true" self as an adult. Cross-country skiing is similar but applies to an earlier time in my life, when I was a boy. After witnessing and hearing about John's death, I have wondered anew what is ahead for me. I cannot imagine passing from life to death, but I will, sometime in the next year or two. The dream seems to indicate that passage will not be as difficult as I anticipate.
The light around John and Mom and their vitality reminds be of two other dreams, the "Dad hugs me" dream from 11/17/07 and the "From Auburn to Jackson" dream from 7/24/19, both of which appear to at least consider the existence of an afterlife in which we are transformed but remember and continue our relationships from this life. As I wrote in a recent letter to Mom, Is what I apparently believe in my dreams more true than what I believe in waking life?

What strikes me about the second dream is that I never reap the reward of my effort. In backcountry snowboarding the effort is the hiking involved; the reward is the ride down. In my dream I only hike and I don't get to ride. Not only that, but apparently repeat the effort over and over again, as represented by the path trampled down in the snow. To what in my past or present life might that experience apply?
One possibility might be the decades of my life which I devoted to God only to find out in the end that God does not exist outside of my imagination. Pie in the sky by-and-by, only with no pie. Snow in my dreams often places the setting at the end of my life, which might support that understanding of the dream, though it might be a stretch to interpret carrying the snowboard as my subjecting my "true" self to my ultimately unsuccessful efforts to be a good Christian. Or maybe not.
Darchelle suggested that the dream might be more about my practice of Christianity, in particular my attempts at a devotional life. My daily (well actually, more like monthly) the sessions of Bible study and prayer, which I considered essential to being fully accepted by God, never in my mind achieved that objective. I put forth the effort but it was never enough (at least in my opinion) to obtain the reward.