The dreams in which I'm dying are the best I've ever had
There's a piece of mythology about dreaming that suggests we cannot die in our dreams, our brains won't allow it. I dunno about the underlying assumption, but yesterday morning, on the heels of some spectacularly shitty sleep (go to bed at 1am, wake at 4am, finally get out of bed at 5am, try to go back to sleep at 7am, dream somewhere after dozing for an hour, finally give up when the boy keeps texting me around 9:30am), I died in a dream.
I don't recall what the premise of the dream was that lead to the climax; it was standard dream non-linearity and so gets lost in the overwhelming experience of what happened last. The gist of the death scene was thus:
I am lying on a mattress in a well lit furnished living room; small enough to be an apartment, unobstructed light suggesting high enough to be above impeding treelines (or just wide open to the sun). There is someone else in the room to do the incision, but I don't remember what predicates the slicing into my abdomen: too high to be a C-section incision, but not so high as to cut into the stomach. Nor do I have any sense of who this Other is. There is no anaesthetic, but like Joy says in Shadowlands, "It's like the pain's still going on down there, but it has nothing to do with me". I feel nothing but the parting of skin and organ tissue, the warmth of blood everywhere. There is a sensation of hands at the incision - and this is no laproscopic incision site, this was a full-on gutting slice - but not in the sense of trying to hold things together so much as looking for something, or at least doing something that involved getting hands into the wound. I'm not entirely certain the hands aren't my own. Throughout all of this, I am feeling the blood literally sluice down my sides, soaking into the mattress under me. The world doesn't go dark, I just get very weak very quickly; I remain dissociated from my body and the pain, other than feeling strength drain with the bleed-out.
Then I hit the point where I know I died: I felt my whole body just letting go, where everything stops abruptly and relaxes into death. No "world went dim", no "white light", just... letting go.
That was the point at which I woke up, unsurprisingly.
There are some rabbit holes, apparently, down which even MY brain is unwilling to traipse.
I don't recall what the premise of the dream was that lead to the climax; it was standard dream non-linearity and so gets lost in the overwhelming experience of what happened last. The gist of the death scene was thus:
I am lying on a mattress in a well lit furnished living room; small enough to be an apartment, unobstructed light suggesting high enough to be above impeding treelines (or just wide open to the sun). There is someone else in the room to do the incision, but I don't remember what predicates the slicing into my abdomen: too high to be a C-section incision, but not so high as to cut into the stomach. Nor do I have any sense of who this Other is. There is no anaesthetic, but like Joy says in Shadowlands, "It's like the pain's still going on down there, but it has nothing to do with me". I feel nothing but the parting of skin and organ tissue, the warmth of blood everywhere. There is a sensation of hands at the incision - and this is no laproscopic incision site, this was a full-on gutting slice - but not in the sense of trying to hold things together so much as looking for something, or at least doing something that involved getting hands into the wound. I'm not entirely certain the hands aren't my own. Throughout all of this, I am feeling the blood literally sluice down my sides, soaking into the mattress under me. The world doesn't go dark, I just get very weak very quickly; I remain dissociated from my body and the pain, other than feeling strength drain with the bleed-out.
Then I hit the point where I know I died: I felt my whole body just letting go, where everything stops abruptly and relaxes into death. No "world went dim", no "white light", just... letting go.
That was the point at which I woke up, unsurprisingly.
There are some rabbit holes, apparently, down which even MY brain is unwilling to traipse.