h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Weird stupid thoughts that have recently come to me

So a weird, sort of odd idea came to me. Dreaming is some sort of chemical reaction that is going on in our brains. It’s something that comes to us, it may mean the world, and it may mean we ate too much green jell-o. There really isn’t much of an explanation as to why I can have three full meals in a day, complete a full day’s work, and still dream that I am flying, with my own wings, off the cliffs of some town I once upon a time read about in some ancient National Geographic magazine.

What if dying is like dreaming?

I mean, dreaming is really sleeping, while living off the mental spark of that day, thriving still from some chemical additive, while maintaining a fully inert body. A person can dream that they are running, falling, holding, fighting… you can wake up thinking you were holding a precious treasure, from money to jewels to some loved one you can’t touch when you’re awake. You can wake up afraid, nervous, excited, just about any state that some particular remnant of some particular point of that particular dream has the ability to leave you in. And that is one dream, one night, fueled from one day.

What can a life time give you?

What if the end comes? I mean it will, eventually, no one lives forever in actuality… so eventually it has to. What if that last moment, whether you are awake or asleep, your body gives you one last spark. Not the spark of a day, or a month, or a year… but the spark of a lifetime. All the visions of heaven and hell, the visions of the afterlife from Valhalla, to the Buddhist version of nirvana, to anything your mind has the ability to scramble for you, for that one last spark, could instantly become your afterlife.

In a dream a person can dream a date, and a second, a week and a year without noticing that the real world has spanned somewhere from 4 to 12 hours. A dream can have you being a hero, a fighter, a lover, an enemy. You can fly, you can swim, and you can do anything in a dream. And that is still the same dream that is fueled from one day’s reserve of one chemical additive.

Imagine the value of that one additive if someone could market that???

So what I’m wondering is that what if when you pass, when your brain decides that it has had enough, that your heart finally gives out, what if the same nervous impact that causes you to soil yourself, against your best instincts, also fires away one last spark. One spark, a spark that compares putting your tongue across a 9-volt battery to getting hit by a dozen shots of lightning on the very tip of your tongue. That spark could be a tunnel with light on the end, it could be Thor waiting in Valhalla, it could be Buda his own chubby self greeting you with open arms, it could also be the very pits of hell, sending you on some sort of hellish eternity where the mind screams. But the mind would be gone, there is no eternity, you just are living off one spark that is so vast and so very important, that it may be lasting one fraction of one moment, but then again, every moment can be drawn out to eternity if it is that important.


Huh, that scared me. I didn’t think I had that in me anywhere really.

Think of your mind as a computer. When you switch it of (go to sleep) it compresses all your thoughts (files) for future reference. This is what we experience as dreams. As with computers, some thoughts/files get scrambled. (strange dreams, nightmares etc)