Judgment Day

Who will make the call, and where will you go when your time on Earth is done?

The bus was upon me the moment I stepped onto the road. There was no way to avoid it.

I didn’t feel any pain, I just opened my eyes, confused and afraid.

But I wasn’t in a hospital or on the side of the road. I was inside the bus, as if it had gone straight through me, or more accurately, I had passed through its metal walls. Everything was dark and blurry.

Feeling the lurch of the vehicle below me, I realised I was right at the back and I needed to move forward. I gripped the handles on the seats on either side of the aisle one by one, pulling myself forward, but each step was an effort and I was unsteady on my feet.

Reaching the middle, where the backdoor created a gap in the rows of seats, I gripped a vertical bar and looked down at the person sitting in the seat on the opposite side.

Without saying anything, she turned and looked back and up at me. Her eyes met mine.

I opened my mouth to speak, and she spoke at exactly the same time.

I said “Am I asleep?”

She said “Are you asleep?”

Confused, I looked up towards the driver, noting the forward-facing heads of the other passengers. I looked back down to where the woman was still watching me.

I said “I must be dead.”

At the exact time, she said, “You must be dead.”

My eyes opened.

I was asleep on a real bus, my body tipped sideways across two seats. The darkness oriented me enough that I knew it was an overnight journey. I blinked a couple of times to convince myself I was still alive, and sat up.

In the split second where I’d believed I was dead, a huge jolt had run through my brain. A million thoughts all on top of each other. Was I a ghost? Was this bus my eternal purgatory? Was I living in some kind of half reality, where I was destined to try to break through to the world of the living forevermore? And the most pressing question, how did this happen? How did I die?

Many years later, I had another dream.

Nothing unusual, for the most part. Figuring out problems and getting chased and trying to get away.

I found myself in an orchestra pit, where a gigantic orchestra was tuning up, filling the air with the sound of instruments playing long notes that together made a beautiful white noise.

I found a seat towards one edge and sat down, hiding among the faces.

The conductor looked around and I noticed we were in a great hall surrounded by a huge audience, although some were standing and moving about. The space stretched off into the distance, both on the ground and in vast, curving balconies, all brimming with humanity.

I sank deeper into my chair, aware that someone was after me, but then suddenly the person chasing me was right there, screaming in my face.

I stood up and stepped away from the row of seats, facing them. They ranted and raved, telling me all the things that were wrong with me and how many mistakes I’d made.

I let my head drop to one side and they started to gradually shrink.

Still chattering away, the person grew smaller and smaller until they were shouting up at me from ankle height.

And still they kept shrinking.

Until they were just a tiny speck on the floor.

I lifted my foot and placed it down on top and they were gone.

Looking around, the sound of the orchestra swelled. It was joined by the sound of the people speaking and my ears filled with a calm and peaceful, but entirely nonsensical, noise.

I felt my “self” start to shift and become one with the sound.

I consciously released and ceased to be entirely as I was completely absorbed by the ambient noise of the life around me.

My eyes opened and I realised that I was in a bed lying beside a sleeping man.

A soft smile was on my lips. I felt completely at peace, like I could be water in the ocean, connected to the rest but with nothing holding me to a discrete body.

These dreams taught me what I imagine heaven and hell to be like - one jarring and confusing, wishing to understand and remain connected to a physical body, and the other a serene release into the ocean of life.

And who will decide which one I go to when my body can no longer house me?

Only one person will have the full context.

I will be called upon to contribute to my own judgment.

But it may not be about pointing fingers and looking at a list of good and bad deeds and taking stock, putting them on either side of a set of celestial scales. Me and God going through point by point and figuring out if I was a good person on average.

I had another powerful dream many years earlier.

In it, I was in an apartment full of corridors. Something happened that made so little sense that I realised it was a dream. Maybe I walked through a wall or something.

Upon realisation, my first act was to peer closely into a mirror. My pupils were square and my hair stood out at weird angles. Next, I looked at my hands, impressed at how real it seemed, not just to look at but to touch, like my senses were even more sensitive than in waking life.

Knowing that it was all happening inside my head, I decided to take advantage.

I ran down onto the street and began killing people and destroying everything I could.

Looking up from a torture table where I had someone laid out and was hacking into them, I saw a friend calmly approaching me.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“It’s just a dream!” I laughed. “Come on, we can do whatever we like, it doesn’t matter!”

She said nothing and backed away. That’s when I awoke, completely shaken.

The images of the destruction I had caused were fresh in my mind and I understood that those urges lived inside me.

That there was nothing fundamentally “good” about me and if there were no consequences, I was capable of viciousness and horror equal to that I’d read about in tales of medieval castles and genocide and war.

For the first time, I felt with visceral truth that good and evil both inhabited me and I knew I could never judge others, because if I was in the situation they were in, with the same background and genetic make-up they had (i.e., if I was them), I would behave exactly as they did. The proof? The fact that they had acted in that way.

My only choice for living is therefore to try to understand. To listen to the constructive side of me and accept the destructive side, and not to see myself as better or worse than anyone else, for inside me is a monster living alongside the rational scientist I try to cultivate.

One time, when I was conversing more regularly with the voices in my head than usual, I asked the age-old question, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” The answer came back as clear as a bell: “There are no good people.”

When I think about judgment, I think about my ability to accept my reality and exist in love, as well as in fear and hate. To stand beside the forces of yin and yang and not fight to be on one side or the other. Pure consciousness.

The hell I experienced in the dream of becoming a ghost is not something to fear necessarily - it may just be an indication that we are not done with the present reality.

Still, when the end of my life comes, I can only hope that my grip on this reality and this body is loose enough that I can let go and allow my self to cease to exist, such as to know peace.

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Images: ChatGPT 4o and photo taken by author.

Sound: SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA TUNING BEFORE CONCERT.wav by dorhel -- https://freesound.org/s/162765/ -- License: Creative Commons 0