The ridiculous dream

As I said, I fell asleep unconsciously, as if still thinking about the questions. I had a dream that I was sitting there with a pistol pointed at the heart -- the heart, not the head; I was going to shoot you in the head, right in the temple. I waited for a second or two, aiming at my chest, when suddenly the candles, the table, and the walls of the room all shook and spun before my eyes. I took a quick shot.

You sometimes dream of falling from a great height or being hacked to death, but you never feel any pain unless you actually hit yourself on the bed, and you often wake up from it. It was the same with my dream this time: I felt no pain, but I felt the shock of the shot all over me, and everything disappeared in an instant, and everything was black. I felt as if I were blind and deaf, lying on my back on something hard, unable to see or move. People were walking up and down beside me, Shouting, the captain was whispering, the landlady was screeching -- and suddenly the clamour stopped, and they were carrying me in a closed coffin. I felt the coffin move, and, wondering why, it gave me a shock: I was dead, really dead. I see, without a doubt, that I cannot see or move, and yet I feel and think. But I soon left it to myself, and accepted it calmly, as I always do in dreams.

So they buried me in the ground. They all went away, and I was left alone, all alone. I can't move. I used to think, when I was not dreaming, how I would be buried in a grave, and that the grave was only associated with dampness and cold. Now I felt cold, especially on the tips of my toes, but nothing else. I lay strangely unexpectant, calmly admitting that dead people have nothing to look forward to. But it feels damp. I don't know how long I lay there -- an hour, or days, or days. But suddenly a drop of water came through the lid of the coffin and fell on my closed left eye, and a minute later another drop, and a minute after that a third drop, and so on, a drop every minute. A great anger rose from my heart, and I felt a pain in my heart. "It's a wound," I thought. "It's a gunshot wound, and there's a bullet in it..." The water was still dripping, a drop a minute, straight to my closed eye. I suddenly began to pray, not with my voice, for I could not move, but with all my body and soul, to the ruler who had made me this way:

"Whoever you may be, if you are there, if there is anything more reasonable than what is happening now, let it be here too. And if, by killing myself for my lack of reason, you wish to avenge me by making the rest of my life miserable and absurd, then be aware that no suffering I may suffer at any time can compare with the shame I shall bear in silence, even if it lasts for millions of years! ..."

I prayed and said no more. There was a deep silence for almost a whole minute. Another drop of water fell, but I knew and knew and knew that everything was about to change. Now, my grave really suddenly opened. That is to say, I do not know whether the grave was opened or dug up, but I was seized by a black creature I had never seen before, and we found ourselves in the sky. It was late at night, the darkest night I had ever seen! We are hurtling through space far from the Earth. I asked nothing of the monster that had taken me. I waited. I was very proud. I was convinced that I would not be afraid, and the thought of not being afraid excited me. I can't remember how long I flew, and I can't imagine it, because everything is as it usually is in a dream, when you go beyond time and space, beyond the laws of existence and reason, you only stop at the point of vision of the heart. I remember suddenly seeing a little star in the darkness. 'Is this Sirius? 'I asked suddenly, for I didn't want to ask anything. "No, this is the star you saw through the clouds when you came home." "Replied the monster who had captured me. Then I saw that the monster had a human face. Strangely enough, I did not like this monster, and even felt very disgusted with it. What I expected was total nothingness, which is why I shot myself in the heart. Now I am in the hands of the monster, it is not a man, of course, but it is alive, is alive: "Oh, so there is life beyond the grave!" My thoughts were dreamlike, but my heart was still the same. 'If I were to live again,' I thought, 'under someone's will, I would not accept being controlled and abused by others!' "You know I'm afraid of you, so you despise me." 'I asked my companion, suddenly and without decency, a question that was self-professing, and my heart felt as mortified as a prick. He did not answer me, but I felt at once that no one despised me, laughed at me, or pitied me, and that the purpose of our journey, unclear and mysterious, concerned me alone. A sense of fear crept up in me. Something in my silent companion infected me silently but painfully, as if it were surging through me. We were flying through the dark mystery of space. It's been a long time since I've seen those familiar stars. I know that there are stars in space whose light takes thousands or even millions of years to reach us, and we may have already flown that distance. In the agony of my heart I seemed to hope for something. For an instant, I was shaken by a familiar, gripping sensation: I suddenly saw our sun. I knew that it could not be the sun that had raised our earth, that we were infinitely far from our sun, but somehow my whole being felt that this sun was exactly like our other sun, a copy of our sun, a twin of our sun. The sweet feeling that touched my heart stirred a wave of joy in me: the kindly power of the sun that had given me life reverberated in my heart and revived my spirit, and for the first time since I had been buried I felt alive, the old life.