Narcromancing with Anubis

Strange dreams troubled me last night. Dreams of talking homeless dogs and shopping for shoes to wear at Burning Man. Then dreams of eating overly buttered desserts at a coworker's surprise birthday party and lying about the taste. In the dream I inadvertently ruined the surprise by signing the birthday card as she walked by, allowing her to see it. 

I kept waking and sleeping, starting and stopping in cycles like a narcoleptic. When I slept, dreams of necromancy overtook me - my unconscious mind repeatedly resuscitated - it was narcromancy.

I dreamt about mashing maggots off of the corpses of cats and long dead mummified humans, reanimating them. It was very Egyptian, in hindsight. One woman, saved from the clutches of death, was upset at having been resurrected and fought me. Another, a child, cried during reawakening. Her head wholly reassembled, but her body still a motionless leathery corpse adorned with insects and flies. The bones of her ribs hanging bare and exposed like some macabre birdcage. The smell was not something that I can relay with words. She may have shit her diaper, badly.

That last dream, which took place between 5:20 and 6:00am, was one of the more bizarre dreams I've had in some time. I felt strangely detached from it, almost like I was playing a video-game. I was competing with old J.C., trying to beat his high-score, in a race to save as many souls as I could before time ran out. I did so indiscriminately; dogs, cats, snakes, women, children. Who would save their souls from me? 

What does it all mean? Was the talking dog Anubis?  That's dangerously similar to the word anus; and it has the word bi in it. Or maybe it's prophecy: soon I will have a new bus.

After I woke, I imagined the horror of waking inside a dead body. Your open eyes, made pale by the blackness of death, suddenly blinded by shafts of light sharp like glass. Inhaling into collapsed lungs, gasping for air but unable to breathe. Your twitching heart like a peeled grapefruit black with rot, cramped and painfully spasming. Numbness transformed, transfixed; terror and anguish. 

In a way, rebirth becomes merely a second death - death's death - perhaps more painful than the first.

Life, then, to those dead, becomes a fate more feared.