God does mind every sparrow. At least, God watches over me quite closely. The trouble is, God's no guardian angel. Just the opposite. When I stand up, God swats me down. Oh, he appears in various masks, but it's God all right--with a personal vendetta. I can escape by transforming into someone else, but God always finds me again, no matter what body I'm in. Seems to be toying with me--waits till I grow a little hope, and then returns to slap me flat again.

One day, it stops being a game mattering only to me. One day, I meet a girl with wings. An angel. And when God shows up to smash me, she stands up to God!

God fights her. She won't give in, yells "Over my dead body!"

So God arranges that.

But she gave me time to transform again, and I leave as a leaf, as a mouse, as a mycelium. Just a skein of memory threads saying I've got to change more than my form now. I have to accept help, and hide methodically. If SHE, who I'd have sworn was far above me, could die for me, then God's not just punishing me, or showing idle malice. She died to buy me time, so I must use it--try to learn about God and his history of persecuting mortals. It's a furtive sort of research, but now I seek out strange angels and witches and the creatures God sweeps into the corners of his nice clean rational house.

A Goddess shelters me, introduces me to other beings with clues to God's hate. It seems I'm a better-known fugitive than I knew.

A man whose face I know walks into the house of the Goddess. One of the masks of God. He and the Goddess argue angrily, and she orders God from her house. He kills her with a blast of fire that shatters her house--and half the landscape.

And my habits, again. I'm accepting support and seeking answers, but still accepting something: God's initiative. Should I FIGHT God? He seems slightly less than omniscient, and far less loving than most. Is he a fraud? Is God God?

But if God is just a malevolent being of great but not infinite power, the Angel and Goddess need not have died. Their plans all assumed God is infinite. They hoped to distract him, make moral statements with their deaths... but they never organized to fight him face to face. But if I suspect rightly, God is finite. We could win.

I set up a magical test to see if all this persecution is really TRAINING. Is God grooming me to supplant him?

And the result is unambiguous: yes! I'm being trained, in this horrible, insane, loveless way, to be God's successor, after he alienates everyone else so much they drag him down!

What a waste. But he sees a need and we can't stop him. Until we can.

That better be soon. A third woman, the Guardian of the Yin, is sheltering me now. I'm falling in love with her. She and her brother the Yang Guardian both side with me now. And they're God's chief assistants! So if I'm going to rebel and try to bring God down, it must be soon--before he kills a third girl I care about.

NOTES NEXT MORNING

This dream inverts Nikos Kazantzakis's tale of a monk who used to fight the devil, but now fights God, while saying "I hope I lose!" There are also echoes of Patricia McKillip's RIDDLE books, with their mortal, makeshift God in hiding, who must groom his successor so indirectly it seems like indifference--or persecution.

The final guardian sheltering me is certainly Kuan Yin, the Chinese moon-goddess of compassion. I suspect the angel was Cyndi Lauper--I just saw one of her videos where she sings "I may not be an angel, but at least I'm a girl." But you can be both! Better than being like this jealous Judeo-Christian-Islamic God--who's neither.

I've often wondered if the principles that rule our psyches have problems with succession, like autocratic political systems. This dream suggests they can--that not all sabotage is exactly intentional. My current psyche IS trying to reorganize, but doing so in a messy, bloody fashion chosen by my current ruling principle. This rigid inner ruler was beaten into me by years of brutality in school... and can't relax or evolve. Rule, or die--as messily as possible. It's not even sabotage--he truly means to step down. Yet the best method he can come up with is... THIS?

Hey, don't worry about it. It's only me. Dreams are a letter to the self, not a comment about public problems. Old gods aren't causing us trouble. You don't sabotage yourself. Your past pain will dissolve peacefully. You never hurt the one you love. You're all right. It's only a stupid dream.

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