Jacob heads for Haran.

Jacob travels until the last light of the day and the stars began to come out, so he made up camp in a strange place along the way and placed the stones before him to use as pillows. Since he was such a momma's boy and had never slept outside of a tent ever, he didn't know that rocks make bad pillows.

Jacob dreams of a ladder up to heaven with angels ascending and descending it.

In the dream, Jacob sees God.

God tells Jacob that the land that Jacob is laying on, he will give unto Jacob and his seeds.

God tells Jacob that his seed shall be as the dust of the earth.

God tells Jacob that his seed shall spread to the north and to the east and to the west and to the other direction too.

God tells Jacob he will be with him even when he leaves the land that he is now in that he will later return to and inherit.

God assures Jacob that he will not leave Jacob until all that he said has come true.

Jacob awakes and says, "Thith plath ith thcary and dreadful! For the Lord God ith surely in thith plath!"

Jacob takes his stone pillows and makes a pillar and annoints it and names the place Beth-el, meaning the House of God.

Jacob makes a deal with God and says, "If God keepth me thafe until I return unto my father'th houth, then I will acthept him ath my God!"

Jacob declares that the stone pillar he made shall be God's house.

Jacob states, "All that God shall give me, I shall give a tenth of it back to him."

STUDY QUESTIONS!
Question God and Religion!

Why do angels need to climb a ladder? I thought they were supposed to have wings? Are these proto-angels that had yet to develop wings? Or are they drones or workers? Maybe heaven is just like a giant ant colony or bee hive! Maybe winged angels were invented in the Renaissance. Or maybe Jacob's dream was just a silly dream.

Did you see the movie, Jacob's Ladder? Was it called that because the whole movie was a dream? Or were the weird apparitions Jacob saw actually angels? Was the main character's name even Jacob? Why was it set in Viet Nam?

Should I come up with some sort of short-hand code-word for God's Abraham speech? How come God has to come to every generation and tell them the exact same story? Does he realize that faith and belief are easy to lose, so He has to keep reminding them of the reward for following him? Why do God's rewards so far all have to do with this mortal coil? He isn't offering any kind of afterlife or eternal promise. Is it because He's a racist and thinks Jews are only motivated by money and real estate?

Did God get the idea for a ladder reaching all the way to heaven from the Babel Engineers? Maybe God confounded their language because he didn't want any competing paths to heaven.

So far when The Bible speaks of heaven, like in this Chapter and the Tower of Babel Chapter, is it really just referencing the sky or space or the whole area above the earth? God hasn't actually given any word as to his Kingdom to the people, so how would they know anything about it? Jacob says the place where God lives is the spot he just had the dream. It was an actual place on Earth. Did the people in Abraham's generations even believe in something other than the material world?

When people have a dream about God or Jesus, do they wake up thinking they've been spoken to by the Lord? But when they have a dream about a jelly roll with fangs eating the family dog, it's just a silly dream, right?

Why does God tell Jacob that He will one day leave Jacob? He doesn't say He'll always be with Jacob. He says he won't leave Jacob until the day comes that all of His words have come to fruition. Does that mean God will definitely leave at that time? Or does that mean that God will never make those things come true so he can always be with Jacob and all of Jacob's seeds? And keep telling them all the same story over and over and over again?

What happened to Luz? Whose city was Luz? Did Jacob wake up to the morning sun and find he had been camping in the middle of a city and he'd just built an altar in the town square and renamed the whole town? Can somebody explain why The Bible mentions Luz at all at this point?

I probably repeat myself a lot in these Study Guides but that's because The Bible needs some new material. Jacob just did the same thing Abraham did when he first began his travels in Genesis Chapter Twelve. They both built an altar to God on a place they named God's House or Beth-el. Did Jacob relocate God's home or did he just happen to fall asleep on the same spot that Abraham built his altar many years before?

The Bible is either filled with great coincidences or many retellings of the same stories with different details. Either way, is this the best way to convince people that your religion is miraculous? Are some people wired to never see coincidence but to always see divine providence or the work of man? Like a schizophrenic? Are some people not cynical enough to realize that the same story is being used again and again and instead, in their naïveté, see it as some kind of miracle or proof that God is working through each generation to repeat his father's same actions?

Does Jacob really think God, who made the entire universe and everything ever, really wants to live in a crappy stone pillar? And does he think God really needs a tenth of everything that Jacob accumulates from, in Jacob's words, God Himself? If God indeed gave it to Jacob, then God didn't need it for Himself. So why does Jacob have to give a tenth back to Him? What sense does it make to get a $5 allowance from your parents and immediately give them back fifty cents? Wouldn't your parents just amend your allowance to $4.50 if they really needed that extra one-tenth? And why would God need anything anyway being that he's omnipotent? What a greedy jerk.

