Life is but a dream …

What happens to you when you die? The world’s philosophers, mystics, lamas, crackpots, and thinkers have amassed to tackle this problem, but they all have different suggestions, and it shall likely remain forever a Great Unknowable. So I have a less serious suggestion, which depends on two premises.

Dreams as entertainment. Once I fancied the notion that with sufficiently advanced hallucinogenic technology, you could fashion your own dreams. You could ingest a pill or whatever, fall asleep, and it would let you experience a very specific dream. A movie, effectively, but you’re completely immersed in its world as a character, in all its sensory splendour, and it lasts for the eight hours you’re asleep. A pill for a romantic comedy, a different pill for a prison escape drama, and yet another pill for eight hours of fucking Matthew McConaughey. In practice this might work like the TV or movie industry—instead of home-brewing your own dream-pills, you’d have production companies synthesise dream-pills for general consumption. These companies might consist of neurobiologists and pharmaceutical experts, as well as artists: actors, writers, directors, set and lighting and costume designers. And you’d take their pill and have an adventure of mythic proportions, subplots upon subplots, all underneath your fidgety eyelids. Eight hours of sleep, converted into entertainment.

Differential dream-time. Time passes differently in dreams. This is a conceit I draw mainly from Inception (2010), although C.S. Lewis did the time-passing-more-quickly thing much earlier, with The Chronicles of Narnia. In Inception, twenty hours of dream-time occur in one hour of real time, so an eight-hour sleep could contain roughly a week of content. But why limit ourselves to a 20:1 time dilation factor? With a 100,000:1 time dilation factor you could experience an entire 90-year human lifetime in the space of an eight-hour sleep. So the dream-pill production companies could synthesise pills containing the full life experience of a particular human (real or fictional). These pills could be marketed by genre, so you could choose to live the life of, for example, “Hattie Layton” (early 1900s Midwest schoolteacher, romance, 83 years) or “Antoine de Vere” (early 1800s French street urchin, crime, 22 years) to-night, depending on what you’re in the mood for. For framing purposes, let’s say the production company who made the pills you used to-night syncs in “Life Is But A Dream”, by the Harptones, as end credits music.

And so as you lay dying and the Great Nothing envelops you in its tender swaddling finality, you hear the drunken swirl of the Harptones fade in. Across the featureless black of your vision swims a scrolling list of credits. And after three minutes, a date with eternity, the credits wrap up, the doo-wop fades out, and you wake up … somewhere.