It wasn’t an ordinary, calm death. No fading away like Camille, the coughing courtesan of Alexandre Dumas’s novel, Lady of the Camellias. What disease did she have anyway? I remember that she coughed dreadfully, but with ample grace; then she died. I expect she suffered from TB.

In my dream my right hand held a perfume bottle. The bottle top was without a cap. Although the atomizer pointed directly at me, I couldn’t actually see the hole in it. But that didn’t bother me too much. Almost never am I able to locate perfume bottles’ aim-and-sprits apertures. Even so, I peered closely at the bottle, searching for the opening. As I curiously analyzed the thing, it exploded. BANG! Or BOOM! Or KAPOW! Or insert your own idea of a comparatively robust detonation.

The noise cut off quickly. A single thought fluttered through my shocked mind. “It killed me.” Then everything went gray. I could see nothing because there was nothing before me anymore. As far as hearing is concerned, all I could hear was my own attempt at a scream. Screams typically do not wake me, not even those caused by my extra unnerving dreams. This one did. If we had a dog, it would have been flabbergasted at the hertz I managed to produce. However, we have a cat and cats only hear what they choose to hear.

On the other hand, the husband person, a human being lying beside me, didn’t move an eyelash or a single small orbicularis oris muscle. (Later, he claimed to have heard my scream but I have my doubts.) My shriek was caused by my very stanch sense of having, in point of fact, died.

Was I terrified? You betcha! There was an instant when I thought, “Now I’ll find out if there is such a thing as reincarnation.” Instantaneously, I decided that I was not prepared to discover the explanation at that moment.

The following morning, I leaped onto Google and called up a “death dream” search. Looking for Death Dream Interpretations, I discovered that if I wanted free information, I had a possible 560,000 results to check out. Investigating the un-free sites I came up with 428,000 possibilities. Google also offered both free and not free sites – 1,170,000 hits. Any one of those numbers was beyond my capacity to comprehend. They would have to wait for others less number-phobic than I.

At last, I found a site – free – that offered more than the pinch-penny stuff presented in my Dictionary of 10,000 Dreams. Of course, the Dictionary was written and published back in 19-ought-something. Have to give it a break. Anyway, clever Google dug up a site with more to it than the others.

This site begins with a quick introduction to Freud. Apparently he believed that we all have two contending drives in our basic makeup. Eros is the drive for pleasure and life. Thanatos is the drive toward death. Then it goes on to, “If the dead person in your dream was yourself, you may want to consider the following:”

The first section tells the reader to ask him/herself if the dream is based on a fear of dying. If so, you are encouraged to accept the undeniable fact that death comes to all things, sooner or later. Realizing this will broaden our spiritual perspective and loosen the grip materialism has upon us. “Everything in the world is the dust of stars but look deep within yourself and you may find the part of you that is eternal.” Hmmm.

The next portion asks the reader if there is something he/she is trying to be freed from. It’s possible that the reader wants to be reborn, free from emotional burdens and become open to new potentials. Yep.

The final paragraph comes right out and demands, “Do you feel suicidal?” Then it goes on to tell the reader that suffering is in fact a blessing. (I’ll have to inform my bone-on-bone grinding spine about this.) The reader is encouraged to become like a strong tree that bends with the wind but never breaks. (Personally, I don’t know of a single variety of tree, including the “mighty oak,” that doesn’t bow before the strength of tornado winds or a hurricane.) At last we, the readers, are given the mystical meaning of death dreams. There’s a lot of stuff about symbolism and allegory and metaphor, none of which applied to my explosive death dream, as far as I could determine. I refused to dither over this, but I wanted some real nitty-gritty evidence to put my teeth into.

So, I went to someone who genuinely knew about sleep, dreams and death. This genius was much better informed than Freud and better looking too. Hamlet. Hamlet’s soliloquy, written of course by Will Shakespeare, has more analysis, more empathy and beauty, more common sense in it than anything Google or Freud could offer.

Hamlet: Act III Scene ii

(There is more to this august, supreme soliloquy than what I have allotted below. It has 33 lines and starts with the immortal citation, “To be or not to be - that is the question.” However, these words below are not troubled to say it all. At least, it’s what I needed to discover after my ghastly dream.) . . .

To die, to sleep--
To sleep--perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th' oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th' unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprise of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action. --

Let me explain, as well as I am able, some of the more obscure lines in Hamlet’s fabulous monologue. “When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin?” Hamlet is asking what man would want to live a long life and bear all the pains that life has to offer when he can end it by suicide ( when he himself might his quietus ((death)) make with a bare bodkin ((sharp slender blade, a dagger)). He also asks who would bear terrible burdens and sweat under a weary life but for the dread of something worse after death. Good question.

I admit that I gained a huge heap more consolation from the exalted Bard than any single thing else I sought and found to “help me” through a rough patch because I dreamed a perfume bottle I held turned out to be a grenade and blew me to kingdom come.

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About the author Cate Lane: Born in Minnesota and raised a temperate progressive, I was carried off to Texas 10 years ago by the tsunami that was my husband's retirement. Texas is not Minnesota, not by a long shot. However, I hear that Minnesota isn't Minnesota anymore either.

Writing was always my first choice in life. I began writing at the age of 8, small books about pioneers heading west. Little did I know then that I would be living in the most "western" of all the states, Texas. No one told the Texans that they are simply Southerners who, like Bugs Bunny, took a wrong turn at Albuquerque and wound up here.

I am sneaking up on 70 years of age and now own a vast store of useless knowledge. Happy to share any or all of it with you all.

Email: CthlnLn@aol.com

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