Memento mori: "such stuff as dreams are made on"

The Dance of Death (1493)

Michael Wolgemut

(Image from Wikipedia)

I awoke the night before last at two in the morning to find my dear wife embracing me, and I vaguely wondered if I had been calling out in my dream . . . except that I hadn't been dreaming, I realized, as I slipped back into sleep.

The next morning, I woke my wife and asked her if I had cried out in my sleep, but she said no, that she had dreamt a dreadful nightmare. In her dream, some Islamist who violently objected to a number of my blog posts had threatened me, but I refused to back down. Indeed, I was adamant. My wife then had to go off on some pressing errand like buying a loaf of bread or something (such stuff dreams are made on), leaving me alone in my obstinacy.

Upon her return, she found me dead.

She began screaming, "No! No! No!" -- waking herself up. As often happens in such moments, she was unsure if she had merely dreamt of my demise. She turned and looked at me intently, saw that I was lying in exactly the same position as when I had fallen asleep the night before, grew alarmed to think that I really might be dead, and thus embraced me to find out.

On hearing all this, I calmed her still lingering fears:

"Don't worry, Sun-Ae. If some terrorist threatened me, I wouldn't be adamant. I'd back down because I'm a coward."

She laughed, but wasn't sure if I was joking or not. Neither am I. Death comes for us all, I'm told, and there's a lot of evidence for that proposition, so I reckon that I'll have to go sometime . . . but hopefully not in tiny fragments or riddled with holes or in some other cripplingly violent manner as would leave me incapable of dancing off into the otherworldly distance to the tune of Totentanz.

For the nonce, I'm still here . . .