I was writing about dreams when Julee Cruise's 'Into the Night' began playing on my stereo.

This is my favorite moment in Twin Peaks spoken by Major Garland Briggs to his son, Bobby:
"I had a vision, as opposed to a dream which is merely a sorting and cataloguing of the days events by the subconscious mind. This was a vision fresh and clear as a mountain stream. The mind revealing itself to itself. In my vision, I was on the veranda of a vast estate, a palazzo of some fantastic proportion. There seemed to emanate from it a light from within the gleaming radiant marble. I had known this place; I had, in fact, been born and raised there. This was my first return; a reunion with the deepest wellsprings of my being. Wandering about, I noticed happily that the house had been immaculately maintained. There had been added a number of additional rooms but in a way that blended so seamlessly with the original construction one would never detect any difference. Returning to the house's grand foyer, there came a knock at the door. My son was standing there. He was happy and carefree, clearly living a life of deep harmony and joy. We embraced, a warm and loving embrace, nothing withheld. We were, in this moment, one. My vision ended and I awoke with a tremendous feeling of optimism and confidence in you and your future. That was my vision. It was you."

I had a dream one night that bugs were infiltrating my head. I was standing upon a large suspension bridge set up between the left and right hemispheres of my brain and I had to figure out how to get the bugs out. The only clue I had was that I had to say a certain word in front of a star. Searching my head for the star was like searching through an antique shop amidst all of the clutter. Then I remembered where I had seen that pattern before and I headed over to a wall next to a bed. On the wall were two lit up circles and I could see some other circles which made up the five points of the star. So I started jumping on the bed and shouting out words playfully as I tried to guess the word I needed. I remember the first word I shouted was 'Despair' but I don't remember any others. As I shouted words, I suddenly realized the exact word I needed. I stopped jumping and, dramatically, spoke, "Dream."
     The circles all lit up and the star became a whirlpool of lights and colors. At that point, it sort of morphed into a plasma television that gave me three options for a reward for figuring out the first part of the quest. One of the options was to see a glimpse 50 years into the future. I chose that option even though I wasn't really interested in the reward, just continuing on with the bug extermination. I could hear my cousin speaking from somewhere, like on a headset. And then another friend was suddenly there with me.
     The vision of the future had to do with something like the Sharks taking over hockey in some hockey altering change or something equally strange. I wasn't really paying attention. My friend suddenly asked me, "Hey, what's wrong with your eye?" and I glanced in a mirror to see blood dripping from above my eyelid. Also, the white of my eye was beginning to mist up red from the blood. So I turned and started yelling for some woman who was helping me with the quest. Only, I couldn't remember her name, so I was frantically yelling, "Hey! What's your name? Hey! What's your name? Where are you?"
     As I was yelling, blood began gushing like crazy from above my eye and I grabbed a towel to staunch the flow as best as I could. But it wasn't really helping and at that point, I realized it was all a dream and that I should wake myself up before I bleed to death.
     Which is what I did. I woke up.
     After waking, I'd realized that the blood pouring forth from my eye was one of the tests and that I'd failed. Instead of dealing with it and continuing on with my dream to rid the bugs from my brain, I'd gotten scared and ended my dream before I was finished.
     I sat in bed wondering what would have happened had I continued? What lay before me if I'd kept following my dream? What would I have learned had I persevered? But I realized that I'd never know that. And, in fact, that wasn't the point at all. The point was that I had given in to fear and stopped the dream before I could accomplish my goal. Instead of pressing on in adversity to continue with something I'd wanted to do, I'd given up.
     Man, the subconscious mind can really bitch slap you sometimes.

I dreamt that Mister Roger's Land of Make-Believe had a theme song. It was the word 'Gorkublort' repeated over and over again in a monotone voice.

A. Isaac makes a deal with God that if God keeps him safe on his travels to and from Haran, he will worship God. What kind of selfish and manipulative deal is that? Have you ever made a similar deal with God? Perhaps that you'll never do something again if God just answers your prayer? Describe your own deal you once made with God.
B. What is the significance of the ladder that Jacob sees in his dream?
C. Do some research and find out what Luz was since I can't be bothered to look it up even though it's only three whole letters to type into Google.

DRAWING TIME!

Draw Jacob's dream as you imagine it must have looked from the limited details presented in The Bible.

WHAT DID CHRISTIAN LITERALISTS LEARN?

The entrance to heaven exists at Beth-el where there is a ladder extending all the way to heaven.