No, it looked that way; but didn’t actually go dark for ~10 minutes.
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Well done.
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You’ve inspired me. I’m going to give it a shot!
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That activity is just scientists in the future downloading your mind through a network of tiny wormholes.
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Gawd, Flatliiners annoyed me. Looked interesting at first, but turned into a stupid morality play.
Wait. You are the 76th Earl of Groan?
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At the very least: how ‘long’ is it that dreams last in the morning? You hit your alarm, go back to sleep for fifteen minutes and seem to have HOURS of dream space, at the very least, sometimes. Sometimes I listen to stuff like this and I wonder: is that the last echoes of the conscious mind dreaming itself into death? What are that final dreams like? There is no waking up. Anxious lives lead to anxious dreams. Unresolved lives lead to unresolved dreams. Those final moments could be rather nightmarish or… they could be entirely pleasant. In fact, who knows how long that dream space might be. It could seem to last for days. So… what do I want my the days that take up my final moments to be?
Side note: the movie “Jacob’s Ladder”. Such a great exploration of that concept.
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I am not sure that dietary transfer of memories works for owls. Only planaria and Alzabo.
…A Gormenghast / Book of the New Sun mash-up, MAKE IT SO.
At the end of the story the owls travel back in time to discover the origins of Gormenghast, and set up a temporary camp as a base while they explore the distant past, until they finally realise that their camp is itself the foundation of Gormenghast and its immemorial traditions.
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So a while back?
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I would pay good money many silver milk-bottle-tops for a version of “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”, written from the perspective of the owls.
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No references, but ISTR there’s been research on this, and subjective dream time maps pretty closely to real time. When you perceive hours or days passing in fifteen minutes, that’s your brain playing editor. Like a comic book panel saying “THE NEXT DAY…” You don’t actually wait a day before reading it.
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I suspect an EEG shows a flat line in every meeting I am “allowed” to take part.
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Are YOU way off. The 75th.
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so, ostensibly, years COULD pass…
I can’t remember anything else about it at the moment, but I once read a book that took the “life begins at conception” conceit and turned it on it’s head with a plot element that posited that life continues as long as even a few cells are preserved. The authorities then bascially took tissue samples and put them in tiny nutrient bath jars or some such where they could keep the cells alive indefinitely. This allowed them to get rid of dissidents or prisoners or whatever without having to kill them, since their soul was still attached. Or maybe there was some mystical angle to it – I don’t recall the details, but I want to say it was presented as some sort of cynical ploy.
It was much cooler than I’m making it sound. 
And now I’m going to drive myself crazy trying to figure out what book it was, dangit.
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Sounds cool!
Cue my recurring nightmare.
One more reason I plan to go out via self-inflicted cranial buckshot.
For the record, before anyone starts calling 911, I’m hoping that’s still another 30 or 40 years off- But realistically, I’ve watched two grandparents and both parents succumb to Alzheimers/Dementia. I have a very solid idea of exactly what point I have no intention of living past.
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Approximately 3.8 billion years ago.
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I wonder how the metaphysics of chimeric individuals would work in such a context? For our purposes, they are mostly just a source of occasional trick results when somebody attempts DNA testing, since being genetically distinct cell lines doesn’t keep the mechanisms that result in a human body plan from working largely normally.
If the soul inheres to even a few cells, though, a chimera might be two or more people despite being indistinguishable from a single person except on very close inspection(unlike conjoined twins, where the the individuals get some distinct organs, in addition to whatever is shared or fused). It might even be possible for a chimera to have their sibling die(in the event of something like an amputation large enough to remove the portion of their body derived from that cell line) without noticing.
Plus, of course, the I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream value of being a cell line in vitro keeping you from the release of death. Henrietta Lacks would sure be having a lousy time of it.
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