Here's a creepy thought. It came from a dream I had when I was in Texas a few weeks ago. It's just a fantasy, but it takes on an eerie plausibility when you look at the graphics I've marshaled here. I'll discuss these pictures in a minute, but first...the dream.
I'll start with a question: what if humans were immortal? I don't mean some time in the future, as in science fiction, or in the afterlife or in reincarnation...I mean physically immortal right now. What if, unbeknown to us, we've always been immortal ever since we first walked the earth? What if none of us dies a natural death. What if we have to be killed, otherwise our cells would continue to divide indefinitely? What if every human who has ever lived was........murdered?
It's a scary thought. It implies a murderer, someone who thins the flock. Those could be devils or space aliens. It could be a race of Morlocks, as in H. G. Wells' The Time Machine. It could be quasi-supernatural thugs who enjoy killing for its own sake, and who have a vulture-like ability to detect physical and mental weakness. My dream was about the latter.
I dreamed that I was in a parking lot, looking for my car when I noticed a couple of thugs heading my way. I was the target, no doubt about it, and there was no doubt the thugs had a murderous intent: it was broad daylight and the lot was full of shoppers, but the men savagely pushed them aside as if they were rag dolls. I ran into a nearby supermarket and the thugs ran after me. Inside they tore up the market in order to get at me. I managed to stay one step ahead, but I was getting tired and the thugs seemed to have infinite energy. At that point I woke up.
Lying in the dark with my eyes open and my heart pounding, my half-conscious mind filled in the rest of the story. After I escaped, the joking thugs walked out of the market, confident that they would get me in the next encounter. Previously frightened patrons took on blank expressions then dutifully tidied up the market. After that they went about their business, completely unaware that anything scary had just happened. They had total amnesia about it.
I remember thinking, "So that's what death is like." In front of witnesses you're violently killed by thugs who then arrange the corpse so it appears that you died a natural death. The witnesses clean up then, with no memory of the killing, resume their normal lives...until some time in the future when their turn comes. Scary, huh?
Okay, it was just a nightmare, something we all get now and then....but as I was assembling the pictures for this post I began to notice that most of them seemed to confirm the premise of my dream. Almost all of them had a common theme: that death comes not to the fatally sick, but rather to ordinary, healthy people who are minding their own business. It's as if there was a consensus of artists and sculptors of the past that death was murder, something that's done to you with malevolent intent. Look at the pictures. Do you see what I mean?
