I was home from college for two or three days. I think I remember comparing this one to the Thanksgiving break I recently had IRL, which was almost a week long (even though we only officially get two days off). On Friday, I planned on bringing my laundry down to be washed on Saturday, so it would be done by Sunday, and then I started thinking about how, like during the Thanksgiving break, I could go back to college on Monday rather than Sunday, even though it's a five-hour drive, because I didn't have class until Monday evening. I think this was the part of the dream where I saw lots of slightly different kinds of underwear (all of them briefs), including one pair that was only blue on one side. I may have also looked at my laptop and seen a whole bunch of programs open on the Windows 7 taskbar.
Somehow this led to a part where a guy (who was sometimes me -- this is one of those weird dreams where sometimes I'm the character in there and sometimes I'm a spectator watching it) and a girl (who sometimes disappeared) were traveling across the country. We came to a church, where the sanctuary was laid out in a triangle. An older woman in the back, who was based on Maude from Harold & Maude, said something to us about universalism. It made us feel good. We walked a little farther and a stained glass window started talking to us (somewhere in here I temporarily switched to watching the guy instead of being the guy, and the girl kind of faded out). The stained glass window's lecture started out sounding like a rebuke of universalism in support of standard substitutionary atonement, but then the guy doing the voice (as well as a priest we saw when we turned around, who was either mouthing along with the window because he had memorized the window's rant from all the times it automatically went off when someone said some theology it didn't like, or he was doing the actual voice we were hearing) started getting kind of unhinged, talking about the stars fighting us and screaming "ONLY THE INNOCENT! ONLY THE INNOCENT!" and we noticed there were some sort of 3D-ish pigs embedded in the window, being cast out of heaven. Another priest got up and continued the sermon, as the message became more about works-righteousness, mentioning some story about how originally the way to be forgiven was to confess nine sins before a statue, thanking God before and after each one and asking for a miracle on each one, and to bring "a plenifer of gold" (around this time, he was wearing a purple and green newsboy cap) A woman, who may or may not have been a younger version of the one from earlier, stood up and said "Technically there's one objection to that," and then a bunch of other people stood up saying "We object too!" and they started saying something like what the Maude-type from earlier was saying, and this time that was the one that sounded more like substitutionary atonement.
Somehow a fire got started. As a spectator, I was watching this unfold with my mom, and thought about telling her that I had previously considered becoming a Catholic, figuring it would not be a good time now to say that, because this church was apparently supposed to be Catholic. Then I went back to being the guy in there. Everything was being destroyed. There was a sort of dollhouse-type thing that was burning. A priest tried to grab the burning roof off of it, which was apparently supposed to stop the fire somehow, but it was too hot (odd, because there were plenty of other priests in there routinely grabbing things that were on fire and being okay). The fire in the dollhouse continued, and lots of tiny white squares of paper flew out of it. I applauded their use, because they both added to the realism (newspapers stuffed in walls as insulation) and made it look cooler as it burned. The Maude-type lady was happy with the whole fire, but seemed especially pleased about the dollhouse. She told us that she had already been going here three days and hadn't even thought to do something like that (even though I don't remember if we even had any role in starting the fires) There was some kind of thingie with tiny Post-It notes that was falling down -- I held out my hand, and a huge row of them somehow started building up in my hand and then down my arm.
I went on a brief mental interlude thinking about how Post-It notes are made. I considered how sometimes the bottom note on the stack is still kind of sticky but not as sticky as the others. I wondered if in some factories they just had the workers grab the right number of notes off a big stack and separate them into little stacks, and if others put a bigger one in the stack every fifty notes so the workers could easily grab exactly fifty, and also wondered why they were still having people do that instead of robots.
Then I was back in the church. The fire was out, the priests were gone. Apparently we had won. But then someone brought over a kids' board book from a book shelf. We all felt a bit scared at the ominous title, The Stars Won, because of the mention the window had made earlier about stars fighting us. We opened the book and started reading. The whole thing was a little girl asking her father what different parts of nature sound like when they talk, and each time, the father responded with three paragraphs of creepy Lovecraftian gutteral sounds. One page showed him with his face twisted into the grotesqueness it would have to be twisted into to make those noises, and the girl was laughing. Then on the last page, the girl asked what the stars say, and the father said that the stars are an ultimate hammer of judgment.
