Nekojiru-sou [Cat Soup]: Surreal Animation

Three very long part series by Tatsuo Sato tells the following tale:

Nyāko, the older sister of Nyātta, lies very ill in her room. By accident, Nyātta sees his sister leaving the house holding hands with the Japanese version of Ksitigarbha, (known as Jizou in Japanese) and follows them. Nyātta claims one half of his sister's soul by pulling one arm. Nyāko's soul gets split in two, and her brother runs away with one half. Jizou sends a clue about a flower they must search for in order to retrieve the missing part, then walks away with the other half.

Oblivion or The Inability To Comprehend A Finite Existence

*edit: this was actually posted on my old tribe.net blog back in 2007...just a note*

A few nights ago I sat up straight in my bed from a dead sleep with only one thing on my mind: what happens to my consciousness when I die? The dream I had just experienced was tantamount to an incomprehensible black void; only it didn't feel like a dream. Not any dream I've experienced previously. It was more of a sense than a dream, a sense of nothingness, a feeling of being compressed into the smallest bit of matter by the blackness.

My heart was racing, all I could think about was an image of an old black and white television set cut off suddenly by a power outage, the onscreen images immediately shrinking and fading into a single minuscule pinpoint of light. To fathom or comprehend the infinite state of not being that comes with death is akin to staring into a bottomless abyss. What I remember most of all about that dream was a sudden feeling of total sensory deprivation. The state of being unable to touch, smell, hear, see, think, or even exist - it's mind-numbing to contemplate a total and complete void, a total absence of light.

I understand that my body is just a shell for my consciousness, a container with a very limited shelf life. I've known people who've come back back from the dead - who have been clinically dead and were resuscitated, and their stories range from seeing a literal flaming hell, as was the case with my Father, to experiencing absolute nothingness until they were revived.

The condition of never waking up is unimaginable to me. Life as we comprehend it for each of us ends when we do. I've had people around me who passed away, and it struck me as being the single most life-changing event that anyone living being could ever face. It reinforces the universal truth that life can end in the twinkling of an eye.