A Stone With No Name
A few nights ago I had a dream where I was dead and, as a ghost, I felt compelled to complete a few objectives before giving in to the light. This dream was interesting in that it was the first where I witnessed my own death—a moment not marked by fear or spectacle, but by stillness, followed by the out-of-body experience that comes with being a spirit. There was no funeral. There was no commemoration. The stone that was placed above my grave looked to be the size of an A4-sized sheet of paper lying flat on the ground and made of glass. It bore no inscription. For the rest of the dream, I learned how to interact with the world enough to communicate with the sole purpose of having the stone updated to show my name.
The other details of the dream, the people and places within, I will not bore you with because they are meaningful to me but utterly unknown to anyone reading this. However, there were a few things that stood out about this dream:
- I had died
- I felt no fear or sadness
- My tombstone was a pane of glass
- It bore no name
I have had dreams where I wake up a few seconds before death, such as those falling dreams where you see the ground rushing towards you with no way to slow down. I have had dreams where I could not communicate with people around me, mute despite the plethora of communication mediums available to us. Never have I had a dream that incorporated both of these aspects with one that had to be accepted and the other overcome.
Upon waking, I stayed in bed staring at the ceiling for a while just thinking through the dream and what it could mean. The subconscious often wrestles with reality in creative ways. The visions it presents overnight can give us clues into our own psyche.
Mortality is not something that I have worried about over the past few years as I’ve come to accept that I will not be here forever, nor would I want to be. While I do not have hyperthymesia, the uncommon ability to remember every day of my life, I do remember the vast majority of my dreams. This additional weight of experiences makes every calendar day feel like two or three. And, while dreams are often illogical and full of contradictions, so is the real world. So this provides a wealth of “life experience” to consider when people ask if I want to live for 200 or more years. Would I be anxious or fearful to discover I was a ghost? This would be wholly dependent on whether someone could look after Ayumi or not. As selfish as it may sound, nothing else would concern me as they would be temporary nuisances for the people taking care of them.
Selling my car. Emptying the house. Notifying various government offices. Nuisances, but short-lived ones.
The tombstone is what stood out more than anything to me. Being made of glass it was completely transparent. This was not a fancy marker with frosted sections depicting a work of art. This was a piece of transparent glass that looked to be about 2cm thick, showing the flattened grass underneath. Nothing would have prevented someone from coming by, picking it up, and walking away. There was no message. There was no year. There was no name. It was effectively saying that I never existed; one of the only concerns that truly keeps me up at night.
In the dream this motivated me to remain on the earth as a spirit, learn how to communicate with the physical world, and ask someone to have the stone updated. Rarely are my dreams so egocentric where, like Bender in the classic episode of Futurama, I am shouting into the void: “REMEMBER ME!”
While I stared at the ceiling that morning, I wondered if this would be my fate. Would I be forgotten in the sands of time, relegated to nothing more than a statistic in a handful of databases? Or can I communicate with the physical world, offer something of value, and perhaps be remembered for a little while? This theme returns often: the desire to do something meaningful before I go. But I seem to fail every time. Am I chasing the wrong things? Misunderstanding the point? Or is the truth something else entirely? I don’t know.
What I do know, however, is that I do not want my tombstone to be an unblemished pane of glass.