They say that when you die, your brain floods with DMT, the chemical of dreams. Your perception of time slows and you relive your life as synapses die and memories pop into being one last time. Memories are fuzzy and imperfect things, and in your psychedelic dreamscape your life plays out a little bit differently. Then, your dreamscape self dies, and it floods with DMT, and so recursively, at the moment of your death, you dream and live your entire multiverse of selves.
These recursive multiversal selves exist in a metaphysical space, a space of souls, where the soul-self opens the gate of the pineal gland and enters the collective unconscious.
And what are undead, if not liminal beings, a physical, synaptic consciousness at the gate, lacking a soul, the apparatus to join the collective unconscious? Zombies don't hunger for brains, they hunger for souls. But no matter how hard they try, no matter how many brains they consume, they'll never be able to digest, to integrate, the soul. Weep for the pitiful hungry zombie. Vampires, lich lords, and other intelligent undead sleep, but without a soul, what do they dream?
They do not relive their lives, but the lives of those whose brains they've eaten, blood they've drank, bodies they've necromantically revived; damaged and mutated, the undigested souls linger within, propagating through a dark multiverse of astral un-life, the reciprocation of undeath, a limbo dimension of null that exists, cruelly, to balance the physical inequality of energy that undeath introduces into the universe. The undead dream the purgatory of the living.
Also, I made my first post on the collaborative blog Iconoclastic Flow!
Love the writing! It's a fascinating idea that zombies ultimately want souls but they eat brains to try and satisfy themselves but to no avail. That's been something I've heard alluded to about zombies: that we are zombies hungering for meaning but in our materialistic world all we can do is eat brains as though that were the seat of the soul. When all we can see is the brain and not the soul, we have no access to true meaning. You might also say we settle for the intellect and are unable to access the spiritual and so we remain hungry.
ReplyDeleteWell... I know you know I don't exactly agree with that argument haha, but anyway I'd like to think this writeup from 2019 unequivocally demonstrates that I have considered that argument and to whatever degree I reject it, I'm doing so from a place of understanding and appreciation.
DeleteAnd thanks! Ya, probably with more work this could have been better, but I was reasonably happy with it, not sure why it took me so long to post.
As I've said and I also know you know, I've been thinking about a lot of related ideas lately, and trying to figure out how to tie them all together, so it felt right to finally come back to this.