Saturday morning I stabbed three different people in their guts with a large hunting knife, one of them twice.  It was all in self-defense though. And, more importantly, it was all in my dreams.

Seriously, I am not sure I would want to live with someone who repeatedly stabs people with a big knife, even in his dreams.  But I don’t really have much choice, since it is me.

And yes, it is totally like a scene out of the Hell of Strife as portrayed in Buddhism.  The people there supposedly attack each other on sight, not so much because of hate but because of fear, a fear that is of course multiplied by the actual fights they get into.  Kind of like being a gang member in an American city, I guess.  Their iron rule is: “Do unto others as they would do unto you, and do it first.”

I particularly clearly remember the last dream, in which I had a neighbor living in the same house as me who was plain crazy.  There was a religious element in his madness, or perhaps it was my religious element that made him crazy, but he was hell-bent on killing me.  Each morning (the dream lasted for several days in that realm) he would try to break into my home to kill me in my sleep.  I locked the door, I barred it, I even barricaded it at the end.  He always managed to force his way in eventually, but he also always made so much noise that I was awake and ready with my knife when he showed up.  Having been cut by it twice already, he had a healthy respect of the knife, which was why he was always trying to catch me unaware.

A very unpleasant dream, and so was the earlier one in which I stabbed those two other guys.

It bothers me, and I think rightly so, that I still have these kinds of dreams. You may have a religion in which you go to Heaven regardless of your evil character because someone has paid for your sins, but how long can you REMAIN in Heaven if you have a tendency to stab people with hunting knives? Well, presumably you would not be that badly provoked in Heaven – in fact, I have not been that badly provoked in this world since I was a teen – but it is still a rather precarious existence.

I am not blaming City of Heroes for this one, because I had these dreams before IBM even invented their Personal Computer. The feeling in that game is anyway very different.  Well, for me it is.  There seem to be those who take it personally, but for me the game is not about vengeance or even self-defense, but standing up for the innocent.  Besides, the criminals are supposedly arrested rather than killed.  However, a game like Age of Conan is unplayable to me, because it is just too reminiscent of the evil inside.  The whole atmosphere of pervasive villainy, betrayal and random attacks is like a projection of my own Hell of Strife into a virtual realm.

To think that this kind of life was the Heaven of my Viking ancestors is kind of disturbing.  I dare say they did not know true religion, but I still feel their blood in my veins in a manner of speaking.  When I was little more than a child myself, I was not dreaming these things, I was planning them in great detail. As a matter of fact, I even did make a couple stabs at my tormentors, but by some degree of divine intervention I managed to not actually hit them.  I made a hole in a school bag though, as he managed to get it in front of him. Well, those were the days.  It is more than three decades since I left that mindset behind, well in principle at least.  I wonder how long I will still be like this though…

Evil Inside.