Life can be viewed as a dream, and death as an awakening.
I cannot let go of the idea that I had died before I was born, and that in death I will again be returning to that state. To die and to return to life with the remembrance of one’s past existence is what we call fainting; to be awakened again with new organs is to be born.
— Lichtenberg
If I were to kill an animal—a dog, a bird, a frog, an insect even—then, strictly speaking, it is still unthinkable that my angry or thoughtless action could turn this being into nothingness, or rather, could turn into nothingness the primordial force thanks to which this amazing phenomenon appeared before us in all its energy and joie de vivre only a minute ago. And, looking at it from another side, it is not possible that millions of animals of all kinds, entering life at every moment in their limitless diversity, full of strength and drive, could never have existed before the act of their birth, beginning their existence from nothingness. If I see that one thing disappears from my sight no one knows where, and another appears from no one knows where, and in addition both the one and other has the same form and essence, an identical character, differing only in its material, which is, by the way, ceaselessly discarded and replaced throughout the duration of its existence—then a hypothesis naturally comes to mind that that which is disappearing and that which is taking its place are one and the same being, which experiences only a slight transformation, the renewal of the form of its existence, and so it follows that what is death for the species is sleep for the individual.
— Schopenhauer
We live in our dreams almost the same way as we do in reality. Pascal says that if we were to always see ourselves in a dream in one and the same situation, and in different ones in reality, we would take the dream for reality and reality for a dream.
That is not quite right.
Reality differs from a dream in that in real life we possess the ability to act in accord with our moral obligations. In a dream, however, we are oftentimes aware that we are committing repulsive, immoral acts, but we are powerless to resist. So I would say that if we did not know a life in which we had more power to satisfy moral obligations than in a dream, we would take the dream wholly for life and would not doubt for a moment that it is not real.
But is not the whole of our life, from birth till death, with all its dreams, in turn a dream which we take for reality, for real life, the reality of which we do not doubt only because we do not know of a life in which our freedom to follow the moral obligations of the soul would be greater than that which we currently possess?
I do not regret that I was born and that I lived a part of my life here because I have reason to think that I lived in a way that brought some good. When the end comes, I will leave life the same way I leave a hotel and not my real home, because I think that our stay here is intended for us to be only transitory and temporary.
— Cicero
Even if I were mistaken in thinking that the soul is immortal, I would be happy and satisfied by my mistake; and, while I am alive, no one has the power to take this conviction from me, which gives me such immutable peace and such complete satisfaction.
— Cicero
We make a mistake when we ask: what happens after we die? When we speak of the future, we speak about time, but when we die, we leave time.
