WHAM! YOU ARE ENLIGHTENED! SUCKA!

(ZZZ hunting. Skip as necessary.)

The dream started normally. I was some wizard scubadiver from a wooden submarine, and we were trying to lose a large galleon that was chasing us. I don't know what I was supposed to achieve, except that everytime I looked at the hull of the ship, some sort of illusion was flung up, and it turned into a giant fish with very big teeth, which is a rather alarm thing for a diver to see. But I foiled the illusion, and floundered my way back into our submarine with my three, er, companions. Party members would be accurate. It was very much a role-playing party feel.

As my party flounded out of the waterlock (like an airlock, only not), the captain, or someone of authority, came to greet us. My companions froze, and the captain proceeded to tear apart everything I thought my life was. My friends were actually figments of my imagination, people from my childhood who'd died, and whom I had kept alive by projecting them into the world, thus they became demons of sort. This was a terrible shock, but still pretty standard dream fare.

And then....wham. All of a sudden, I was enlightened. Although I had, and still have, no idea what terrible thing it was I'd actually done, I had done a terrible thing, and realisation of it floored me. I lay on the concrete beside a pool with the autumn leaves blowing around me, and I couldn't move I was so stunned. With this, came an entirely out of the blue piece of enlightenment.

Rebirth, for those who do,
Darkness, for those who don't.

The meaning of which was the opposite of Buddhism. It meant that you only ever had one chance to get your life right. If you did, you would be reincarnated. If not, then nothing.

For some reason, knowing this was killing me. And as I lay there, dying, I couldn't figure out if I was glad that I wouldn't have to go through reincarnation, and another life, or grieving that I'd failed, and that everything I was would end utterly.

The whole thing was very startling, what with enlightenment and death (which is what happens to other people in my draems), so I woke up feeling unsettled.