I had a dream this morning that I began to think about as soon as I woke up, just as I normally might. But then, I noticed that the dream was continuing even after I was awake. At first I just thought it was me and my own thoughts making me see this but then I noticed I was not controlling it. I’ll describe that part when we get to it. First the asleep part, but before that, a little background so it will make sense.
 
In real life I am a musician, playing currently in a three piece band doing a variety of "cover" music, (country, classic rock, blues, oldies, pop, standards, easy listening, jazz, folk, folk/rock, reggae…) As a three piece we have gotten very tight. We usually play in nice locations like country club resorts / golf clubs, RV Parks, Dinner Cruises on San Diego Harbor, Yacht Clubs, We recently did L. A. Athletic Club, etc. But we recently took a strictly country gig (in a bar) that called for a five piece, where we added a drummer and keyboard player. Each of whom also sing lead as do each of us in the three piece, and harmonize etc. This was a success and we now have more five piece gigs coming up, for which we are learning a lot of new songs and the pressure is there for me. (Plus we have a Christmas music set that I have yet to start brushing the cobwebs off of…) But every time I think about it and give it to God, I feel Him saying, "Don’t worry about it…" As though it won’t matter because we’ll be gone and I won’t have to learn those new songs… (Yea!)
 
With that little background, I now will tell the dream:
 
In the dream, I was going to be playing a gig with a different band than my usual one and I was feeling the same uneasiness about the unfamiliarity of the situation that it provided. But I also was aware that if the rapture happens, I won't need to worry about this. I really felt like this other band would not be ready in time to put on a good show in the short time that we had to get ready. But I showed up to rehearse with them. I knew that they had planned to use my real life brother as a vocalist and I knew that he can’t sing. (Somehow, I inherited my Mom’s talent, while he inherited some of Dad’s tone deafness.) I know this because he has gotten up with the three piece in the past when all his friends were there, and he sang two songs that he "sort of" knew from Karaoke, "Friends In Low Places" by Garth Brooks, and "Chattahoochee" by Alan Jackson. In that situation, no one cared that he was not the best singer, because they were all whooping and hollering for him and just having fun. But now, I wondered why they in this band wanted him to be a singer and I wondered if I should tell them that he doesn’t sing that good etc… But there were so many other concerns as well, that I didn’t say anything.
Later, I was talking to my niece, (in her early 20s), my brother’s daughter, about the gig coming up and I announced that I won’t be able to do the gig after all. Even though my equipment was all loaded up in a big box that would be transported with everything else for the trip to the gig location, I knew that I wouldn’t be going. When my niece wanted to know why, I told her that Wednesday is the rapture, and I’m leaving in it for heaven, so I wont be here. I was very forceful and confident in my telling her of this and she began to get tears in her eyes. I told her that she and my brother had plenty of time if they wanted to go too, they should have prepared for it. But she wasn’t ready for it and neither was my brother. She was upset for those two reasons; one, that I was leaving and two that she knew that everyone in her comfortable world was not. She felt that I was abandoning them and she knew inside that I was right in so doing.
I then reminded her where this gig was to be played as if to further justify why I didn’t want to do it. I don’t know if this was geographically or symbolically where, but I knew that the gig was in Babylon. I told her I didn’t want to play in Babylon. But no one called it by that name. I used the name, "Land of Shinar" but we both knew where I was referring to. Again she didn’t argue.
 
I also recall a scene in which I had a magazine where there was an ad for an adventure weekend vacation in which participants would be hunting and eating rattlesnakes cooked over a campfire. The meat was prepared a lot like bacon and I started making a joke that "It’s bacon! Yum, Bacon!… Dogs don’t know it’s not bacon…" Like the TV commercial. No one there thought this seemed like a fun vacation, but I did. I said so. I also noticed that for those who participated, you not only ate the snake meat that looked like delicious bacon, but also you would receive a beautiful pair of tailor-made cowboy boots made from the rattlesnake’s skins, for having come on the trip. This portion was actually taking place back in the rehearsal time and there was more going on there too but this will be too long if I try to tell it all.
 
I woke up after the part where I was having the conversation with my niece and then I began thinking about what I had dreamed and as I mentioned above, I was delighted to discover that I could still see the dream continuing even though I was now wide awake.
 
In my now awake daydream like viewing of this scene, I saw that I was outside, and the sky was all dark except for one area where the sky was growing brighter and brighter. I was aware that the dark area was not getting brighter, so it was not like a normal daybreak. The clouds were very billowy and thick and puffy white where the light was growing and an opening formed in the clouds so that blue sky showed through and a white door formed there. Jesus opened the door and stood by it on the cloud, beckoning me to come to Him. This door was very narrow so that only one person at a time would be able to go through it. I was instantly drawn to Him and I began to move toward Him. As I did, I discovered that many, many others were doing the same from all over. I was seeing a lot of people going through that narrow door one at a time but to my surprise, there was no slowing down as you would expect for everyone to be able to get in through that one small door. Like when a freeway merges from more lanes to fewer and the cars have to come to a bottleneck of traffic jam in order to proceed. Or like when a large auditorium of people all get up to leave at once through too few doors and it takes a long time for everyone to get out… There was no slowing down in this case however. It looked like a VCR playing in faster than normal mode because the perfect order was kept as you would expect to see in normal speed, with one person able to get through the door at a time, yet it was happening too fast for normal minds to be able to understand how it could be so.
I knew that I was going to be going through that door too, but I was staying back as if watching it like a movie now. So It didn’t concern me when I saw that the door was shut after all those people went inside. I knew that I had already gone in too but yet I could see from this perspective outside the scene. Then I began to see small, one-person sized, colorful hot air balloons rising everywhere, each having one person in it, and I knew that these people’s intention was to try to get to the door and try to get in also. But they were not able to control their balloons because strong winds began to blow in all directions and they were out of control. They then had to land again and stay on earth where they knew things would now be bad.
 
It was only at this point that I began to consider the songs that my brother sang with us – and this part really happened, not part of the dream. Though it’s been a while since then, he only knew these two songs: "Friends In Low Places" is a song by Garth Brooks about a guy who "crashes" a party of an ex girlfriend or wife and though out of place there, he boasts how he won’t complain about his no longer being with her because he has friends in LOW places where whisky drowns and beer chases my blues away etc… We’ve all heard this song but I never considered its implication in a rapture context before. How it perfectly can describe how one who misses it might look at it. Then the other one was "Chattahoochee" by Alan Jackson. Where it says, "Way DOWN yonder on the Chattahoochee, it gets HOTTER than a hoochy-coochy, we laid rubber on the Georgia asphalt, GOT A LITTLE CRAZY BUT WE NEVER GOT CAUGHT … NEVER HAD A PLAN JUST A LIVING FOR THE MINUTE.
I never before thought about how much this actually does describe my brother. I have tried to interest him in Bible prophecy for years but he doesn’t like to hear about it. Though there was a time that he did, back when he was first married and his family regularly attended church, so he knows about it he just doesn’t want it now. How sad.
 
Barry Amundsen