Last Night I Dreamed We Escaped Paul Hill

By

Neal Horsley

⁶And he said unto them, Hear, I pray you, this dream which I have dreamed…Genesis 37:6a

Paul Hill’s Hands

( Christian Gallery News Service, August 31, 2003) For anyone trying to understand where the temptation to terrorism comes from, reading this dream story and a little thought will go a long way toward creating that understanding.

About 2:30 am this morning I woke up to go to the bathroom and my waking consciousness noticed without comment that I was into a dream about breaking Paul Hill out of prison before they had a chance to kill him this coming Wednesday.

The tension created in me by the dream was enormous.  Breaking a man out of death row in one of the most secure prisons on earth, even in a dream, fires every component that makes up a human being’s unit.  But in that mysterious dream consciousness where the most powerful images of the human psyche play out their powerful role, I went about my bathroom business, then went back to bed without thinking at all about trying to stifle the dream. 

            During the remainder of the night I awoke at least three times and each time the dream was moving forward.  By 6:50 am when I finally realized I needed to get out of bed I was still dreaming, Paul Hill was long out of prison, and I was in the middle of a horribly bloody running firefight with the government of the United States of America.

In modern journalism no ordinary reporter would run a news story about a dream he had, but in biblical times news stories were often about dreams.  When Joseph was called upon to interpret Pharaoh’s dreams, the grapevine that was the equivalent of our modern news agencies must have been clogged with stories about Pharaoh’s dreams.  No wonder: Pharaoh’s dreams foretold life and death events upon which the survival of the vast majority of the population of Egypt depended. 

            I was in the hallway outside Paul Hill’s cell at the prison at Raifford.  And when he looked at me, there was already a plan that he and I shared, a plan about his escape.

            Where did the plan come from?

In dreams, absolutely critical components of real world plans just mysteriously occur like assumptions that actually happened.  I was there and when I looked into Paul Hill’s eyes I knew we had a plan for his escape and I knew it was going to require me to kill and/or be killed and I knew I was going to cooperate without the slightest hesitation at every step in the plan.

Now, as I write, trying to reconstruct the dream is very difficult.  But when I was dreaming each shot was absolutely vivid.  Each successive shot was perfectly framed and perfectly necessary given the preceding shot.  Now, like an old photograph that is fading to nothingness, the stark images of my dream become increasingly vague in the light of day.

I remember this much.  The dream unfolded in correct chronological order, there were no flash backs.  By moving around in the hallway outside his cell, even though I was constantly under surveillance by the guard at the end of the row of cells and the security cameras that scanned the cell area, I was able to find a hidden shank.  Everything moved forward to his escape without a hitch.  Paul Hill summoned the guard.  I was able to put the knife to his throat and we knew the security cameras did not see it.

My dreaming might have been prompted before I went to bed by the glimpse I had as I scrolled through the TV channels of the prison escape sequence from “Natural Born Killers.”

And there were other people who helped us.  I recognized them all when I was dreaming but now cannot recall who I saw.

Somehow they had made it to strategic places and were there to help us as Paul and I made it toward the door of the prison.

As we broke free from the prison, there was a convoy of trucks.  They might have been military trucks that had been commandeered by our allies.

By then, many people were involved in the escape and the escape had been found out and the shooting had begun.

Things get dimmer from there, focusing mostly on the daily activities of avoiding capture.  But there was much shooting and we had to constantly be on the move.

And loyal friends were all around.  And there was not much fear.  In the heart of everyone I met in the dream there was a sense of peace and joy because everyone would look into each other’s eyes and without saying a word think about what a blessing it was that Paul Hill was alive and out of prison and that we had managed to accomplish that much.

When I awoke and realized that I not only had to get out of bed but had to deal with the fact that I had spent the night shooting and bombing and generally doing my best to utterly destroy the existing government of the United States of America plus get ready to go to Florida and stand outside a prison in the brutal mid Florida early September sun while they strapped Paul Hill on a gurney and put him to sleep like some kind of mangy, unwanted cur, I finally settled on this news report as my response to it all.