What Dreams May Come and Death
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The conditions of death as portrayed in What Dreams May Come are distinguished above all by consciousness and the unfolding of continuous experience. That would be consciousness of death and in the state of death, but experience unfolds as if the subject, the sentient being, were alive, at least alive to experiencing, though not affecting, novelty and its consequences. Experience in What Dreams May Come happens to the subject; the subject is not active, except emotionally. He cannot affect his environment or alter found conditions. Questions like these arise: How will he choose to feel about X? What insight will he arrive at about X, or how should he have felt before this time about X? Will he accept or reject found experience? The action of What Dreams May Come has Chris acquiescing in love and death--and attempting, with limited success, to persuade his wife Ann to do the same. What makes his effort distinctive is that it takes place in what is Chris's experience of an afterlife.Arriving in Summerland after an accidental death, Chris adjusts to the fact that he is disembodied but not to the fact that death has robbed him of the continued presence of his beloved wife Annie. She, meanwhile, opts for suicide, having lost her children and Chris to accidental death; doing so, however, consigns her to a species of hell, or limbo, where she is obliged to "reside" until her normal life span is run through--at which point she can be reincarnated. At least, that is how Chris experi
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try that, as a "possible" world, cannot possibly be the same country for every departed consciousness. One can say this for in-life material experience, that there appears to be a general consensus about what it is "like" to be alive, what it is "like" to have sentient experience, to perceive color, shape, mass, and even emotion so on. The idiosyncratic character of Chris's afterlife is daunting: Are we in the waking universe to expect that his vision will be our own? If so, that may not be satisfactory to everybody. If our sentient experience of the afterlife is to be radically different, given our unique consciousness, how bleak and solitary such experience must be.
Curiously, Matheson has the point in hand but either does not want to develop it or does not recognize the contradiction embedded in characterizing the afterlife, or indeed all life, as "a state of mind" (Matheson 265). He admits that what he has dictated to his New Age medium is "my experience and no one else's. . . . Accept my word that the variety in afterlife is boundless" (Matheson 264). Well, yes, but Chris proceeds to abduct his wife and children into his afterlife. Is it so special that he need not give the other members of the family their own chance? Appar
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Arriving Summerland, Matheson Dreams, Dreams Chris, Chris Chris, Price Hume's, Memory Hume, David Hume, Curiously Matheson, Experience Dreams, , experience afterlife, paul edwards amherst, york prometheus books, prometheus books 1997, chris's experience, life death, immortality ed, ed paul, paul edwards, edwards amherst, edwards amherst york, york prometheus, prometheus books, books 1997, amherst york prometheus,
Approximate Word count = 2523
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)
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