Last night my dream started out with what seemed like a high school reunion - except that it wasn't just people from my high school, but also the assholes from elementry school and junior high. And instead of being at a school, it was some kind of house party in a nice white Victorian.

The assholes, the "in crowd", the bullies from my younger days were fully grown and utterly boring. I half expected them to resume their taunts from when we were all 9 years old, but I don't think they recognized me. They wanted to chat about investments and make small talk about some television series, I don't remember which.

I shifted away from them and noticed some of my old high school friends in a different section of the house. There was Dan, a great drummer who I used to jam with during my free periods, Kevin the timpanist, a few others. There was also Ascander, who I wanted to talk to but who refused to speak with me, and who was wearing a bright orange military uniform of some sort. He was speaking with Shane, a fellow who used to make charts of the high school's various social cliques and had binders full of this kind of information. I remember thinking "we will need this man's brain, we want this fellow on our side, I should talk to him". But Ascander was draped over him, covering his ears, so I decided to come back later.

Then Ruwan showed up, with his Three British Friends. Ruwan is the brother of my girlfriend, and the Three British Friends are people that don't exist in real life, they were creations of my subconscious. One of them looked like the singer from Gravenhurst. The second wasn't actually British, but French, and looked like the guitarist from Blur. The third was a large Indian fellow, who I will refer to as Gabriel, because this guy was basically my mental image of the character Gibreel Farista, from Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. In the dream world, Ruwan's Three British Friends were his business associates, but I don't know what business they were in. Something to do with computers it seemed.

Somehow I ended up leaving the party/reunion with Ruwan's Three British Friends, and without Ruwan himself. We were going off to get into some trouble, it seemed, and Gabriel had appointed himself the leader of this outing. Suddenly we were in front of a huge, very fancy hotel. "Come on" Gabriel was saying "I want to show you guys something". We walked through the busy lobby unnoticed and entered a large elevator with nice wood-panelling on the walls. Gabriel started messing with the buttons and the elevator took off. Something about it's motion seemed rather wrong, but I couldn't place it. It was a long trip, I assumed we were going to the top of the building.

We got out on a floor with no windows, but other than that it all looked very typical for the part of a large hotel that a corporation would reserve for conferences and such. We were in an empty hallway, and there were many sets of double doors, made out of some nice light-colored wood. The carpet was burgundy, with sort of a swirly gold pattern overlayed on it. The colors were dull with age, but the carpet wasn't ragged. Everything looked exceedingly normal. Gabriel went down to the end of the hallway and started messing about with one of the doorways, trying to open it I guess. I went over to him, and he hurriedly handed me something. "Take, take for fucks sake!" he whispered angrily and thrust into my hand a collection of small metal plates. They were a dull aluminum color, about four inches long and one and a half inches wide. They had a slight curve to them.
I was confused by headed back to the others who were waiting by the elevator, while Gabriel continued to mess with the door.

Suddenly, when I got back to the others, one of the sets of doors opened, and a businesslady started shouting at us. "What are you doing here? You can't be here. Let me see your keys this instant or I'll call the police". I handed her the little plates of metal, and her tone changed dramatically. "So sorry to distrub you gentlemen, we've had some security issues here, is there anything I can get for you?" There were blurred figured in the room behind her, I couldn't make them out, but they were moving as if they were dancing at a formal ball. Something seemed wrong with them, with the perspective at which I was seeing them and the fact that they had no features. One of the others thanked her politely and the three of us (minus Gabriel, who seemed to have disappeared) started to get back into the elevator. As the doors were closing I heard her say to someone else, "stop them in the lobby, don't let them through".

The elevator was at some crazy tilted angle, and somebody had to jam one of the pieces of metal into a slot to get it back to normal. Suddenly we were in the lobby; I noticed big fat columns of black marble and a waterfountain, and a maze of glass doors. I could see a city street outside, and for some reason I assumed that it was Canada. "Excuse me, gentlemen, a word" a consierge was calling from behind a desk, but we ignored him and moved away, and he didn't follow.

For some reason, at this point, I decided that I needed to stay in the hotel and see what had become of Gabriel. The others weren't so interested in this, so while they slipped outside, I ventured down a hall and then through a large open doorway.

That's when I realized where I really was. I was in a large room, with big machines sticking up through the floor, making all sorts of ungodly noise. It looked like part of a hydroelectric damn, except everything still had that nice hotel lobby feel to it - marble tiling, felt ropes. There was a huge staircase that went up towards the ceiling, and all manner of people were hurrying down this staircase, as if propelled by a fierce wind. They were a diverse lot as they made this downward journey, but as they came closer to the bottom they all transformed into tall white men wearing a dark suit and a fedora. Each and every one of them. There was a huge sign hanging on the wall next to the staircase, a slab of marble with the word "GROUNDLINGS" engraved in it, with an arrow pointing at the staircase.

Suddenly I knew that this was Hell, and that this staircase was the entrance to it. For a moment I panicked and tried to run up the staircase, but of course some magnetic force pulled me back down. "Well that was stupid", I thought, "of course everyone would just go right back up if they allowed it".

I went back out into the lobby, and out onto the street - which was, curiously, at the same level, and thus still below the entrance at the top of the stairs. I walked across the street and confirmed my suspicions. In spite of the long elevator journey, the hotel was no high-rise but looked like a small, single-story building. The elevator had been going down.

