Karma

Last night, I dreamed I gambled some money and won some money in the form of $5 paper credits. Since we can't pay tithing on gambled money, I decided to give everything to a charity by buying new clothes and groceries for a homeless shelter. When Tim and I reached the Salvation Army to purchase these things (apparently in the dream, I was thinking quantity over quality), we didn't know how to begin getting our paper credits to work, so we asked a guy by the counter. He explained to feed them into the computer and it will give us a credit under the store account. So that's just what we did.

Going through the store, we picked out all sorts of things. The people in the store kept hiding things in their jackets and taking things from our cart, the last of whatever item was available on the shelves. I would turn to look at a pile of jeans, turn around and half the things we picked out would be gone. In my dream, the people in the store were poor, and I knew them to be. I kept smiling at them like I was personally touching their lives by buying these things for a homeless shelter. But once I saw one of them stuffing their coats with everything they could get their hands on, I told on them to the guy at the front counter.

After we'd picked up everything we thought would help, I believe our last items were baby food and diapers, we went up to the counter. People butted in front of us and gave us dirty looks like they'd been standing there all along.

When we got up to the front, a different front counter person rang up all of our things, then asked us for payment. I explained we put our credits into the machine and they should ring up in the computer. He asked who told us this, because there is no way to do that. It was then I realized all that money that was about to be put to good use had been stolen.

I turned around to the whole store, to all the people waiting behind us looking ill-tempered and screamed at them. "That's IT! I've had it with all of you! You wonder why you're poor!! Have you ever heard of karma?! If you keep stealing things and treating people this way, it's all gonna come back and bite you in the butt. You're going to get robbed of the little you have, or your kid's gonna die, or you'll get cancer!"

I woke up to myself screaming in my dream. It felt pretty good to get all my frustration out like that, but man, talk about karma. I'm having a pretty bad day today. Maybe cuz I yelled at all those poor people who stole from me. Or maybe it showed me the consequences of gambling...

Or maybe we shouldn't eat pizza right before bed anymore.