The Strange Workings Of God by William Hrdina

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I had only been lying there a minute before Misha began attempting to bathe me with her tongue. She was clearly happy that I was up and playing fun games like fall in a big heap on the floor. This was a game that she had played many times with the kitchen linoleum. She was losing to it by several thousand points. I reached up and scratched the fur behind her neck. Misha growled, in a somewhat pathetic, but disgustingly cute imitation of her best friends, Jubal and Weeza, my two cats. They had all grown up together and since she was a puppy Misha liked to growl softly in the canine version of purring.
Getting back to my feet I made it the rest of the way to the bathroom safely and flipped on the light switch. Again, the small white lights danced in the unnatural glare of the fluorescent light, only now they were superimposed on the world. I wondered if what I saw with my eyes open was more like what I saw with my eyes closed than I wanted to admit.
For the first time since I woke up, my mind went back to the dream. The whole thing consisted of a single symbol, floating against a background of the deepest black I have ever seen; asleep or awake. In college several friends and I had gone into a cave. Inside a large central chamber we had turned out our flashlights and gone staggering around in the total darkness amazed at how quickly we lost our bearings. That darkness was noon on a summer day in Florida compared to what lay beyond the symbol in my dream. I was familiar with the symbol, having seen and studied it in school. But, knowing the origins of the symbol made its appearance in my dream even stranger.
It was the Sepher Yetzirah, the Tree of Life, a symbol that has its origins in the mysticism of Judaism. The symbol was an immensely complex metaphor, one that people often study for their entire lives, like chess. Although I recognized it, I couldn't figure out what it was doing in my dreams. I may have been many things, but I wasn't Jewish. I had dated a couple of Jewish girls, but that had been years ago. I couldn't help finding it extremely odd that I would be dreaming of Jewish mystical symbols.
I was not a religious person. I liked religion. But I also liked philosophy, and psychology, and politics, and a half dozen other disciplines. If anything my religious beliefs tended towards philosophical Hinduism mixed with philosophical Taoism, Buddhism and a heaping helping of Discordianism. If I were to use a single word to describe my religious philosophy it would have to be "Maybe." I was raised Catholic and held the kind of scorn for the church that only a child raised Catholic can feel towards it. That I had narrowly avoided the dogmatic brain blender that was Catholic school, was a blessing that I thanked God for when I was feeling sarcastic.
Interpreting and thinking about recurring dreams was fine, but I had a job interview in the morning. After a week of not sleeping for more than an hour uninterrupted my eyes were sunk into my head just about as deep as they could go without putting undue pressure on the frontal lobe of my brain.