Suddenly I was back at the Victorian house from the beginning, inside, on the second floor. "So" I said to myself "it seems I'm dreaming about Hell." Realizing that I was in fact in a dream world, I immediately began trying to manipulate the world. But it was much more difficult than usual. I attempted to test things out my re-painting the walls of the room I was in, but as I waved my arms around, all that would happen was that the world would become briefly warped and then quickly return to normal. I walked over to a doorway, and tried to trasform the structure into a similar doorway that I had seen in a castle where I once stayed in France, and thus transport myself to that location. But something went wrong. I was able to mentally re-create the new location (Avezan, France) but the old location (Victorian house, Hell) did not go away. Two worlds were overlapping, and it quickly become impossible to see anything because of the double-vision. Everything was ghoslty and overlapping with everything else, and all sounds were muffled. The only thing I could do was to get rid of the second layer of reality that I had created, and settle on being back in the Hell world.

I grabbed some random friends who showed up at the house, somehow got them to appear with me on the street in front of the hotel. I explained what had happened, about the elevator, the pieces of metal, the businesslady. I gesticulated wildly at the lack of a high rise building. And I'm sure they believed me, because they refused to enter the building. And they refused to allow me to enter. They held me back, and semi-lucid dream or otherwise, there was nothing I could do to free myself from their grip.

Which, of course, left Gabriel still down there in the depths, his fate a mystery. I brought this up to those who were with me. "Oh," someone laughed "He's fine. He's probably talked his way into being their consultant. In fact I wonder how much he's overcharging them."

The following is something I wrote in a post on a web forum, in a discussion of the issue of Jews' responsibility for the death of Jesus.
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It's been a couple thousand years now.

Historicity notwithstadning, Jesus as portrayed in the Bible said some good things, I think he was a good guy, I think he meant well. I think a lot of Christians are good people, I think a lot of them mean well, I think a lot of them are bright and intelligent. I think some good things have come from the presence of Christianity - some good art, some good philosophy.

But all the same to me it's pretty clear something got lost along the way. More than lost. I look at what's going on in my country, and while it's nowhere near as bad as what's going on in some other countries, it's disconcerting, it's a dangerous direction, in the context of history it makes me more than a little nervous.

The Romans killed Jesus in more senses than the literal. In many ways the Romans killed Christianity, and used Jesus for their own purposes. It wasn't Jesus that died and was resurrected, it was Rome. Over and over again. Rome is still here. Not the empire as a political unit, not the geographic notion, but the soul of Rome, the western empire, is still here and still in the middle of dying and being reborn.

Is this a bad thing? Not in and of itself, no. There are always those who hold power, that's a fact of life. There are a lot of democratic notions in the west, a lot of people enjoy a lot of freedom here. And of course there are those who suffer as a result of the freedoms the west enjoys. So it has always been.

I'm not a Roman. I'm not a Christian. I'm a Jew. And right now, relations are good between the rest of this "Roman" world and ourselves. Israel is strong, and it wouldn't be so strong.. probably wouldn't even exist without the help of the rest of the western world. But there are two Israels - there is the nation of Israel, the geographic entity in the Middle East, and then there is Israel, the nation comprised of all Jewish people, everywhere in the world. And as I see it, what benefits the one does not of necessity benefit the other. Obviously the modern state of Israel has been doing combat with Arabs since its inception. And for different reasons, the new "Romans" do combat with Arabs as well. And so we have a common enemy, which leads to at least a pretense of friendship.

Maybe a lot of people will think I'm wrong in this, but as far as I'm concerned that friendship is superficial and temporary. This isn't me, as a Jew, saying that I hate non-Jews, more that I think there are people on both sides who see our relationship as temporary, and that I think it would be incredibly foolish to blindly trust the rest of the western world, given our history. There have been a lot of voices in the Jewish community in the west, especially following the Holocaust, who favor the idea of assimiliation. This is something you see in a lot of communities who live within other communities - immigrant communities, religious communites, and so on. This idea - the idea that assimilitation equals tolerance - is an idea that often comes more from outside a culture than within it, and when it comes from within it comes out of fear. I think this is wrong. I think the association of assimilation with tolerance is one of the worst lies of modern times. All it leads to is death of culture and, in the end, it doesn't stop persecution when that time rolls around anyway.

So what it comes down to is that it's important for us to remain who we are, and who we are is not Romans. At this point your probably asking what this nonsense has to do with this thread.

What it has to do with it is this: according to a custom, at the Passover feast, the Jews could ask the Roman governor to free a prisoner who was intented for death by crucifixion. The Jews chose Barabbas instead of Jesus of Nazareth and so, it could be argued, the Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus.

But who was Barabbas? Someone in this thread called him a thief. That's how he's described in the gospel according to John. However in the gospel according to Mark, it's mentioned that his crime of murder was committed as part of an insurrection. Many scholars now believe that Barabbas was a member of the sicarii, a group of Jews working to overthrow Roman rule by force.

Now in terms of actual history, of course, most of this has little to no provability. But even if it's just a story, I think it's an important one. We were given a choice to save a man, and we could save either a man who preached love and tolerance, or a man who sought to fight against those who oppressed his people.

Peace and love are great ideas, and in many cases, in one's personal life, living according to the philosophy taught by Jesus will, in my opinion, often lead to happiness and, indeed, peace and goodwill between people. But peace and love do not always come naturally, and in many cases turning the other cheek is not always the best idea when it comes to survival. And while Jews have never been a particularly aggressive people, we are a group known for persistance, and doing what needs to be done in order to survive.

So what it comes down to is this: if I were there two thousand years ago, but I still had the knowledge of what happened during the time between then and now, I'd still say the same thing. I'd ask for Barabbas.