I had the strangest dream last night... I have been known to have extremely strange dreams at times, but this one takes the cake. Part of me is thinking it came from eating hot peppers with dinner, but another part of me hopes that it was the universe telling me not to be afraid. (Not that I have any more reason than the next person to be. I'm rambling here...)

In my dream, I was riding in a shuttle bus or something with a group of people. There was a girl I know from high school there, so I don't know if we were students, or she just happened to be there. We were driving up Highway 55, which is a very windy, narrow road going north out of Boise into the mountains. As we rounded a corner, the bus lost control and rolled several times into the river.

The next thing I knew, I was on a train coming into a station. People were waiting at the station for us, and a knowledge came over me that those of us on the train were dead and the folks ahead were loved ones who'd died before and were going to guide us through this next stage in our existence. I knew that I was dead, and grief tore through me at leaving Freya and Matt behind. But then it was gone suddenly, and was replaced by peace and acceptance.

I searched the faces at the station to see who would be meeting me, and there was my grandmother waiting, but not as I had known her. She was a beautiful twenty-something, dressed in the finest fashion she'd have worn in the 1930s when she was actually that age. She looked a little like Greta Garbo, actually.

She got me settled in a beautiful farmhouse home that was to be mine, and then I realized that I hadn't yet seen a dear friend who'd been lost to cancer about 6 years ago. I decided to go look for him and thought, "What sort of heaven would Mike choose?" Since he was a logger, I knew he'd be up in the woods, and so I started putting together the things I'd need to spend days out looking for him. In this heaven, there were sort of stores along the roads, but you could just walk in and get anything at all you wanted for free. You could walk the aisles with a cart and put anything in--there was no cashier. Cars were parked along the roads and you could take any one you wanted--if someone took the one you'd been driving, you could just hop in the next one, or take a bicycle. It didn't matter and no one would be angry.

The dream started to fade at this point, but the gist of it all was that "heaven" was whatever you'd want it to be. You could live wherever you wanted and have anything you wanted. People would come and go, and I later realized that my friend had decided to return to life on earth by putting his soul into a baby in the womb. You could stay as long as you liked, and you could wait at the train station for your own loved ones to join you. And there were children, too; children who'd died young, and we took them in and gave them homes and the love they may not have received while on earth. We raised them and healed them so that they could return to have another chance.

It was a little bit sad to wake up from this dream. While I don't exactly believe in the afterlife, it would be so nice to think that there was a place with that kind of freedom, acceptance and peace ahead of us all.