The Empty Soda Can

A couple of weeks ago, my beloved wife, Anna, went to the library and checked out a book called 90 Minutes in Heaven . The book is the semi-autobiography of a Baptist minister named Don Piper, who apparently presides over a congregation with 10,000 active members. Really. So anyway, Rev. Piper had a amazing experience in 1989: he died. We’re not just talking he died on the operating table, or his heart stopped, or whatever. This guy was killed in a car wreck; he lay there dead, under a tarp, for 90 minutes; and an acquaintance, who didn’t even know who was under the tarp, was prompted to pray for his restoration to life. And it worked. Very cool stuff. That’s the good part. The second, and somewhat more striking aspect of the book, is what happened while Rev. Piper was dead: he claims he went to Heaven. Now, never mind that God wasn’t there, Jesus wasn’t there, and the Holy Ghost wasn’t there. Never mind that there was a gigantic, pearlescent gate that neither he nor any of his friends...

So I said I’d be back to talk about my next dream, and here it is. Unfortunately, since I’ve waited for yet another night to pass, the details are very sketchy until the climactic scene, which I will now attempt to describe. For much of the dream, I’d been driving around some city that I believe was supposed to be Philadelphia—not that I’ve been to Philadelphia, in the last decade, but that seems right. What sticks out in my mind is that after driving around for a long time, I finally came to a bridge. The bridge was extremely steep—probably about a 55˚ grade—but there was a long line of cars on it, slowly inching their way up. I decided to follow. As I, too, inched up the bridge, I noticed that the left lane was mostly empty and took the opportunity to pass a few people—still moving fairly slowly, because of the grade, but faster than the people in the right lane. As I passed, I couldn’t help but notice that all the drivers in the right lane were pretty old, the kind of drivers whose ...