CONTENTS UNDER PRESSURE: THE MEANING OF LIFE AND OTHER IMPONDERABLES

Julie called the other morning, very early.

"I keep having these weird dreams," she said. And before I could ask about the dreams, she started asking hard questions.

Julie is dying of cancer; all of the questions she asks these days are the kind I can't answer. I'm not sure anyone can.

"Will I keep dreaming?" she asked. "After I die, will I keep dreaming?"

She dreams of her first husband, who died in a car accident. She dreams of her older sister, who ran away to California in 1974 and hasn't been heard from since. She dreams of flying in a dark night sky and of walking for miles through a cool, quiet forest, with the leaves crunching under her bare feet.

It's not uncommon to dream about people we've lost or who are far away from us. They may be bringing us messages, they may be symbols created by our subconscious to bring some point to the surface.

When Hamlet muttered, "To sleep, perchance to dream," he wasn't really talking taking a nap. Hamlet, like everyone else, was pondering Life, Death, what comes in between, what those states have in common and what separates them.

What happens to us after we die? That is the question.

There was a time when my answer was simple: You rot. Period, end of discussion. You become food for worms, and the universe goes on without you.

Now, though, I find that answer unacceptable. Maybe I'm looking for more meaning in the short span we spend on this plane, or maybe I just need some comfort that life won't just end, that this "vale of tears" serves a purpose, if only to move us to some better place.

Or some worse, and much warmer, place, I guess, if you weren't especially nice during this lifetime.

Countless poets have advised us that life is only a dream, a short sleep past, and we wake up in heaven, where life is perfect, and incidentally, non-caloric.

Julie worries about her dreams. She doesn't understand what they mean, if they mean anything at all.

Now that she's moved into a hospice, she worries that there isn't enough time to learn where they are leading her. If she keeps dreaming after she dies, she may find the answer, she says.

She's dying of cancer, and she's worried because she's having strange dreams. Where, I'm tempted to wonder, are her priorities?

But I think -- though I'm afraid to come right out and ask -- that she's stopped concerning herself so much with this world, or plane or dimension or whatever you want to call it, and is ready to face what comes next.

In Australia, the aborigines believe that before the world was created, there was the Dream Time -- what we call Chaos, before God turned the light on -- and that when the dream ended, the world and all its life came into existence.

Perhaps Julie's dreaming her own world into existence.

~Peggy O'Farrell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.