I die. Crossing over, I find myself in the mouth of a cave. Others stand near me, facing inwards. The floor of the cave-tunnel is blue and green stripes like tree rings, billowing around like water, caught in slow-motion, oozing out to the lip like honey. From the mouth it shoots out into a fall, full speed, plain water not honey, splashing to earth far below.

In front of me, twenty feet upstream, is the Devil. We are wading toward him against the current, and will, a long time hence, surround and trap him.

But to my surprise, in mere minutes or years, I reach the hand of the person ahead, and others link up along the tunnel-sides. We block the way out, forcing the Devil to retreat. He's near the edge of a cliff so he must jump. One person outflanks the Devil on that side of the cave, I try to on this side... near-surround him, when... he disappears.

"Quick" we two yell near the cliff edge, "all link hands", and we circle around where the Devil was. "Look out below -- the Devil may jump down to you" I yell to the crowd on the cliff-foot cave-floor. "Can the Devil fly?"

"No," someone answers: "He tried! That's how he got crippled!"

Someone else says "So the Devil is still up here--or jumped straight down!" We close in but lose track of him--but then below us, people in a big heap are fighting and heaping on top of someone they want to subdue. We jump down and surround the pile. Yep. The Devil. But he dissolves, changed into one of us. But which?

Also: "What's that piano doing there?"

Someone answers "It's got four flat keys for every three raised keys, so the Devil can dive through it and escape."

"Who'd know all that EXCEPT the Devil--grab him!" We do... Yep. It's him.

The Devil doesn't fight. We slide on a conveyor belt into another tunnel, opening into a narrow canyon as we go... As the conveyor belt ends and we're ready to lift the devil onto a gypsy wagon, the Devil begins to talk in an Appalachian woman's voice... tells us, between tears, the story of her life. Hard and unhappy--found a man, and when another woman tried to take him away, she killed her. And so she was sent to hell, i.e. inside the Devil.

I say "I feel sorry for you -- but I don't know how to help you... can I?"

"There's millions of them in there" says the Devil, angrily, almost crying. "I am the collective soul of everybody miserable and guilty and angry and hate-filled and never given a chance" ...and so on quite a while. The Devil's a ranter.

"I'm sorry, Devil... I didn't know... is there any way I can help you at all?"

"I don't know what can be done."

I ask angrily "Why does God allow all this?

"I guess he finds it necessary."

The Gypsy carriage-ride ends, next to three children.

"I will enter them, you see," says the Devil. "It's a moral choice for you. That's why God makes me do this. You can either leave the kids to grow and spread evil through the world, or kill them and contain me here--at the price of three deaths." The three kids look like me and my sisters when little...

I think "If we kill them, we are murderers, so the Devil will be in us. So either way we can't end the Devil, whether for his/her sake or for ours. And one choice kills people and the other doesn't. So we mustn't kill the kids."

No devil from then on!

This canyon is part of Disneyland. Well, Disneyland as written by C.S. Lewis. For example, the next stop is the Scientist Grotto, where lab researchers and Buddhist scholars talk to little singing fetuses and children six inches tall. It's all very silly--a view of science and technology about as sophisticated as Mothra. "Oh well," I think, "after That Hideous Strength, what do you expect from CS Lewis about scientists?"

I meet my sister Miriel and her best friend Ariane and our cousin Diana, on a bridge arching over a glacial dome like on Tiltill Creek in the High Country of Yosemite. We walk, looking back to a brilliant glowing magenta sunset--or dawn.

This early dream wasn't just intense and strange, it rivaled my lifetime record for length up to that point.

Its ethical reasoning shows that some dreams at least aren't the product of blind forces. Modern theories use computer metaphors--memory processing, testing associational links, etc.--but is this really much better than Freud's steam-engine metaphors, full of pressures, drives and venting? All such "unconscious process" models do a poor job of explaining a dream like this--a morality play.

Even while dreaming, I knew it was provoked partly by CS Lewis's worst book, That Hideous Strength, painting science as devilish. In retrospect, I think it also challenges a subtler, better book, Lewis's The Great Divorce, which paints what I saw as ignorance, neurosis and addiction crying out for education and healthcare, as sins--the responsibility of the sinner alone. Here, the Devil's party--he's possessed by the dispossessed!--at least gets to voice all that misery. Solutions aren't found, but at least one is rejected: smiting evil just turns good guys into more... smiters.

And lo, fifty years of smiting later, we have thundering herds of...

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