My dreams starts off with Mom and me walking around this area that I feel is supposed to be some sort of beach town, but it looks very retro, like from the 1950’s or 60’s, but everyone is dressed modern. The area is a large, brick path area between two shop areas so no cars can get there, a supermarket on one side and other shops on the other that I’ve seen in real life but it doesn’t have the brick path.

In the middle of the brick area are rows of dog houses with signs.

“Baby Dogs”

“Baby Cats”

“Baby Monkeys”

Mom says I can look at them when we’re done in the supermarket.

In the supermarket, Mom seems stressed as we buy random things that in the dream made sense. For some reason, I want to buy a little tub of yogurt but she won’t let me.

By the time we check out, I grab a tub of yogurt and hide it in the cart. It has a hole in its little lid from where I poked my finger through. Mom looks right at it and doesn’t even notice.

When we leave the supermarket, I go over to the dog houses and look in, All the puppies and kittens and baby monkeys are alive but hanging by their necks. They were pale and not moving.

The second part of the dream, Mom and I reach a community camp type thing where we live with dad. In the dream Dad and Mom aren’t divorced.

In the camp, women wear head scarves but men dress normally. I know instantly that the camp is an Islamic community where we live to avoid persecution.

The dream is pretty boring. I become a Stretch Armstrong like creature and cover the front of one of my neighbor’s houses with some faded pink and bright yellow tye dye wall paper which pisses them off.

At one point, I become guilty that I’m a part of this community and I decide to run away. The thing is, there are guards and police that don’t want me to, so I have to flea with the help of some children who help me over the gates surrounding the camp

By the end of the dream, I’m living my life as a Christian when I hear a knock at my front door. There’s a man there that I recognize as one of the religious police from the camp.

“Have you ever considered converting to Islam?” he asks.

I look off into the distance and see a sandstone brick castle off in the distance that gets closer, like I’m a bird flying to it and say, “I’ve thought about it.”

Things get dark and I realize I’m being taken back to the camp.

The dream ends there.

note: my dad was always very anti-islam. at the same time, it would have made sense for him to convert to islam back in the day strictly for how he wanted to have control over every aspect of my life. i remember him talking about how much he liked that muslim women were beholden to their fathers, brothers, and husbands, and wished that modern christianity "had the balls to do the same thing." thank dolly parton he never got into the super zealous christian nationalist version of christianity, because it's exactly what he wanted.

religious dreams were the weirdest to me because at the time, the majority of my friends were evangelical/fundie christians and i was very much a reddit athiest. religion as a whole has always played a strange role in my life and is an uncomfortable subject for me.