I dreamed my family, including my father and others in my extended family, was in a tour of a  huge industrial warehouse at the end of a vacation.  There were catwalks, lots of ropes, pullies, various cranes, big crates.  The lighting was shafts of natural sunlight.  It was all very clean.

At the end of the warehouse was docked the huge airship that was going to take everyone on the tour home.   There was a ramp in front of me running up to the lower side of the airship.  By now everyone in our group had gotten separated the way we often do so I was by  myself.  I think I saw my wife maybe disappearing inside a hundred yards or so ahead when I came into view of the airship.

I went up the ramp.  It ended in a landing with a wall behind it and a short flight of stairs to the left and to the right.  I went right.

The interior was like a huge stadium.  I was at the bottom.  It was gloomy and twilit but shot through with little patches of light here and there.  On the same side of the airship as the onramp was a short rise of bleachers, maybe 20 benches or so.  On the other side was a huge rise of benches,  maybe 100 rows, split into a smaller upper level and a main lower level, and divided three sections.  The three sections were two side sections and one middle section defined by two long flights of stairs that ran perpendicular to the end of the two short flights of stairs that came up from either end of the entrance landing.  The seats were partly filled, people were moving around, and  more people were coming in behind me.

It was hard to make out the people very well.  I was now irritated that my family, especially my wife, hadn’t waited for me so we could all go in together.  I sat off up the stairs to look for  her.

As I walked up the stairs looking I saw a few faces that I vaguely recognized.  They seemed to be people from other wards I may have glimpsed at stake events.  I thought it was odd, but then realized that the airship was flying back to the small city where stake is headquartered, which is the transportation hub for my area, so it would make sense that we weren’t the only LDS family group returning from a vacation.  We nodded at each other but didn’t speak.  I kept looking.  I went up the stairs, across the small deck that separated the upper from the lower level, and then down the stairs on the other side of the main section.  It was gloomy and I am bad at finding.  So I got back to the small flights of stairs and the entrance landing without seeing my wife.  I came up the same small flight of stairs to do the route all over again.  I was now intensely irritated.  Then I saw my wife on the main stairs about 10 or 15 steps up apparently looking for me also.  She also looked angry.  We said something  snappy to each other, I think my snap was waving my cellphone and asked why the heck she didn’t use it to let me know where she was, then she turned and walked up the stairs expecting  me to follow her.  That also made me angry.

I must have been waking up because the next part of the dream was confusing.  It ran into several vignettes and I had some control over what was happening.  In one vignette we just argued angrily.  In another, we re-ran the earlier small fight at the bottom of the stairs when we first saw each other, but this time I gave myself snappier lines.  In another we were sitting at the bench she’d picked up higher in the side section and I tried to be calm and think about why she would be angry and fearful and the conversation went . . . just ok.  In another we talked about if our kids were with any of the other adults and in my  mind I thought for awhile about the pros and cons of letting kids run free versus hovering over them for their safety.  In this vignette we may have looked for them and once we found them with my dad and once we just found them with each other.  In another vignette she snapped back why I hadn’t used *my* cellphone to ask here where she was.  I thought for a bit and then came up with some kind of  solid excuse of some kind.

Around this point I fully woke up and discovered that my wife wasn’t in bed.  I got up and found her on the couch with a sick child.  I talked to her for a bit and got her a drink of water.  Then I went back to bed.  But somehow still irritated–the dream was that real to me.

I thought over the dream a little and realized that my excuse for not using my cellphone had been an excuse.  I had thought of answer that made sense, and had mostly believed it myself at the time, but the truth was that I just hadn’t thought to use the cellphon.

As I was falling back asleep I had an insight that seemed very profound to me.  I realized there are emotional illusions and facial expression illusions and tone illusions just like there are optical illusions and auditory illusions.  Our brains aren’t just seeing, they are taking little bits of input here and there and then extrapolating the rest based on what we expect to see.  So if we are angry at someone, we literally hear them say  nastier things with  nastier facial expressions and unkinder tones than in reality (except through the grace of the Spirit).  I realized that I needed to exaggerate my kindness and conciliation when dealing with someone angry, to pierce through the  mental filters that they may not even be aware of.

Almost instantly, it seemed, I was asleep and dreaming again.

In this new dream I had offended someone.  It was not my  fault.  The man had misinterpreted something.  Even so he was white hot angry.  I went to visit him to put things right.  I planned on using my newfound wisdom of being exaggeratedly conciliatory.  I went into his little office and sat down.  He flushed with rage.  I started doing my conciliatory thing.  Telling him I was very sorry about this problem, that I respected him, etc.  I don’t remember exactly what I said and in real life I am not always good at these kinds of conversations.  But in the dream I was fluent.  I reached him.  He was still scowling but at some point his face went into suspension.  I don’t know  how else to describe it, it’s a phenomenon I’ve noticed before, and perhaps you have too–when people reach a real moment of choice unexpectedly, you can visibly see their face just turn off.  Whatever spirit was animating it before draws back and the face is somehow inert.  Then they make up their mind and the template they’ve decided on rushes back into their features.

His face was suspended and he was thinking.  He was deciding whether to choose his anger, which seemed very real and important to him, the way anger does; or to accept the real  hand of reconciliation that he understood I was genuinely offering him.

He chose anger.  It flooded back into his face, red and furious.  Me coming to him like this made my perceived iniquity even worse.  He began to strike me across the desk with big, burly blows.  I was calm.  (Yes, I was obviously the hero of this second dream.   Behold the condescension of God!  He will use even my egoism as a vehicle for revelation).  He broke my arm as I was getting up to leave.

Next I was summoned to a trial.  The trial was outside at the gallows and was being held without a lot of fuss or procedure, western-style.  The jury returned a verdict of guilty.  The judge pronounced the sentence–death by hanging–and then asked if I had any words.  He was looking expectant and so was the jury and the little crowd.  They were expecting me to say I forgave him and  ask him to be let off from hanging.  I was about to, I had turned to him, I was opening my mouth . . . then I stopped.  Something held  me back.  I realized I was just going through the expected motions.  I wasn’t angry at him, but the words of forgivenesss I was about to say weren’t actually for the purpose of forgiving.  They were for the purpose of conforming to social expectations.  They were virtue signaling.  The point was to make me look good.  I could taste that it would be a sin for me to continue.

Instead, I turned to the guy and asked, basically, if he had overcome the way he had acted and was willing to change.  He got really angry.  I told him that he was on the edge of death and should take the chance that was being offered.  I don’t remember exactly but I think he didn’t.  I think he was hanged.

Then I had my second realization that seemed profound to me.  I realized there are two types of forgiveness.  The first type of forgiveness is always necessary, and it is repairing the damage that being injured or offended does to the victim’s soul.  One gives up the pain, the anger towards the wrongdoer, the feeling that one is owed justice (this is not the same as giving up one’s claim to justice.  It’s the feeling.  The internal sensation of having been wronged, which corrodes the soul), the fear.  Without giving these things up one cannot progress any longer.

The second type of forgiveness is contingent.  It involves giving people second chances, or 70*7 chances, to those who are willing or may become willing to  use them.  In other words, to the penitent.  It is probably good to offer this type of forgiveness even when you think it unlikely to be used.  Because human judgment is bad, especially when our soul hasn’t perfectly forgiven in the first way yet.

Note:  in my dream, I was an ideal type and had no anger at the man to be hanged.  But I see the dream more as a vehicle for  making a point and less as a practical how-to guide for criminal justice.