A post that I'll never get around to making, but I wanted to save the thoughts (NOTE TO SELF - reply to
quercus' physics comment!):
RE: Donnie Darko / "Mad World" / dreams / death / 'life' after death
And I find it kind of funny
I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I'm dying
Are the best I've ever had
Draft response:
I'm fascinated with time: the time-reversible symmetry
of processes at one level, combined with directional
time at a higher level. Couple that with thinking
about our own perception of time, and how that's
destroyed by trips, meditation or simple absorption in
a moment of clarity or beauty. Now I'm dwelling on
some portrayals of time at the moment of death,
particularly the ending of "Vanilla Sky" and a great
part of "Dead Man", from when William Blake gets shot
to the very end. My conclusions at the
moment are still sketchy, but fall into a few
possiblities. One, that are life is all a momentary
illusion caused by a certain instantaneous and random
arrangement of particles in an infinite universe, and
that our notion of a lifetime is just time-dilation
before our "life state" collapses back into atomic
soup. Second idea is that our life is real and either
we're trapped in some eternal system of being where
time is entirely subjective, or when we die we
experience an afterlife as some sort of infinite
moment, either encompassing an entire personal future,
or even the entire future of humanity, the universe or
whatever.