I am bicycling slowly up a hill while Darchelle walks with me. When we approach a couple of men on the sidewalk ahead of us, she becomes anxious and begins walking directly in front of me. I say to her "Don't worry, I've got your back. In fact I am about to run over your back!" As we reach the top of the hill the sides of the road are covered with an inch or two of old snow so I ride in the traffic lane which is clear until I get to the entrance of the parking garage.

The parking garage consists of a rectangular traffic lane lined with parked cars around on open center. As I enter on my bicycle, a large American car in the style of the 70s is attempting to round the corner to my left. Its right fender only barely clears the bumper of the first car on my right then is unable to get past the next vehicle, a large bus. My way into the parking garage is blocked but somehow I get by. I park my bicycle, get myself a plate of some kind of stew or curry then go over to a table in the corner of a conference room and find a place to leave my plate, stacking four rectangular pieces of flatbread on top of my stew. The table was crowded and dirty but my food would be okay.

I am walking with Darchelle down a hallway to the conference room for a meeting. Although she is a participant in the meeting, I am not but I figure that they will not kick me out because they know I need a place to eat my lunch. People are sitting in chairs arranged in a circle around the center of the room but Darchelle sits with several other people at a table in the corner. I retrieve my food and return to sit at the end of the table opposite her. As I am walking back to the table both she and Bill Busby, who is sitting in one of the chairs in the main circle, are praying out loud as if asking a blessing on a meal, even though I am the only person with food.

After the prayer Bill walks over to me and suggests that I start doing a delivery route because the person who is currently doing it is going to college and won't be able to continue with it. He is basically offering me a part-time job, but the route is in Tacoma and for me, the money would not be worth the inconvenience of a commitment to spend a day a week driving down to Tacoma.

Although it is not obvious, this dream is an effort to reconcile my Christian experience of God in in the past with my own understanding off myself and the world in the present. Beginning in my freshman year in college and continuing for much of my adult life, organized Christianity in one form or another described a normative interaction with God as a relationship in which God requires our dependence and obedience, a relationship which for me became unworkable not only because I persistently projected onto God my own self-hatred, but also because Christian belief, at least in the forms to which I gravitated, did not fit my own understanding of the world. Because of those difficulties I abandoned Christianity as a belief system, but I remain both peripherally involved with church through Darchelle and her extended family and emotionally attached to the idea of personal relationship with a loving God. My search for some kind of true experience with God continues to be constrained by my expectation that it be a relationship and may my history of difficulties with that relationship.

In discussing the dream with Darchelle I was able to associate bicycling with her in the dream with dual time periods in my life. Bicycling represents my life before, during and after college when I established my commitment to Christianity and also moved from adolescence into adulthood. Darchelle's presence with me and my comment about "having her back" (which I borrowed from the TV series Suits which she and I have recently been watching) places the dream in the present time and reflects my current experience of who I am in a loving relationship with her. The snow along the road by also be a reference to the current time of my life, in which I am dying.

The large car obstructing my passage into the parking lot reminds me of the 67 Chevy Impala in which I learned to drive during high school. Its difficulty rounding the corner may represent my difficulty transitioning from adolescent into an adult. Procuring food for myself symbolizes pursuing my own interests and understanding of myself during college; setting that food aside represents relinquishing those pursuits when I became a Christian again after college, a decision prompted by my difficulty becoming an adult.

Returning to the conference room with Darchelle to eat my lunch during the meeting is a complicated symbol which develops the subject of the dream as my effort to find a viable experience of God. Darchelle's presence with me reflects both my connection to church through her and the idea that her more nuanced approach to Christianity might be a workable model for me. The circle of people in the room, reminiscent of a church or college fellowship group, symbolizes the church. Darchelle and I are in the room but not in the circle but oddly enough, Bill Busby is in the circle. Although decidedly secular when I knew him during and after college, we were friends and he knew me well. It is therefore also odd that Bill offers me a job which is poorly suited to my situation. His doing so reminded of the time, back when I first joined the Adventist church, that my pastor suggested I get a job in a tire shop, a job which fit neither my aptitudes nor my training. I concluded that my pastor didn't know me.

Bill, out of place in the church, represents me, and his suggestion of a job symbolizes my attempts to find God within the framework of my former experience. His and Darchelle's prayers as I return to the table with my food may in turn represent alternate approaches to experience of God, the first essentially based on behavior and the second based on love. The dream suggests that my problem finding God is not my fixation on relationship but rather my tendency to view that relationship as being about behavior rather than love.