Religious or not, we all wonder what's going to happen to us after we die. I consider myself a religious person, so what I now believe is what is lined out for me based on my religious beliefs. However, at one point in my life years and years ago, I had my own idea of what life was like after death. Funnily enough, about a week ago I had an extremely vivid dream about young me talking to myself in the mirror at home, explaining what I thought happened to us when we die. Who I imagined I was talking to, I don't know, but it was hilarious waking up to this very graphic memory of me speculating life after death. It included ideas from religions I probably didn't know anything about yet; so many theories and ideologies just rolled into one, five-year-olds utopia.
Let me paint a picture for you. We die and get a perfect funeral; whatever you wanted it to be while you were alive is exactly what you got. I wanted mine to be at Disney. My desire was to be cremated and created into a special firework that was to be blown up during the Happily Ever After show at the Magic Kingdom Castle. While this was going on, I would be able to watch it up in the special "life showing cloud room," which was basically a big room with lots of flat screen tv's that would show you what was going on with the people down below. There was always a tv reserved for you whenever your funeral was occurring because it was considered your right of passage. Until then, you were in a giant house with a bunch of other people all waiting for their funerals to happen so they could watch and then get taken to their new life.
Once you got past all the beginning stuff, you got to speak to a gatekeeper that helped you choose what your soul would be transformed into (a.k.a. my version of reincarnation, which I didn't know was a thing at the time). You could pick really anything, but you would take a personality/lifestyle test and that would generate some suggestions based on what you were like on earth. After choosing whatever it is that would essentially be the new embodiment of you on earth, you finally got escorted to your new home. Of course, there were streets of gold and a pearl gate which was clearly influenced by religion, but in my head, everyone up there was as rich as you could possibly imagine so a super boujee road and gate just made sense. Whatever you had wanted down on earth was what you got in the afterlife, except everyone was always happy.
There was no anger or sadness or jealousy, no greed or animosity towards others. We were all just so joyous to be around each other. You could understand and speak every language and even understand animals, eat all foods whether you liked it or not down on earth, and could literally go on the same types of trips and adventures. You could see the afterlife Eiffel Tower or visit the afterlife Disneyland; this new world was your oyster. You were thrown into this perfect universe with anyone and everyone that had lived and died before you. Just this beautiful place in the cotton candy clouds filled with all the wonderful things we couldn't all have before, like tigers as pets or cars we had imagined but that didn't actually exist. Practically identical to earth, except it was perfect.
I find that as I grow older, I tap into those sides of the world less and less. I've turned more into a "let's just live life and see what happens" type of person rather than the type to constantly contemplate the unknown, but as a child that's all I ever did so it's always interesting to go back and pick my brain of what it has stored from the days long ago. And, truthfully, nobody really has a definitive answer to what happens to us after we pass. It's a concept that just isn't fathomable to the human mind, to put it simply. Everyone has their own speculations, but it's one of those things we'll never truly know or understand until we get to it ourselves. I'm not sure I believe it's what my kindergarten self thought it would be, but deep down, I still hope it's something like that.
Sheetal Tadiparty
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