For the last two consecutive nights I've dreamt that I was dying. But I wasn't dying a normal death, as if from a debilitating disease, perhaps cancer or some other such disease. I was dying at a specified time, as if being put to death. It didn't seem like I was being executed, exactly, but it had the same certainty and foreknowledge. I was lying on a table, perhaps a surgical table, covered with a white sheet. There was sadness around me, a funereal feel to the occasion. I sensed my mother there with me, and at a distance, my sister, perhaps, though the identity of that presense was less certain. I don't have a clear recollection of what was going through my head, but there was anticipation, a sense of a countdown. I had that same wonder and awe, a facination and a fear, that I always get when someone I know, someone who was alive one moment, and then dead, gone the next moment. There is something profoundly mysterious about that phenomenon--being one moment and the next moment not being.

I enjoyed the dream in some ways... perhaps the excitement generated by such a personally apocalyptic event, but of course I felt real fear, or rather not fear, but dread mixed with an uncertainty and regret, perhaps, but above all an inability to fathom it. After all, how can one fathom one's own nonexistence. It makes no sense. Well, there's existential dread of the highest order. The phenomonologists, and later the existentialists, believed, and I agree, that intentionality is fundamental to human consciousness. Consciousness is fundamentally a projection into the future, intending, planning, becoming. Not being, but nothingness. And the sure knowledge that there will be no more becoming is, I suppose, an anathema to it. Maybe that's the source of the dread, of the inability to fathom. I wonder what the existentialists have written on death and dying. Anyway, I didn't mean to jump into such musings. My only point here is that I thought it was peculiar that I dreamt it twice, especially since I so seldom ever remember dreaming at all. The other thing I thought noteworthy was how I felt my mother with me. It was so nice to have her there, even though she couldn't really help me. My mother doesn't know what's going on inside my head most of the time now that I'm an adult. Others know me better now, in that respect. But there isn't another soul on the planet I'd rather have with me at such a time.