The Threshold Theory

Here's as far as I go on this whole life-after-death thing.

Your whole life you've been telling yourself stories about yourself, often deceptive or at least non-factual.  The best example being dreams, where you show yourself in a narrative and you wander through, as though awake, taking in the world you've created.  At some level you  - the deep you - must know that the dream world you've created isn't "real".  But the dreamer in you believes the whole story, until you wake up.

And as you grow older and wiser you learn that telling these stories to yourself doesn't only happen while you are asleep.

OK so far.  Basic stuff, I guess, but I was no psych major so this wasn't taught to me, and neither was what's next.

The threshold theory is that at the moment of death - at the threshold - a final narrative unfolds.  Deep-you shows dreamer-you what's next.  Who knows what it will show you, any more than you know any night what dreams you will dream.

So, you're at the moment of death, at the threshold.  Maybe you will look out at the afterlife you believe in.  If you believe you're going to hell (a proposition I find utterly ridiculous, by the way - take that, Satan!), well then maybe you're looking at brimstone and pitchforks.  If you believe you're going to heaven, maybe you're at a really well-appointed hotel, and all the dogs who preceded you to the hereafter are running towards you, tails wagging.

If you're a lights-out guy, maybe you're looking into black.

Or maybe what dreamer-you believes has no bearing on what deep-you serves up at the last moment.

In any case I'm pretty sure that deep-you knows what is going down.  All the circuit breakers are being tripped,  the fire curtain is coming down, and it's time to trot out the last big dream.

Whatever it is, whatever the final story you tell yourself, at the threshold, that's it, that's eternity.  The frame freezes at one last blink, the lids stay closed, you don't wake up.