further to the Yeats quote, Edgar Alan Poe had one : Dreams, those little slices of death, how I loathe them.
Yes, he did have a tendency to look at the darker side of things sometimes. Though to hate dreams is to hate yourself; Poe’s dreams would naturally have been shrouded in images of death, he lost both his parents at the age of two, and his older brother died when Edger was 22, I would imagine it was dreams of these events that he thought of as ‘little slices of death’… he quite possibly lived in constant fear of dying himself, scared he may never wake up; which, ironically, is exactly what happened to him when he was only forty years old.
I wonder if the types of dreams you have would affect your attitude toward death. For example, someone who mostly had happy, peaceful dreams would see death as a happy, peaceful escape from life, or someone with exciting, adventurous dreams would see death as a new adventure, while someone with frightening dreams might see death as a terrifying experience to be avoided as long as possible.
I see it more the other way around, where your attitude towards death affects the way death appears in your dreams. Though death in dreams rarely has anything to do with actual death in waking life; it usually symbolizes something ending, or that you should make something end yourself.
Yes, I agree. But I was thinking more in terms that we sometime see sleep as a "little death," so if we're happy when we sleep, we might conclude that we'd be happy in death. And if we're troubled in our sleep, we might imagine that death would be an unhappy experience. Which kind of makes sense, because someone who felt guilty or troubled probably would have unpleasant dreams, and if that person believed in some type of afterlife, he might worry that the afterlife would be a terrible experience for him. He might worry about being punished for the things he thought he did wrong. On the other hand, someone whose life was guilt-free, happy and full of contentment would probably have very pleasant dreams. And if he believed in an afterlife, he would probably imagine that after he died, his experiences would all be pleasant and wonderful. And he probably would not fear death so much.
That remind me of something I heard the Dalai Lama say once, 'If you only do good things in your life, you will have only good things to look back on when you're old.' I guess it works for dreams too a lot of the time, either way it's good advice.