Dead People Who Can’t Dream Are Lonely.
I meet a lot of dead people in my dreams. They’re not people I knew in life, well, not this life. It’s not like my late father is impatiently hanging around and waiting for me to hit the hay. But I do meet the dead in my dreams, and they have a lot to say.
Although most of them are quite forgetful, and get things mixed up from time to time. You may wonder, how do I know they’re dead and not just some figment of my imagination? If so, you make a good point, and in this humdrum reality, so fixated on empirical data and absolute proof, I can’t give you a straight answer. Just like science can’t make any guarantees on so many of their ‘educated guesses’, and there are quite a few.
I’ve have had them come up to me in the middle of a dream and demand that I pass on a message to their son or daughter, a favourite uncle, mom or pop, or an old buddy from their army days. I then tell them, in not so many words, ‘no’. The thing is when you’re dreaming your mental faculties aren’t exactly tip-top. You can’t guarantee you’ll recall anything, and even if you did, you won’t have a clue how to track down long lost relatives, with first names and poor descriptions passed on via the hazy memories of the dead.
Don’t get me wrong, not all of them speak to me when I am asleep, but those who do seem happier in themselves. I’d say they’ve learned to deal with ups and downs of the afterlife. Not like those that hang around here on earth, and I don’t mean to generalise, but a lot them can be rather annoying. There are people out there who’ve made a good living from talking to the dead, armed with gadgets galore, spirit radios and the like. But me, all I need is two minutes silence, and there they are tapping on my door. Of course, I mean that metaphorically, although from time to time I do come across the odd poltergeist. But most just cut to the chase and whisper something in my ear.
That’s why I’m always wearing headphones, and listening to white noise, or wind, or rain, or anything that blocks out the background sounds of the mumbling dead. I used to think I was crazy. It got pretty serious at one point or another, a couple of suicide attempts, spending months at a time locked-up in various mental institutions, riddled with clinical drugs and well-meaning psychology. In the end, I just faked it and told the world I felt better, and now, well, I just wing it.
I’d rather the dead jabbered on around me than listen to another word of psychobabble from a highly qualified, pharmaceutically proficient, torturer. It’s better this way, it’s easier. So now, asides from writing God knows what for God knows who, I am an agony uncle, a sympathetic ear, a shoulder to cry on for those who’ve disappeared from view. Those people forgotten by their friends and family, who traipse around the world looking for some company.
The ‘lost souls’, although they take offence to that description, have little to do. They’re not on any great mission, and they haven’t any business to complete before they leave. They’re just paranoid, like me, which is a good thing when you think about it, it keeps you on your toes. I don’t wander blindly through this life. I know the rules.
Then there are those who are genuinely stuck, they are neither here nor there, and you’ll never find them in a dream. If anything, they’d rather keep loons like me awake all night. I didn’t mind when I was young and enthusiastic, pumped full of recreational drugs, and supremely optimistic. Now, not so much. Now that I’ve run out of patience and luck, I need my beauty sleep because it’s the nearest I get to a vacation these days. But if it’s a particularly troubled and wretched soul, somebody with a tale to tell, I’ll stay up late and hear their story in all its miserable, long drawn out glory.
What I hear is usually the same, details differ, but life is life after all. Regrets can ruin one’s perspective, and when the dead ask my opinion, I will stick to the script. Less is more, avoid any details, homespun philosophies will more than suffice. Perhaps something obvious like ‘learn to move on’ but never ‘time is a great healer’. It seems that grief works both ways, which makes sense. All in all, like people in general, the dead are a decent lot, although you will come across a few jerks once in a while, especially if they were a ‘somebody’ down here on earth.
You know the sort, the wealthy, the famous, the big kahunas, even the relative nobodies with a brief spell of celebrity, a soap star, sitcoms, the usual B-movie fodder. Sometimes you won’t even know who they are, but they won’t hesitate to remind you. I’ll be honest, I have my favourites, there’s one particular director from yesteryear, not a big name but respected within the industry. I call them Frank, although that can get a little confusing. It’s actually their surname, or near enough, but for reasons unknown they’d rather I don’t use their real name. All the same, they’ve helped me tremendously, and I’ve kept them company, and now I think they’re doing pretty well for themselves, on the other side that is. But Frank’s one in a million, there are plenty of bigwigs in the hereafter, that I’ve been glad to see them go and not come back.
The big ‘I am ‘s’, the people who say, “Don’t you know who I am?” Sometimes I do, and sometimes I don’t, but you can tell they’re lonely from a mile off, it’s their egos I suppose. Too many yes men, too much pampering, too much money in the bank, it all does damage in the afterlife. That’s the thing, all those puritan tomes telling you to smite your neighbour’s goat get it right once in a while. A camel through a needle, or some such proverb, like airport luggage, there are weight restrictions when matter turns to light.
So, here we go, ‘Dead people who cannot dream are lonely’. The materialists, the fundamentalists, the shallow and the rigid, those who have sworn allegiance to a cause, those who can only learn to be themselves by example, the followers, the copycats, the fashionable critics and creatures of habit, you are all doomed.
If you want to be happy when you’re dead, first of all, accept that life goes on without you. When you’re gone, people will forget you for tastes and fashions change. The world is a fickle place, and when all you have left are dopes like me to lend an ear, you should learn to adapt and get a handle on death.
Conjure waking dreams in the slumbering shadows of the afterlife for lucidity is the key, and without it, you’ll go blind. Always remember, you have three eyes. While I’m at it, don’t be greedy, don’t be impatient, your time will come again, in one way or another. And if you’re that desperate to come back, remember that you struck lucky this time, next time it won’t be so easy.
Who knows, if you don’t heed my warning you might end up being a freak like me? A loser without any direction in life, hankering for death like a long lost love.
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