Dream Sequence

The other night I had a dream that I was dying. In my dream, one minute I was sitting down and the next I was falling down slowly. As I fell, my vision became cloudy. Outside of my body, I watched my body, which was that of an older man black man with big eyes and fine lines, bend at the waist and come to rest on a white miasma. My eyes, covered in a milky white film, were open and stared back unseeingly at me. It looked as if my body were shutting down.

Before dying, I had been thinking about dying. I was considering why I should continue to live. In particular, I was thinking about a friend of mine who had passed on recently. I was considering what I had that she didn’t have. Why should I be around instead of her. It was immediately after I thought this that my dream body started to die.

While my body was dying my mind was very active. My mind continued the same debate, what reasons did I have to live and what reasons did I have to die.

There were very few reasons to live. I thought that my family would mourn me and I didn’t want them to suffer and be sad, but from personal experience in dealing with death I determined that they would eventually move on and forget about me. I’ve always been pained when losing a loved one. The pain does not necessarily fade, but you think about it less and the edges of it dulls.

I also thought that there was nothing great I needed to do on this earth, there was no great thing that needed to be accomplished before I die. Interestingly, the fact weighing most heavily in favor of dying was that we will all die eventually. What makes tomorrow any more appealing than today. To live, I was marking time to the inevitable anyway.

Despite all of this I decided that I wanted to live. I can’t remember why I wanted to live, but live I did. My dying body reenergized and my dream changed to something new.

Maybe my dream meant something, maybe there is something I need to finish before dying and fading from memories I might just need to finish my story about my grandmother so that she does not fade from my memories.