Dream.

Dream.
January 2004.

I was introduced to a charming man, and we instantly became friends. He was tall, dark, handsome, witty, the usual Ideal. He was in his mid-forties (about ten years older than I am). In the dream, we talked and talked on a long bus ride (this is how we became acquainted).

After a time, he began to explain to me that it was a shame that we'd met so late in his life, and I was puzzled. After further explanation, he told me he'd decided to be "recycled".

This was a new social movement (for lack of a better term). People who had decided that they'd experienced all that they wanted to (even if they were not ill or heartbroken or otherwise dissatisfied with life in general), could go to a secret place, where they would be humanely slaughtered. Their bodily components would be used for things like fertiliser and paper: industrial uses from the separated, purified chemicals of their bodies. This was an option that was soon to become legal, but was hush-hush for now.

He had simply decided that he'd seen everything he wanted to see and did everything that he wanted to do, and it was time to be recycled.

I was angry with him for bothering to make friends with anyone, to make anyone care about him, when he was soon going to be a non-entity. Why make friends with people who will then miss you when you've already made this decision to stop your life? And I was further upset by my own reaction: after all, it seemed a rational choice (in the dream) and it was his business, not mine. But I was pissed that I had made such a wonderful friend, who wasn't going to stay.