I dreamt of heaven...

I'm currently reading a rather chilling horror novel called The Dwelling. The Canadian author, Susie Moloney, has mastered atmosphere: her haunted house is genuinely creepy.
The scariest books give me nightmares. I've dreamed scenes from Stephen King's The Shining off and on since I first read that book. The Dwelling might yet provoke a night scream or two out of me.
(Yeah, yeah, I know, what kind of masochist buys a horror novel about a haunted house that keeps coming on the resale market...just after he buys a house? That'd be me. Hyuk hyuk hyuk...)
Anyway, last night I went off to bed, checking first to make sure that all the closet doors were firmly closed, that the tub hadn't sprouted claws, and that I couldn't hear music coming from nowhere...or the creak...creak...creak of something long-dead hanging from a beam in the attic. The house checked out normal...at least for now...so off to sleep I went.
And had a truly remarkable dream.
I dreamed that I had died and gone to heaven. Nobody told me I was in heaven, or indeed that I was dead. Dreams come to me with a set of facts presupposed...I'm made aware of them via a kind of mental shorthand before the curtains raise in my theatre of the mind.
Heaven was...different
At first, I was high in the air on some kind of slow-moving amusement park ride. There were scores of faces around me, some of which I knew very well, others that I just barely knew I'd known once. Everyone was smiling, laughing, having a great time. A bunch of people greeted me by name as we flew through the air
We came to rest and without warning I was walking through a Price Chopper grocery store. Don't you just love those abrupt scene changes? Don't you love even more how they seem perfectly natural?
It wasn't the one I work at, but my boss, Larry, was busy stocking shelves. I hailed him and said, "so heaven is a Price Chopper? Seems odd."
He replied "no, only on Thursdays". And without him saying another word, I knew what he meant.
Some days Larry would go out and play a round of golf. Some days, he'd laze around home. But once a week, usually on Thursdays, he'd come to "work" because otherwise he might experience boredom, a state unknown in Heaven. And he'd putter for a few hours because he enjoyed doing so.
Nodding my head, filled with sudden epiphanies, I walked outside.
And met a bunch more people, including my last girlfriend before Eva came into my life.
I'll call her Anne--I do have this habit of thinly disguising people's identities by using their middle names.
I've always wondered what happened to Anne. The breakup was my fault entirely--she was depressed and not entirely stable and I just couldn't handle it. Having made a complete mess of the relationship, I then realized my error and spent about eighteen months trying to win her back. Futile effort. The final split was at her urging, but on (mostly) good terms. She seemed to be getting on with living her life and jettisoning me was important in that regard. I do hope she went on to live well
Anyway, in this dream, I asked for and received forgiveness. I told Anne that meeting Eva had been the best thing to happen to me in my life and thanked her for booting me out so I could go on to do it. And I somehow said that in a way that didn't offend her. I got a nice hug, started to move on to the next friendly face, and woke up.

No idea what had awakened me, but I thought it was the television, which is what we use for an alarm clock. Sensing Eva awake beside me, I started babbling about this dream, only to open my eyes and still find it pitch black in our room. So I apologized and tried very hard to go back to sleep and re-enter the dream.
No luck. I've only managed that particular trick a few times in my life, and last night wasn't one of them. But I was grateful for what dream I did have, because it comforted me...inspired me? Yes, inspired me.