CW suicidal ideation

HAMLET                     … to die: to sleep –

To sleep, perchance to dream – ay, there’s the rub,

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil

Must give us pause: there’s the respect

That makes calamity of so long life.             (3.1.63-68)

To die: to sleep—the yearning, so, so tired. (Sometimes dragged out in performance, with a kind of wondering, bitter ecstasy. Sleeeeeeep.) But then. Then. To sleep, perchance to dream. Sleep as pure oblivion, un-being, it’s not guaranteed; the busy brain keeps on in its business, and in unpredictable and sometimes horrifying ways. Ay, there’s the rub, the thing that makes me stop and reconsider (but in a negative rather than a positive way). That’s the thing that knocks me off course (the metaphor’s from bowling. Not that kind of bowling.) What if the sleep of death brings its own dreams? (To be novelistic: safe to say Hamlet has terrible dreams, has had them since he was a child, night terrors, so much worse recently, the dread, the fear—that’s when he can sleep at all. He longs and dreads to sleep.)

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come—and it’s not like anyone can tell you! but it’s a terrible prospect!—and it’s frightening, the possibility of such dreams when we have shuffled off this mortal coil must give us pause. Enough to stop you in your tracks, isn’t it? Shuffling here isn’t a verb of motion, but rather sloughing, shedding, like a skin, an ill-fitting garment, the despised body itself, which persists in feeling pain and promising pleasure, which persists in feeling, everything and anything at all. But the undefinable fear of those death dreams: there’s the respect that makes calamity of so long life. That’s why people keep going, isn’t it, even when the going seems impossible? Because they’re afraid that there could be something even worse…