I Like It, But I Am Not Quite Sure What To Do With It

 

 I was recently speaking to a close friend of mine and they told me about this dream they had.

Now, I am not entirely sure what to do with dreams. However, I found it, at the very least,  vividly illustrative of some features of life-after-death that would not surprise me. With their permission I have related the dream here. Worst case it is just some weirdness to be dismissed, best case there are some pictures and structures in here that may open doors in your mind and soul that bring freedom in ways that only features of a story can.
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So I'm beginning to have a recurring dream about my own death

It goes as follows:

I am arrested for treason and killed via injection. Some times I get away for a bit, then get shot, dragged in and injected. Other times I just go with it. For the first few times I knew for certain I was about to die and I really wondered what I was going to find on the other side, or if there was actually anything there. The first few times there wasn't. Things just went black.

Then the last time I had this dream I knew it was going to be different. The reason I was not actually over to the other side, for lack of a better word, in the previous dreams was because I had not gone brain dead. As long as the brain is functioning, it will filter out perception of the afterlife.

I knew this time it was going to work all the way.

I get injected, go into paralysis
feel as the various biosystems shut down
finally I realize the brain is about to go
then it does and everything is black
then quite as if it was totally natural
I come to on the other side
this is where it gets really interesting
I woke up in the back stage area of a theater
wearing 16th century British attire
along with a few others dressed the same

Here is the key thing.
NOTHING fundamental had changed.

The only thing different about the after life is that we could not die again and were now stuck with accepting reality for what it was. Also, we could see through each others thought processes and realize that all the same emotional dynamics were in effect.....no one had actually changed, gotten better, worse, wiser, stupider, and most of all no one was at peace because, and this is the really important part, we all still had complete freedom and responsibility.

The big change was that we now had no pretense of morality or right and wrong to justify anything we did or didn't do.

We started fighting and arguing and I realized that we had been stripped to the barest essentials of junior high level emotions and retardation because these emotional process and not some abstract notion of morality are what actually direct our actions
we could no longer hide it
guilt did not exist
right and wrong could not be used as a justification
only schoolyard shame
It wasn't a question of if we should or should not do something because it was good. It was a question of what people would think if we did something. This is what underlies all actions.

This all confirmed for me that fear is not tied to survival as people would assume from an evolutionary stand point, because we were no longer physically alive. It is tied to the soul, it is tied to interpersonal emotions.

God was no more present or not present than in the physical world. We just saw him as a constant, which is to say we ignored him because he was in the room with us instructing us on what we were actually dealing with.

As I remember it the big conflict in the rehearsal room was when to go live on stage.

And here is where it gets insane.
We had to strip, as in take off the clothes we were wearing, and go on stage to do a live sex show. (Not to read into it too much but the going on stage part in my opinion was about our new bodies and the sex show part has to do with entering into a level of intimacy that would just seem obscene to our current sensibilities.)

The big take away from all this is that our impression of the after life being Heaven or Hell or whatever are wrong.
It's all Hades or Sheol.
Everyone goes there and it is a continuation of everything we did or didn't do in this life. Unlike the common religious assumptions about the afterlife like both places being where we have no responsibility/freedom, and we either are made perfect or burn for all eternity, we had complete freedom and all pretense was stripped away.

The evolutionary process of making us more perfect however was fully in effect
I realized that the growing would never stop and we all had a long way to go.
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The idea that we are still free in the afterlife, that we are not relieved of our freedom, but that we can no longer hide from it or hide it from ourselves, and that our passing is a transition to a deeper development of personhood with the crutches of this world stripped away.

I find the picture invigorating and it drives me to want to accept more responsibility for my own actions and inactions to better prepare for that next phase.

What do you think of it?