Just re-read Jim Crace's wonderful and strange book Being Dead. It's the story of a couple who returns to a beach, on which they met decades before, for a picnic. The opening paragraph mentions that they're brutally murdered during the picnic (so I'm not ruining anything, I promise), and the subsequent chapters alternately tell the tale of their meeting, their youthful romance, and the literal decomposition of their bodies as they return to the earth, picked at by crabs and gulls. It's oddly strange and beautiful.
I wish I had the exact wording, but I lent the book immediately to a friend after reading it. Anyway, Crace's narrator is frighteningly omniscient and nuetral, and he describes the husband's last few moments, "a little more than a half-hour." At one point closer to his end, the husband begins to dream, and yet the narrator doesn't tell us what he dreams of. It's interesting because it leaves the man some dignity, after we've witnessed his very undignified death. But more interesting is the concept of dream at death. Never thought of it before. Death is so often described as sleep, but rarely (except for Shakespeare) do we speaking of dreaming at or in death. It's lovely really, and I'd never fully considered it as metaphor, but more for it's possible reality. Maybe we do live on in dream. Energy goes on without dying, so perhaps we live on in dream on some energetic level. There was an ancient Indian philosopher, Shankara, he insisted that the dream state is every bit as legitimate as waking state--each only pale versions of Ultimate Reality. And that we can only achieve Ultimate Reality when we see that this life too is is dream while we're here, and that we will go on within alternates states of waking and dreaming until we "wake up" from waking life. And he claims to have "woken up" a few times himself. Now I'm going off on a tangent. I guess I just found it beautiful and even comforting. And it's a good example of this course's ability to heighten awareness and, in turn, enrich the experience of art and life. I'd read the book before, and that one brief bit was glanced over. Read in the context of this course the book has taken on yet another level of poetic intent. And I'm free to imagine a good dream for the two of them.