Underworld

So I dreamt last night that I had died and gone to hell. It wasn't too bad though. Hell seemed to be a large old school, like a high school or college building, where I sat in a class taught by a wise old woman. I don't know what the class was about, but it might have been philosophy - because this woman's lecture was more of sermon on personal truth and excellence.

It turned out, too that it was possible to escape from hell. Down the hall from the classroom was a huge room, the end of which just stopped in darkness at an impossible precipice. A black pit yawned before me, and another student told me that if I jumped into the darkness I could escape. He jumped and vanished. I deliberated for a time, worried that jumping off the cliff could just as easily lead to my annihilation, but eventually I gathered my courage and leapt into the void.

When I was a child I used to have a recurring falling nightmare. I would be holding my mother's hand and looking up at an ominous brick building. Suddenly I would be standing at the top of the building looking down at her. Then I would fall off the building. The fall was sickening and terrifying, but just before I would hit the ground I would find myself back at the top of the building, my mother still out of reach below. Then I would fall and be up again, fall and be up, over and over again until I awoke in a cold sweat.

In this dream, however, the fall was not unpleasant. It was a controlled fall, through darkness, without any sensation but gradual descent.

I landed to discover, much to my surprise, that the exit from hell was a small luncheonette. It was busy with customers, most of them young college students, much like my fellow schoolmates in hell. I walked through the restaurant out onto the sunny street. That was it. Then I woke up.

This dream reminded of why I sometimes wish I could be a novelist. I have this idea for novel, called "Odysseus in America". In it, Odysseus, the master tactician and innovator, contrives to escape from Hades and finds himself in California, from whence he makes his way across the U.S. on a second odyssey, avoiding the old gods who want to return him to the underworld, to try to get across the sea to Ithaca to find his beloved Penelope. I think it could be great story, but I'm just not a novelist. I have ideas, but the thought of putting them down on several hundred pages just makes me tired.