Sweet dreams are made of these

Friday night, I gave new meaning to multi-tasking, as I dispelled a popular American myth in my sleep - literally.

After being chased around North Campus by a gun-carrying Michael Myers from the Halloween horror flicks, who was apparently in the mood to stray from his usual style of killing, I was then shot in the head and died in my dream. So ends the myth that, should you die in your dreams, you also die in real life.

Why is this important? In a vacuum, it's not. In actuality, I'm not on drugs - I just have very detailed dreams, in addition to having a point.

Death. We're quick to fear it, and even quicker do we come up with our own theories behind it. We stop ourselves from playing in traffic and swimming with sharks because, for the most part, we don't want to die.

Socrates said that a fear of death was irrational, mostly because of its inevitability. Death could be a great thing- it could be a relief from the stress and pain people feel during life. Or it could be a long, peaceful, earned rest.

Most who think about death see it as something to be feared, despite a popular connotation that post-death is almost always a good thing. Out of that fear has come numerous myths and irrationalities surrounding end of life issues-that you see a white light, that there are ghosts, or even that there is a God and you get to spend eternity at his side.

All of these ideas contrived based on the fact that no one really does know what happens to you once the doctors stop recording brain activity. Are you still in there? Perhaps you are still conscious, and we're burying people who are fully aware that they're getting six feet of soil on top of them in graveyards every day. That would suck.

Some people who have had near-death experiences say that they have experienced a heaven, a hell, or even seen a god. Some doctors call that white light, fuzzy feeling experience a trick of the brain from the adrenaline and endorphins associated with the physical trauma that actually led to a near-death experience. If you're losing a lot of blood, chances are you're going to go to a happy place in your mind, despite missing a limb or two.

The ancient Aztecs planned out a detailed calendar based on the moon, which spans to the present, ending in 2012. That year, their calendar ends because they believed something awful would happen, which apparently you wouldn't need to know the date for. I hope that the apocalypse can be put on hold until I finish graduate school, but 2012 will come fast.

Similar ancient religions also believed that the apocalypse would come, and that the antichrist would be settling into a place of power some time around... now. Maybe it's President Bush, and the apocalypse is coming in the form of global warming.

Whether you're going to count on 2012 being the end, or you plan on living a long life and croaking after 60 more years or so, you're not going to want to have regrets.

When we're all plummeting towards hell, do you want to be looking back and thinking you wish you'd done more?

I can't wait for death. I'm not suicidal; I'm just thinking that aside from the obvious making-my-family-sad thing, it would probably be pretty relaxing in comparison to this. Maybe I just long for sleep a little too hard.

All I can figure is that, no matter what happens, if you're dying you're going to want to be able to look back and say you did it all, you didn't live with regret and you didn't put what's really important on an indefinite hold.

It's so easy to live as though the end will never come, and as such, live like spending every moment focusing on school and a career is all that matters and is a time well spent.

Unfortunately, you're only young once. If you're looking to do something, now is the time, because in the blink of an eye you'll have a family and a career to worry about, and even less time to do the things you want to do.

The irony in the dream I had was that the dream didn't end when the killer pulled the trigger, and I got to experience an idea of death that my mind created - one I had never consciously thought of before. What did I see? Not telling. It's probably not the reality of it anyway, and not knowing is really what keeps us going.