Over the past couple weeks, every night, I’ve been having very similar nightmares, not necessarily recurring, because they’re all different, but they have all been centered around death. Absolutely any aspect of death from my own death at an old age, dying in a hospital bed, dying by someone elses hand, witnessing a loved one’s death, feeling the emptiness of someone important no longer being there, hell I’ve had a nightmare about the guilt of being responsible for someone else’s death. I never used to be too afraid of dying; I guess I used to just see it as the inevitable part of life it is and felt no need to be afraid of it. But lately I started thinking about what happens after death and all the things that we do with corpses: freeze them, cut them open, embalm them, disembowel them, cremate them, stick them in a cramped little box and bury them 6 feet underground (which terrifies me even more because I’ve always been claustrophobic) And I try to express the fact that I’m afraid of all these things, but people just say “Ah, you won’t even know what’s going on because you’ll no longer be conscious/be starting the next life/be in Heaven” but this is all just speculation. What I’m absolutely petrified by the thought of is still being aware of everything even after death, like still being able to feel pain, feeling maggots eat my body, feeling my stomach grow emptier and emptier, feeling like I’m choking, growing colder, feeling my body rot. I just wish I wasn’t so terrified of something that trillions upon trillions of people have gone through.