THE DWARF'S DOOR

A Strange Obsession and a Secret Portal - Chapter 8 from Romancing the Divine

(The Dunn Family home at 333 N. Euclid in Oak Park, Illinois as it appeared in the 1970s)

It was in that same fourth floor walk-up on Chicago’s North Side that the dream came. It was perhaps a year later. The bliss had faded and my heart was well toward healing, but the memory of it haunted me. I was busy but not happy. I had been shown that the Love I sought was real, but I had no path back to it – and four days of sleepless heartbroken fasting was not a formula I cared to repeat.

You may have had dreams in which there is no preamble and no back story - just an image, indelible and steeped in deep emotion, that brings you awake in the night. That is how this was for me: I dreamed my way into an iconic painting. I became a figure at the table in Salvador Dali’s “Last Supper,” and at the head of the table shone a Light, bright, gentle, and so full of Love that my body lost its density on the instant, and rose in the air to accompany my heart in its flight Home.

I don’t have such dreams often. At that time, I had never had such a dream.

It might have been the next day, or the day after. Wanting to visit my parents, I drove out to the old hulking tribal manse (still well-stocked with a few of the notoriously slow-to-mature Irish-American siblings - Irish Catholics tell the following joke, but do not allow others to tell it: how do we know Jesus was Irish? Simple: at age thirty-three, He had no job, He lived at home…and His mother thought He was Jesus Christ).

There was nothing profound on my mind, and I sat down in the kitchen to fix myself a snack.

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