From the journal, 11/22/2004:
An angel comes to me and tells me that a great calamity will occur as a sign that Jesus will return to Earth soon. He then tells me that the dream will repeat three times so that I will know that it is true. Then I see a crowd of thousands of people on a beach running for their lives away from the water. The angel comes back, gives me the same message again, and then I see the people running again. After the second viewing of this sequence, the angel returns one more time, repeats the message, and then I see the people running away from the beach again.
Comment
The night I had this dream, I was getting over a cold. I didn’t feel like writing down the dream, so I used only as many words as were absolutely necessary to record it. I almost always leave out details I remember when writing these down but in this case, left out more than usual.
I don’t always dwell on my dreams after writing them down. Once that has been accomplished, though I don’t forget them, I don’t think about them either. At least, not unless I have a reason. In this case, I didn’t have a reason. I wrote it out, mentioned it to my wife, Kitty, and daughter, Nina, and then went on with my day. Almost a month later, on 12/20/2004, I had another dream.
From the journal, 12/20/2004
I'm at a Japanese earthquake watching station. One of the machines appears to predict, or record, a magnitude seven earthquake, but one of the technicians says, "It's not that big." I can see a graph in front of me though and I see dozens of quakes represented there, of varying magnitudes. If anything, seven seemed to be at the low end of the scale for this group that seemed to top out in the high eights somewhere.
I wonder why no one seems concerned, and a technician says to me, "It's not here," and then he looks to the Southwest and I can see on a globe that he is looking to a place below and to the west of China.
Comment
I had a good night’s sleep the night I had this dream. I was alert, well-rested, and feeling healthy. As soon as I was dressed, I left my bedroom and met my 12 year old daughter in the hall near our front door. “I dreamed about a huge earthquake last night!” I said. Over the next few minutes, I told her all the detail I could remember.
“That’s kind of like your other dream, isn’t it?” she asked.
“What dream?”
“You know, the one with Jesus.”
I didn’t know which dream she meant.
“You know, the dream where there’s a huge wave.”
I was still drawing a blank but it sounded somewhat familiar. We went to my room to get my journal. This, by the way, is one of the reasons why a journal is so useful in situations like this. The way Nina had described the dream to me, based on what I’d told her the previous month, wasn’t enough to jog my memory. Without her prompt, I might not have thought of it at all. Now, thanks to her and the fact I’d written it down, the dream wasn’t lost.
As soon as I saw the words in my journal, I fully remembered the dream. I was lucid in the dream, meaning I was aware that I was talking to an angel and that he was giving me a message to remember when I woke. This dream was far more interesting in some ways than the other one, yet my cold had left me with such a fuzzy head that it hadn’t stuck with me. That and the mention of Jesus, which was problematic for me at the time.
Three days after the 12/20 dream, there was an 8.1-8.2 earthquake between New Zealand and Australia. Two days after that, the 9.1 magnitude Great Sumatra earthquake struck. Between the 2 closely spaced major earthquakes, hundreds of smaller earthquakes were recorded. The Sumatran earthquake spawned what became known as the “Boxing Day Tsunami”.
Accounts of the event match my 11/22/2004 dream fairly well. It struck coastlines covering thousands of miles, hundreds of thousands of people were on those coastlines, and they were killed in the giant wave. It also matches my dream of 12/20/2004. There were many large earthquake, including something in the “high 8’s” range (between 8.1-9.1), and they happened in the part of the world indicated in the dream.
Now comes the hard part. The dream of the seismography station is straightforward. As a literal representation of a meaningful comment related to a later event, the dream is precognitive. In no way is the dream meaningfully different from other precognitive dreams I’ve had. The earlier dream, however, is very different.
In the earlier dream, I am approached by someone, an angel, with a message. He tells me something that will happen in the future. This distinguishes the dream from precognition. Because I am told something about the future, and then shown it, as a message from someone else, this dream is now better described as “prophecy”. The difference is that “precognition” is passive and literal, as if I’d walked by a future event and happened to notice some of the details. A “prophetic” dream is where my attention is actively drawn to the future event by someone else. This is the first distinguishing characteristic of the earlier dream.
Second, I am approached by an “angel”. This is a specific type of spiritual being that sets him apart from anything in my waking experience. Third, the main body of his message is not the tsunami. If anything, the tsunami is secondary to the principal message, that the calamity is “a sign that Jesus will return to the earth soon.”
The tsunami, repeated 3 times “so that I would know the dream is true”, is an offer of proof that the other prophetic statement was true. Instead of saying, “Jesus will return to earth soon” and expecting me to accept that at face value, he gives me something big that I can verify when I wake, the tsunami. The tsunami happened. That has been verified. So what do I do with the rest of the message?
The dream was less about the tsunami than it was about Jesus. That was the important part. At the time of the dream, and to an extent even now, 17 years later, I do not accept certain portions of Christian doctrine. Some things I believe are mistakes, like the Holy Trinity or the related concepts of the divinity of Jesus and his mother Mary. Other things, I don’t have an opinion, largely because I don’t think I have enough information to form one. The return of Jesus to earth was one of those at the time. Now, a little less so but it still bothers me*.
Before going any further, I would like to point out that as I write this in 2023, it is 17 years after a dream wherein I was told Jesus would return “soon”. On a human scale, more than 17 years later is not “soon”. Relative to a 2000 year absence, it could be described that way. “Soon” is a relative term, with no absolute value. For that reason, it doesn’t have much utility in this context, unless Jesus had returned roughly simultaneous with the dream. On the other hand, what would be the point of warning me of the return of Jesus unless it is to warn others of the momentous event? As a warning, it gives people time to reflect on their lives and to correct those things they want to correct “to be right with God”.
This dream bothers me because the angel gave me a specific prophetic statement and vision three times, each exactly the same as the others, and it came to pass soon after the dream. That part I feel good about. I am very uncomfortable about the rest of the dream because the first part happened. If there hadn’t been a tsunami, or it had happened much later, it would be easier to dismiss the first part. As it is, I don’t feel comfortable dismissing the prediction about Jesus but I am also unsure when “soon” is. All I do know is that when it comes to one’s spiritual health, now is always the best time to repent and sin no more.
*I have had multiple dreams about this subject.