Dreams

Operation Chaos.

Steve Matuchek tells us that we might experience his narrative as a dream. He could have added, "One of you might not only dream but also remember my account, then write and publish it in the belief that it is a work of fiction." That is how Olaf Stapledon's Last And First Men comes to us, its author among the First Men believing that what he has written is fiction. In any case, it distorts most of what he has received from its real author who is one of the Last Men.

Matuchek advises:

"Ask yourselves how you could have a simple dream that was quite like this one." (p. 2)

Are dreams ever simple? I believe that they are the cause of belief in a hereafter. It seemed to our ancestors that they left their sleeping bodies and entered another realm where they sometimes met, i.e., dreamed about, the dead. It followed that we leave our bodies temporarily in sleep, then permanently at death. However, if we are our bodies, if dreams are activities of sleeping brains and if consciousness depends on a functioning brain, then there is nothing of us that will survive into a hereafter.

Recently, I corresponded with a philosopher who argues that we do enter and remain in the dream realm after death, an unsettling though since dreams include nightmares:

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause
-copied from here.

Neil Gaiman reassures us that the realms of Dream and Death are different places.