About a week ago, I had a very strange dream. Funny thing, I didn’t so much as see a glimpse of the dream until about eight hours after I woke up but the instant I did remember it, all of the feelings I had experienced during the dream came flooding back in that second. Many of the finer details are fuzzy, as dreams typically are, but I remember the overarching concept pretty clearly. So, what was so interesting about this dream?

Well…I died.

Even so much as typing those two words is enough to cause me to feel a sudden jolt in my chest, like an electric shock went off within me and surges through my body. It’s a weird feeling. What makes this weird for me is the fact that that jolt is the sort of feeling that reminds me that I’m alive, which is a weird feeling to associate with a dream about my own mortality.

Like I said before, many of the finer details, including how this all began, are lost to memory but I will do the best I can to recreate the scene. I believe I was on some sort of starship as it made its way across the galaxy (I’ve got to slow down on the Sins…) and I believe the ship I was on was besieged by an alien vessel.

I’m pretty sure you can see where this is going.

As far as what happened after that, I’m not so sure. I really wish I could remember what happened between the attack and the…end but I can’t and I’d rather not try to push myself too hard and risk forgetting the more important details. But…there’s one line I recall saying just before my death.

“Well, at least I’ll be able to see if my theories about death are true.”

And then, I died.

There’s that feeling again.

Explaining the feeling I experienced during my…death is pretty difficult. I felt as though I was forcibly and irrevocably being disconnected from my body while seeing colors swirling all around me and then…darkness.

I awoke some time later in some sort of spirit form, feeling as though time itself had stopped or that I was existing in a realm beyond time. I was still in space and fully aware of what happened to me and strangely, I was at peace with it. Space stretched out endlessly around me and I drifted, soundlessly and effortlessly through the vacuum, aware of my death and now, in this spirit form, free to explore the universe for all eternity if I wished.

I was also fully aware that I now possessed supernatural abilities, including the ability to instantly teleport to any location I wished. I felt a call from home, Earth, and transported myself there in a split second. I found myself at home, standing in my room, gazing upon it as if for the last time. Shortly after, I teleported myself to the house of my grandparents and had another fleeting look around. Afterwards, with a satisfied smirk, I departed Earth, supposedly forever, and began my exploration of space.

That was the end of the dream. What makes this dream stand out from other similar dreams I’ve had is the fact that I actually died in this dream. In every other similar dream, I’ve had mere brushes with death, including tripping and falling into the Grand Canyon, nearly being shot by a burglar, among other dreams. This is why this dream in particular has had such an impact on me.

Remember that quote earlier? Well, that serves as a foundation not only for the dream but aspects of my life as a whole. If there’s anything that fascinates me, it’s the subject of death. I am positively enthralled by the concept of death and what awaits us on the “other side”. I suspect that many people have their own theories about death (Heaven, reincarnation, and so on) and my theories are similar.

This dream connects my fascination with death with my other fascination, a fascination with the universe and what dwells within it. I have long looked up at the stars at night, wondering if there are any star systems similar to our own, containing a planet similar to Earth and housing sentient life similar to us but, of course, entirely alien to us. Now, I don’t believe in the crackpot theories that aliens are among us or have abducted and probed people but I don’t believe for a second that we, on Earth, are the lone forms of sentient life to exist in the vastness of space.

Interstellar space travel similar to what has been glimpsed in sci-fi television and movies like Star Trek and Star Wars as well as games such as Mass Effect and Sins of a Solar Empire is unlikely to be achieved in my lifetime and I’ve made my peace with that, however, it is my wish that, in death, I shall be allowed to roam the stars, for all eternity if I wish, to discover just what lurks out there in the endless blackness of space. This dream I had was an embodiment of this desire as well as the desire to see what awaits us after we have passed on from this life and into the next.

In the end, this dream is a representation of my true obsession, an obsession with the unknown. I wish to be able to venture the stars to satisfy my latent curiosity. In terms of death, no one truly knows what happens to us after we die and that represents perhaps the biggest unknown in our lives. This dream was perhaps an attempt by my subconscious to bring some meaning into the unknown. People tend to have a fear of the unknown, simply because the unknown, in and of itself, is impossible to understand. It’s like being afraid of the dark. You’re not actually afraid of the darkness itself, you’re afraid of what could potentially be lurking in the darkness that you cannot see. Understanding the unknown leads to acceptance, which in turn dispels the fear.

This dream was a freaky but insightful look into my own philosophies toward life, death, space and the discovery of the unknown. I only wish I could remember more of the dream, or if I could force my subconscious to show me an extended cut of that dream (with full recall upon waking up, of course) to see just how deep the proverbial rabbit hole goes.