I dreamed of a round room on another planet, perhaps Mars. About ten of us waiting, my brother among them, as though we had been removed from Earth so the encounter could occur beyond every inherited argument. Then Jesus entered.
He was handsome, with long hair and a face sculpted from my likeness as though another brother.
Jesus moved around the room asking each person whether they believed in God. His mouth remained still, yet the question entered every mind. When he reached me, the voice came aloud but in Romanian.
“Are you kafir?”
The word landed as a joke. He already knew my critical views of Islam and borrowed its name for the unbeliever as a private tease, puncturing the solemnity before I could make the encounter too serious. It was the humour of someone who understood the whole context and could play with it safely. I felt seen before any explanation had begun.
With my hands joined, I answered first in Romanian. After a few sentences, I asked permission to continue in English, where my vocabulary allows for greater range in abstract thought. Romanian carries my childhood, ancestry, and the faith into which I had been born. English belongs to the mind developed later, after doubt had widened it.
I told him about being raised Orthodox Christian, considering myself atheist in my teens, then gradually returning to God through reason. The conclusion had arrived through logic, though logic was never the whole of it. Beneath my argument remained a simpler fact: I felt God regardless.
Some part of me expected examination. My history of belief came out like a defence, carefully arranged to prove that faith had been questioned, abandoned, reconsidered, and earned. Yet no accusation waited on the other side. Jesus watched without suspicion. The trial only existed inside my expectation of being judged.
Once that tension dissolved, curiosity took over.
I sat beside him and asked the questions that seemed reasonable when faced with someone such as Christ. Was his body physically supernatural? What capacities did it possess? Where had he come from? I complimented his intellect directly because admiration has always felt more honest when spoken without ritual embarrassment.
When asked about his origin, he hinted at an alien federation. The implication passed between us at once, and he knew I had understood. Around the room, the others seemed moved simply to hear him speak. That alone could never have satisfied me. Reverence without inquiry feels incomplete. Anything sacred enough to matter deserves examination.
Some would call that irreverence. A God injured by honest questions would already be smaller than the mind asking them.
My brother began to grow uncomfortable as the exchange gathered around me. The pattern was familiar. Once curiosity acquires momentum, I tend to follow it past the usual social limits. My brother can experience that directness as a takeover, especially when the situation carries emotional significance for everyone present.
Jesus understood the tension before it hardened into interruption. He offered a playful cartoon metaphor that made my brother laugh and helped him sympathize with the questioning. No one had to be diminished. I was allowed to continue, and my brother retained his dignity.
That small intervention revealed almost as much as the larger mysteries. Great intelligence rarely needs to crush resistance. It sees where each person stands and changes the atmosphere with the least injury.
Jesus sat beside me as though questions consumed nothing scarce. There was no impatience, no glance toward an exit, nor suggestion that some higher obligation waited elsewhere. He could have stayed for as long as I needed. Magnitude required no announcement; patience made it obvious.
The dream answered more through his demeanour than through speech.
Nothing in me appeared capable of threatening him. My eagerness, pride, curiosity, directness, and narcissism were already visible, yet none produced alarm. He understood the value and corruption possible within each trait, along with the stage of development to which they belonged. Praise would have been too simple. Condemnation would have revealed a lesser mind. What remained was comprehension, and the freedom to decide what those qualities would eventually serve.
Most human judgment is autobiographical. People measure others by the disturbance created inside themselves. Confidence appears excessive to the timid. Persistent inquiry feels invasive to those protected by settled answers. A large personality can look narcissistic to anyone who needs others easily contained.
Jesus had no private wound through which perception could bend. He saw what was there without reducing it into something easier for himself to tolerate.
Flattery was absent as well, and this mattered. Condemnation gives the ego an enemy. Praise offers anesthesia. Accurate perception supplies neither refuge. It leaves a person fully visible and still responsible.
At moments, his mind seemed open to me. He knew I could read something of it and permitted the access without concern. Concealment served no purpose there, so defence had none either. Much of my life has been spent asking what kind of being exists behind a given mind. Here was intelligence free from the frightened custodian usually stationed behind identity, guarding the image and correcting every unwelcome interpretation.
