JMA-PSOS

1. Me and an acquaintance get in a car parked at the curb. I get behind the wheel. Before I close the door behind me, the car slowly starts moving forward even though it is not in a drive gear. I start cycling through the gears and slamming the break pedal to no avail as the car slowly keeps moving forward on its own. Eventually me and passenger get out of the car and we watch it crash into a parked taxi and slowly crumple itself and taxi within seconds as taxi driver is frantically waving arms and running alongside the inevitable. Skip ahead: we rush to the scene only to end up inside a house where the cars are nowhere to be found. I call the police from a landline and the police calls the owner of the house which turns out is a restaurant/bar. The owner ia evacuating and closing his business as the police instructed as I try to explain why and what happened. Police arrive and I start explaining again what happened. I wake up.
2. Me and a few friends (as kids) are across the street from a burned church (cathedral like in style and size) which we know is about to be soon demolished. A friend simply reaches into a hole under the curb and flips on a switch that turna on a chintzy electric candelabre in the church’s alcove.

Background: last evening I watched some videos and still images of car crashes. For the past few days, I have been thinking about the history of the Christian church’s diminishing role in Western society and culture since Martin Luther in the context of skimming and reviewing McGilchrist’s “Master and emissary: the divided brain” 2009 book. The electric candelabre reminded of two things: an old 80s Hungarian film in which the revelation of the scary macabre scene repeatingly shown thru the movie as merely a mechanical malfunctioning looping contraption and the discussion I had with an acquaintance (Tibi, soon to be ordained an Orthodox priest after he had a calling, which I found out more about later in some one on one interactions with him) and telling him and his wife and hosts about the subtle ways in which priests manipulate the masses: their imposing attire (including the ridiculous and sometimes enormous hats) and their raised dais or stage. I was thinking now also (but probably did not mention it then) about the church architecture, the music, the smells, the imprinting by inserting self as a required (and for the longest time as the only) official during one’s main events in life: birth, marriage, death (in countries where Christianity is still the overwhelming quasi-official religion, e.g. Eastern Europe).