Dream: Suicide Is Painless–But Stupid

This is not a recent dream. It came years ago. 2005? 2006? Somewhere around there.

I was dying.

I was lying sunk into the oversoft cushions of a large four-poster bed. Nearby, on a lounge-style sofa, stretched one of my compatriots, also dying. On the steps of the dais on which the bed was mounted sprawled a third, also dying.

We were all members of a lodge of decadents, a group dedicated to the profane and the macabre, which owned the chateau around us. The group had developed a taxonomy of suicides. Each member had been assigned a specific type of suicide to perform. I had drawn Poisons/Animal-based Poisons/Insectoid Poisons/Spider. Presumably the others in the room were also in the “Poison” subgroup. I imagined that elsewhere in the chateau lodge members were hanging themselves, hurling themselves from the rooftops, opening their wrists, etc.

I could feel the venom pumping through my veins. Already I was too weak to move. Then came my last thoughts:

“Wait a second–I don’t want to kill myself! Why did we do this? This is stupid!”

But it was too late. I succumbed…

Only to wake up with the appropriate sense of relief on finding that one has not, after all, committed suicide.