Page 30 - Ferry Tales

Zoltaine

“Oh, that.” He was unconcerned about my confirmation of his
fate. “No, I meant about waking up. But that’s out of my control:
people come back from the brink of death with all sorts of wild tales.
Most of them are rather sedative, produced by the brain’s reversion
to a simple, infantile state as it is shutting down. If, instead, it really is
the end, then obviously there is no waking. And if the end is sudden
enough—say incineration in a fire storm or nuclear explosion—you
wouldn’t have even that bit of fantasy as coda to your life.”
“So, Zoltaine: this is all just the concoction of a moribund mind.
Tell me this: how can you be so certain? What would convince you
that it is not a hallucination?”
He was dismissive. “Is that a trick question? Sounds to me like the
old argument of the solipsist or theological absolutist: prove to me
that I am not all that exists, or that a deity didn’t create the world as
is, fossils and Big Bang included to fool us, just a few years ago. Can’t
be done.”
What an annoying fellow!
“Let me do something to show you that you are in the afterlife
right now, and that I am operating independently of your
imagination,” I says. “I’ll tell you something about your future that
you could not predict. In ten seconds Leviathan will surface next to
the ferry and snap at you with his monstrous jaws.”
As I knew it was coming, I was able to plant the pole on the
bottom and keep us from capsizing. After the breach and the waters
calmed, I looked at him from under my cowl and sneered.
“What about that, Zoltaine?”
He shoulderlessly shrugged. “Maybe you weren’t listening, Charon.
Even though a dream is produced by the unconscious, it is presented
sequentially, as if to an audience. That which is the audience in the
brain does not know the source of its experiences. They might be real
sensory impressions, or concoctions assembled from memories for
perception by that audience. Some people, with training, apparently
are able to waken within a dream and control its content; I say
apparently, because that may only be a dream within a dream.”

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