Tag Archives: death

I dreamed a dream and I thought it true

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I’m not much given to visions or the dreaming of visions, but I did have this dream some time ago.

In my teens I enjoyed dabbling with electronics. I would take radios and TVs apart either to fix them or see how they worked.

I had fixed a wireless and left it outside its cabinet at the side of my bed. Plugged in. The mains supply in the UK is 240V, much more robust than the anaemic North American 120V. Upon awakening, I reached down to turn on my masterpiece of renovation only to discover I had unwittingly grasped the 240V input terminal to the power transformer.

I don’t recommend you try this for yourself but, if you do, you will discover that your hand will seem to stick to the point of electrical contact while every muscle in your body spasms and shrieks at you in the utmost agony. Needless to say I survived, in spite of my attempt to invent the ultimate alarm clock. My first activity of the morning was to put the cabinet back on the wireless.

This brings me to the dream. Even though my conscious mind had long forgotten the incident, much as my hand had stuck to the electrical terminal, my unconscious was still grasping, or in the grasp of my adolescent electrocution. 60 years later I dreamt about it. There was one thing different in the dream version, though: I heard a voice say “you have one more second of conscious life left to you, then your self-awareness will be obliterated for ever.” I awoke in a panic.

Even though it was a dream, the idea of annihilation filled me with the utmost terror, more so than any of the other options – even judgement and condemnation. Perhaps I feel this way because I am an unrepentant egotist unwilling to let go of my inner dross. Or perhaps annihilationism isn’t as kind an option as some might like to think.

I’ve got you under my skin

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I recently attended two funerals which, while making passing references to Christianity, were more cultish new-age productions than anything else. The first was conducted in a Diocese of Niagara church. The priest, whose studious efforts to avoid mentioning God were subverted only by his being compelled to do so by the funeral liturgy, buoyed by years of theological training, concentrated his potent expository talent on how the deceased would live on in each of our hearts.

The second was conducted by a lady cleric of indeterminate denomination; she did mention God and Jesus but only as an afterthought when not waxing eloquent on the cosmic life force in which, apparently, we are all adrift as we journey together, wafting through the spiritual ether like itinerant milkweed seeds never able to settle long enough to germinate.

Neither mentioned the resurrection of Jesus or our hope of resurrection. Without the resurrection we are still in our sins, there is no reconciliation with God, no hope and no coherent meaning to our lives.

So how does the contemporary pagan gain comfort after losing a loved one? By having the ashes of the dearly departed tattooed into his skin; how else?

Trish Rodgers filled a small bottle cap with her dead aunt’s ashes and emptied it into a vial of black ink. In her apartment, the tattoo artist used the combination of human remains and tattoo pigment to draw the outline of a rose into her cousin’s shoulder.

At that point, this was a practice that only tattoo artists used amongst themselves, Ms. Rodgers says. But since that evening in 2008, it has garnered attention of sociologists across the world and Canadian tattoo parlours are seeing requests for the procedure grow.