Avatar

I had a strange dream the other night. I was lying down on my side in what appeared to be a church or sanctuary and then my consciousness left my body and rose up to the ceiling. I was thanking G_d profusely even though I had stopped at the ceiling rather than continuing on to heaven. It still felt peaceful.
I think that the dream might have been the result of having recently seen the movie, Avatar, in which scientists had found a way to link their consciousness to an artificial body that resembled those of a tribe of native people on a distant planet. After the movie, we had a conversation with a woman outside who had not yet seen the movie, but told us that the story had been told before and that some friends had taken the script from Disney’s Pochahontas, substituted names from Avatar and it was the same story. Also, David Brooks of the New York Times wrote a piece about it being a too often used story with a “white messiah”. I think they missed a lot. There were similarities, a large, powerful corporation coming to destroy a native culture for the minerals there, and the main protagonist falling in love with the daughter of the chief. But what was different about this story was that the invaders did not succeed. The natives thoroughly routed them and then the one who had come among them as an avatar actually died to his old self and his consciousness was permanently transferred to the avatar body by the wife of the chief, who herself was the tribes’ shaman. It was a resurrection story that I could appreciate. That one could see joining with another people to overcome evil that threatened all is a heartening message.