This is a dream I had

I dreamed I went to hell.  I wasn’t sent to hell, or anything.  I just found the way in and was curious. 

You entered hell through a stairwell in an auto body shop.  There was a red bulb in a wire cage above the door to hell; you could see it glowing from the top of the stairs.  Someone told me, “see that, down there?  That’s the entrance to hell.”  And I was like, “no shit.  Really?  Wow.”  So I went to take a gander.  It would make an interesting story, I thought.

Hell was basically an endless underground parking lot, only without the cars.  The ceilings were very low, and the floors were raked at about a 15 degree angle, descending infinitely into darkness.  The concrete floors were painted gray.  There were low-hanging fluorescent fixtures that buzzed and flickered.  The light was not flattering.

It seemed that as you entered hell, you met up first with the not-so-bad people.  The people who were there for reasons that would probably seem petty to you — and almost certainly did to them — if you heard them.  The white liars.  The masturbators.  The benign gossips.  They were scattered about, standing or sitting around looking moony and shell-shocked.  The thing you noticed almost immediately about hell was how sparsely populated it seemed to be, until you considered that the space itself was infinite, but that the number of people who have ever lived in all the history of the world is finite, and of course not all of them were down there, so.  While you might imagine writhing masses of tortured bodies in sweaty piles and ugly clumps, in fact what you saw was mostly lonely little ragged individual figures standing 50 or 100 feet apart, not talking or making eye contact.  It was embarrassing, finding yourself in hell.

One of the rules of hell was that there were these weapons, like giant medieval broadswords, and the rule was that if you were bigger and stronger than another person, you could take their sword away from them.  So of course the biggest and strongest people were also the best-defended, although against what I wasn’t really sure, since they were already dead, and even if they hadn’t been, what they had to fear from the smaller, weaker people was a mystery.  On the other hand, the smaller, weaker people lived in constant terror of the bigger, stronger ones, who would come rampaging through and rape and pillage and torture them pretty much for kicks, which kind of made you wonder what the whole point of their being there was, since you would think that that would be the latter sort of person’s idea of heaven, really.

Anyway, I came in through the stairwell and the first person I saw was this frail little woman in old-fashioned-type clothes, dragging this ginormous broadsword behind her.  I couldn't imagine how she’d gotten ahold of it, but I could even less imagine what she’d ever actually do with it, since she couldn’t even lift it.  So I said, Look, why not give me the sword?  I’m bigger than you, so I can handle it better.  And you can stay with me, and I’ll keep an eye out for both of us.  She agreed, I guess maybe because she thought I would just take it from her anyway, and the two of us started moving deeper into the center of hell, which when you think about it seems kind of counterintuitive, but that’s what we did.  It was only a dream.

Time passed in that dream-like sort of way, where things happen and you don’t really notice or remember them, but basically what happened was that over time, this woman and I met other people, some armed and some not, and as we went along, we asked them to join us.  Safety in numbers, I said.  And after a while we had a pretty good-sized group, which was kind of a unique situation, since as I said, hell was mostly a pretty solitary affair.

The worst thing about hell was the eternity of it.  There really wasn’t anything to do, and it was forever.  At the back of my mind, I sort of realized that since I had only snuck in on my own initiative, and not been sent there formally, I could probably leave if I wanted to, but I wanted to stick around because it seemed like what we were doing was an interesting social experiment, and I was curious to see how it would all turn out.  And I admit it was pretty flattering, or at least self-aggrandizing, to be the leader of such a large group of people, even if they were mostly petty thieves and the socially unpleasant. 

 

Also, if I had gone back, I just would have had to go back to work in the morning.

You never got hungry or thirsty in hell, which was good because there was no food or water, but you did, as I said, get mighty bored.  The thing was, you could actually sleep, but almost no one ever did because if you let your guard down for even a minute, someone would come and set you on fire or slice one of your body parts off, which even though you were dead was still very unpleasant because it was, as I say, forever.  Eternity with no ears or feet or whatever.  But we figured out that if we sat in a big cluster, we could sleep in shifts.  The people at the inside of the cluster would sleep, while those at the outside would keep watch, weapons at the ready.  Then we would trade off. 

People didn’t like the idea at first.  They said that if you slept, then you would dream, and how horrible would it be to have a lovely dream and then wake up, only to find that it had just been a dream and that reality was the awfulness of eternal bleakness and boredom?  And I said, if you hadn’t already spent a third of your life on earth practicing for that, I wasn’t sure what kind of a reality you’d been experiencing, but it certainly wasn’t one I could relate to.  And that got a dry chuckle.  It worked out pretty well, really.

Mostly we talked.  We talked to each other.  We spent a lot of time just sharing stories of our lives and the things we’d done and the things we regretted not doing, but that it had made us happy even to think about while we were on earth.  Strangely, it still made us happy to think about them, even though we were in hell now and those things were really, truly, definitively never going to happen.  We were never going to parasail in Costa Rica.  We were never going to form a rock band.  We were never going to have a little house overlooking the ocean, or marry the person we loved, or breed show horses.  It was still nice to think about.  Really, surprisingly not depressing at all, but actually kind of the opposite because now, with literally no boundaries on what we could imagine, the parasailing became actual flight, and the house overlooking the ocean became a house under the ocean, where we could look through the windows and watch seahorses swimming by. 

Our community got a lot of attention.  Mostly from people who wanted to join, and we were pretty open to that.  We had rules.  You couldn’t hurt anyone.  You had to be civil.  You had to take your turn guarding the sleepers and you had to practice with the broadsword, just in case.  People got it.  They had screwed up pretty badly in life, most of them, and it had landed them here.  They knew better than to screw up anymore.  We were pretty much their last shot.

But then we became too well-known.  It took a really long time.  Like, centuries in real time, although it didn’t seem that way to us.  But eventually, we were discovered by the People in Charge, who did not like our arrangement one little bit.  This was supposed to be hell, they said.  We weren’t here to enjoy ourselves.

Then they found out that I wasn’t supposed to be there at all.  That caused some problems, because they couldn't send me back.  Too much time had passed.  But they couldn’t let me stay, because hell had rules too, and besides I was causing too much trouble.

They took me back to the main office, and sat me down and had a talk with me.  They said, look, this is very embarrassing for us and we’ve never had a problem like this before, so this is what we’re prepared to do.  We'll send you to heaven.  No questions asked.  Just take your touchy-feely kumbaya  hippie bullshit and go.  But I didn’t want to go.  I didn’t even want to go home anymore, even if I could have.  I wanted to stay with my friends.  I wanted to stay with the people in my community.  I wanted to have long dreams and wake up and tell stories and learn about the people around me.  There were always new ones.  They usually had interesting things to say.  We took care of each other, but I was afraid that if I wasn’t there to remind them, they’d forget.  I think maybe the reason I was able to accomplish everything I had was because I wasn’t actually dead.  My imagination, my memory — they made me special there.  What if I left and everything just went back to normal?  Which was of course what was supposed to happen.  That was the whole point.  That was why they were sending me away — to restore order.

They said I’d better do it or else.  I said, or else what?   What are you gonna do to me?  I’M ALREADY IN HELL!!  And they didn’t have any answer to that.

Finally they said it wasn’t up to me anymore.  They were sending me to heaven, like it or not.  They dragged me away, kicking and screaming.  I kept yelling to my friends:  Take care of each other!  I’ll find a way back.  Just keep taking care of each other!  But I didn’t think they would.

 

I was crying as they dragged me away to heaven.  And already plotting my escape back to hell.