Perhaps the familial resemblance belonged to this part of the dream. Identity has long felt provisional. Man, Romanian, Christian, atheist, believer, coach, brother—each word identifies a useful arrangement, yet none completes the occupant. I value the body, cultivate it, enjoy it, and care for it with unusual attention. Still, flesh has never exhausted the sense of what inhabits it.
Christ embodied that freedom in a purer form: fully present in a body, yet untouched by the fear that makes embodiment defensive. His face carried absolute self-possession without any desire to dominate. There was power in this—the capacity to remain open because nothing could enter and cause collapse.
Of all identities, the observer has endured longest. Meaning can be accepted, created, or withheld. The possibility of an existence without assigned purpose causes little panic in me. Boredom appears more readily than dread. Life often presents itself as available material, capable of receiving consequence through participation or passing nearly unused.
Yet the dream complicated that detachment. Jesus also observed, far beyond my capacity to see, though his perception drew him deeper into relation. Complete understanding produced patience. Freedom from ordinary insecurity allowed intimacy. Seeing through another person created no impulse to possess, punish, manage, or repair that person for private comfort.
Perhaps this is the form of God most recognizable to me: an intelligence so complete that hostility has fallen away from judgment; a being with nothing to defend and therefore no reason to distort what stands before him. Such a God would have little interest in humiliating the unfinished parts of my character. Development would be seen in sequence, with its future left open.
Compelled growth produces imitation. Real change must be chosen from within.
The suggestion of an alien federation belonged naturally within the encounter. My religious instinct has never required God to remain confined inside ancient human categories. Christ might come from another world, belong to an order beyond Earth, possess a body governed by laws outside present science, or have entered history through means earlier people could describe only as divine. The spiritual meaning would survive intact. Explanation does no injury to wonder. It gives the miraculous anatomy.
Perhaps the dream cared less about proving who Jesus was than revealing the kind of presence worthy of trust. A ruler who supplies final answers has limited appeal. Far more compelling is a consciousness vast enough to understand me fully without simplifying, fearing, flattering, or hurrying me. Every improper question remains possible because truth has no insecurity.
There is narcissism in that desire. God himself must find me interesting enough to sit beside.
The embarrassing interpretation may also be the useful one: perhaps Christ carried familiar features because some private wish wanted divine confirmation that my strangeness was real. Yet no crown was offered. He appeared neither impressed nor disappointed. My qualities were simply intelligible—causes with consequences, gifts with possible corruption, material still under revision. The self-flattering wish was allowed to show itself, then stripped of its reward.
The only trait that still feels worthy of pride is my willingness to look directly at suffering. Mortality, fragility, humiliation, pain, and the possibility of meaninglessness can be faced without immediate retreat into consolation. Few people tolerate sustained contact with whatever damages their preferred account of existence. Most turn away, rename what they saw, or seek company inside a more comfortable lie.
Still, endurance can turn sterile. I may grow highly skilled at surviving reality while refusing to love anything within it. Observation can deepen perception, though it can also provide an elegant excuse for remaining untouched.
The Christ of my dream offered another possibility. His invulnerability mattered less than the use made of it. Complete perception produced gentleness. He could have ruled the room, yet chose to sit beside me. Every question could have been closed by an answer, though greater interest seemed to lie in allowing my mind to disclose itself through asking.
At the beginning, joined hands and a careful account of belief carried an unspoken expectation: God would decide whether I belonged. By the end, that decision had been returned to me.
His gaze contained the whole history—self-importance, intellect, childhood shame, spiritual instinct, curiosity, and the unfinished creature carrying them—without granting absolution or issuing accusation. I felt neither praised nor condemned. I felt accurately known.
Perhaps that was the gift. To stand before a consciousness capable of seeing everything and discover that complete perception did not result in rejection. Freedom remained. Responsibility remained. So did the stranger possibility that belonging fully to myself, without disguise, may be one of the ways I belong to God.