A Dream Not Forgotten

In a dream that I had when I was 21 years old in the cell-blocks at McNeil Island Corrections Center (M.I.C.C.), I dreamed that I was a massive twelve foot tall barely humanoid creature. I was stooped over in a hospital room, and there was an anonymous man, of normal stature, laying in the bed in front of me. I somehow knew that in order to prove that I could be a “demon” I had to eat the man. So I picked him up as easily as picking up a child, and began biting his leg. I was repulsed, so I started laughing and snarling as I chowed on the man's leg in order to stave off my repulsion. Then suddenly two tremendous black shadowy arms wrapped around me from behind and pulled me backwards and down. I fell through the floor of the hospital room and quickly found myself being pulled helplessly down into the blackest blackness. As I fell backwards, the powerful arms constricted my chest and arms, so I could not move or breath! I felt a sense of fear at that moment like nothing I had ever experienced before, or since. It was sheer unrestrained terror, that no worldly experience could ever replicate. Then I somehow knew that I was dreaming, and desperately willed myself to wake up. I woke with a violent start and gasping for air. I was back at M.I.C.C., in the top-front bunk (nearest the bars) of an eight-man prison cell, on “Dog-tier”, one story up. It was morning and the other inmates in the cell were also just waking up and in various stages of dress as they got ready for mainline (breakfast). After catching my breath and taking several deep breaths to calm down, I climbed down off the bunk and sat down on the locker next to the bars. The man who slept below me was a friend, and he was there sitting on his bunk. I began to tell him about my dream. But some of the other inmates in the cell overheard, and one of them began raging on me about dreaming that I was a demon. I got angry and told him to shut up. Incouraged by his own friends, he began taunting me even more, “What'cha gonna do, eat me!” I jumped up and attacked him in the middle of the cell. I was so angry that I quickly brought him to the ground, with me on top, and began forcefully slamming his head into the concrete floor. He stopped resisting after the first blow to his head on the floor. The inmate was dead, but I had my hands around his neck and kept using that hold to lift and slam, lift and slam his head into the floor, until his face started to distort. Then I watched in amazement as his face transformed into that of a hideous demon, and he started laughing at me as I banged his head even more and more furiously into the floor and strangled him at the same time. I screamed (and these are the exact words that I remember clearly to this day), “No! No! I don't want to hate! I want to love Jesus, but he won't let me!” Then I woke up again, this time for real. I was in the same bunk, but the lights were off and a guard was just then walking past the bars at the front of the cell with a flashlight doing a security check. Everyone else was still asleep. It was the middle of the night. My heart was racing, and I sat up to think about what had just happened. Could that really have been just a dream? Or was it some sort of message; a warning? I didn't know, but I decided not to take it too seriously, though it was a dream that I never forgot.