Stairway to Heaven
February 21, 2026
CW: gore
I had a dream where I was an inmate of a prison for those who unleashed terrible technological inventions upon humanity. I forget what crime I committed, but I remember my cellmate was the former Apple VP of design who created a physical object that was so visually pleasing that people couldn't stop looking at it until their bodies wasted away into husks.
The prison warden informs us that we were on death row, and the only way to escape execution was to ascend to heaven. He takes me to a dingy doctor's clinic, which turned out to be a sign-up booth for a competition to go to heaven. Those who failed must die under the executioner's hand and suffer in eternal damnation. I fill out a handwritten waiver on a spiral notebook that was encoded in some strange language which I somehow decipher.
The warden leads us to the gates to heaven. We are standing in front of an endlessly wide waterfall of blood whose source lies thousands of feet above us. A crucified, disemboweled Lilith looms at the top of the waterfall. Her entrails are separated neatly into seven strands for the seven contestants, each one about as thick as I was. The warden declared that the stairway to heaven was the intestines of Lilith, and we had to climb up all the way into her stomach to atone for our sins.
We each take our positions. At the warden's gunshot, we start climbing. The intestine is slippery, so I press my whole body against it to climb instead of just using my hands. As we near the top, the winds start to blow people off their intestines. I instruct people to bundle up our intestines to form a unified, heavy braid, and we all climb the braid together. Either that, or I cut open the intestine and climb inside to escape the wind. I wake up before I get to see what happens next.
Dream logic usually falls apart once I wake up, but I think my sleeping mind somehow juxtaposed sci-fi and Christian motifs together in a perfect storm here. Well, I can guarantee that Neon Genesis Evangelion greatly influenced my subconscious, but AFAIK the Christian motifs in Eva were purely an aesthetic choice on the creators' part; there was not an intentional conceptual connection between Christianity and technology, other than the fact that technology enabled spiritual events like The Rapture Instrumentality to play out in a secular, scientific way.
In my dream though, technological innovation and spirituality seemed to be morally at odds with one another. If we view Christianity (or religion in general) as a way of explaining the nature of reality, then one can argue that some forms of technological innovation are an attempt to distort humanity, and therefore God's image, into something unnatural. For example, some Christians see human gene editing as an attempt to alter the imago Dei or "play God"1 while others view this and other forms scientific innovation as a manifestation of God's image, allowing humans to act as "created co-creators" of the world around them (Phil Hefner)2. My dream world seemed to lean toward the former viewpoint, and thus the only way to pay for your earthly high-tech crimes there was to view it as a sin to atone. The method of atonement in this case--crawling up the entrails of a giant crucified Lilith--almost feels like the antithesis of technological innovation; the inexplicable dream logic of it almost resembles the plans of an ancient higher power that no amount of science can begin to explain. The sinners, so used to looking making the next shiny new gadget, are like fish out of water being dragged back to the fleshiness of God's reality.
- Imago Dei , DNA, and the Transhuman Way, by Dr. Ted Peters, Professor of Systematic Theology at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14746700.2018.1488529 ↩
- Can't find the original source for this quote, but it was mentioned this article: https://www.zygonjournal.org/article/id/14410/ ↩