The last time I got talking to God, we really got into it. You’re right: if we’re being logical, I was talking to myself. Anyway, I asked him if he had already planned when I was going to die and how I was going to die, if my death was written down somewhere, inscribed in advance. He said yes and then he coughed and went into specifics. The connection was staticky; I could make out a word here and there, but the most crucial details were inaudible.
Have you ever dreamt of your own death? I’ve had a number of dreams where I’m about to die in all manner of violent ways, and I wake up just before the final moment, but one time I dreamt I was really dead.
Actually it was more involved than that; I think I was alive and dead. I was walking down the hallway of a seedy hotel when I came to a little room. Inside the room there was nothing but a floral mattress, covered in stains, and lying on that mattress, coiled around one another, were three or four versions of myself. These . . . variants looked just like me, except they were even paler and skinnier, and there was something sensual and snakelike about their movements. I couldn’t see their eyes because they were all wearing black wraparound sunglasses, the style I’ve been wearing since I was a teenager. With the conviction that comes in dreams, and that I lack in waking life, I knew I had died and shedded myself, and I stood there in the doorway and studied my dead snaky selves.
The dream was brief and for the most part uneventful, but allow me to interpret it in light of how it both meets and challenges our assumptions about death:
Although death will surely involve a total and absolute demolition of space, a flattening, this dream preserves our expectation that death will be spatial, three-dimensional, even if it is a small, squalid room in a fleabag hotel.
More surprisingly, death may result not in the end of the self, its erasure or eradication, but the compounding of the self, its multiplication.
Given the dream’s erotic atmosphere, and the knotted bodies of my snaky selves, this appears to support the inextricable link between sex and death. But those selves of mine only appear to be screwing. There is no genital contact, no sex is taking place. We postulate that sex and death are tangled together, but it’s possible that sex is of no consequence. Death is sex. We’re all virgins, pale versions of ourselves, until we penetrate or have been penetrated by death.
That’s why I don’t go inside the room. This is the most important aspect of the dream. I want to go in, but I know that if I do, if I go in and untangle the knot, unravel the secret of death, the secret of myself, I will have to join them. So I must not cross over the threshold. Death will destroy all our assumptions. Until then, death must remain impenetrable.