I had a friend over Saturday, and after he left I felt tired – I had not slept well Friday night – and the warmth from the fire put me to sleep around 5 p.m., just as it was getting dark. I slept for three hours. Just before I woke, I dreamt I was driving in my truck along a Robert-Moses type highway – I believe it was the Cross Island. I was in the center lane, but the right lane vanished as the highway entered one of those round stone-faced arches you see on Moses highways. Just as I approached the arch, a black van pulled out of the grass on the median and made a wide turn, entering the center lane. I swerved to the right lane to avoid it, then tried to pull back into the center lane as the right lane ended, but couldn’t, and the truck struck the archway, passenger side first. Since the other side of the truck hit, I thought I might survive the crash, but I felt my entire sensory universe collapse on itself – sight, sound, touch, everything. I knew I was dead. My prime reaction was curiosity: “Now I’ll get to see what’s on the other side.” The complete sensory deprivation continued. It was not uncomfortable – there was no pain, indeed there was something velvety about it – but I kept expecting something to happen, and nothing did. It was just consciousness without any input – the way you might imagine God lived before there was a universe. I experienced that state for quite a long time – meaning perhaps fifteen seconds – before I awoke.
One of my thoughts was, “If that’s what death is like, meditation is a good preparation, to be satisfied with pure consciousness and no input.”
I have heard that death in dreams is a bad sign – a sign of an imminent psychic crack-up but I woke feeling fine. I have also heard that you can’t actually die in a dream, you always wake just before dying, but that I think is not true – the experience of the dream was precisely of dying and crossing over to the other side. And of course we all have the idea that a dream like this is a harbinger of the future, that I shouldn’t go for a Sunday drive on the Cross Island anytime soon. I don’t know.
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