There is nothing frightening about an eternal dreamless sleep. Surely it is better than eternal torment in Hell and eternal boredom in Heaven.
Now if you suppose that there is no consciousness, but a sleep like the sleep of him who is undisturbed even by dreams, death will be an unspeakable gain. Now if death be of such a nature, I say that to die is gain; for eternity is then only a single night.
This is when you die, and you cease to exist. No afterlife. No feeling, no thought, no perception, no existence. Your existence — everything you
were — simply disappears like a popped soap bubble.
This is fairly inconceivable to those who exist, as not-existing and existing are somewhat mutually exclusive. Remember, even in a deep coma there is some basic level of self-awareness. The idea here is that death doesn't even have that.
This idea is the
reason death is a
Primal Fear.
Not to be confused with
The Nothing After Death, where you still exist, if only as a mere shade floating between nothing and nowhere.
Examples:
Music
Webcomics
- This is what Gwynn from Sluggy Freelance is threatened with
when K'Z'K takes over her body.
- In The Order of the Stick, this is what happens to "immortal" creatures like imps and elementals if somebody manages to kill them, because they have no soul that can continue on into the afterlife. It's noted at one point that this means "mortal" creatures like humans are actually less afraid of death than "immortal" creatures, because they know they'll continue on in some form and may even get resurrected at some point.
- They merge with their plane of existence — which is not quite popping out of existence.
- According to the Fiendish Codex books, that's just for elementals. Fiends (demons, devils, etc.) go "poof" if you kill them on their home planes. Devils are explicitly said to fear only demotion more than oblivion.
Tabletop Games
- Subverted in Chaos, with the big reveal that the peaceful state of non-existence some oblivion-worshippers think they want to get to in order to escape suffering is actually an eternal hell where they are caught in a quantum state of vacuum fluctuation, an unstable nothingness where they live a nightmare of forever feeling that they don't exist but not being able to do anything about it.
Video Games
- In Assassin's Creed, the Templar Sibrant believes that there is nothing waiting for him after death, and this fact terrifies him so deeply that when he learns that the Assassins are coming for him, he begins executing random priests out of sheer blind paranoia because they wear vaguely similar robes to those of the Assassins.
Literature
- Robert Cormier's In The Middle of the Night, where the villain went Ax Crazy after discovering this.
- H.P. Lovecraft's "Ex Oblivione", where the protagonist discovered that oblivion was the natural state of things, and that 'existence', as we know it, is merely a brief nightmare...
- In Lois McMaster Bujold's The Curse of Chalion, in which ghosts who are sundered from the gods drift blindly until they fade away completely. It's called the true death or the death of the soul. Most people go on to the afterlife, though.
- In the Incarnations Of Immortality series, people generally go to an afterlife, but which afterlife depends to some extent on what they believe; one incidental character is a militant atheist who believes that Cessation Of Existence is what happens to everybody when they die, and although he's wrong about the "everybody", it is indeed what happens to him.
Anime & Manga
- In Death Note, Ryuk tells Light that since he's used the Death Note, he can go neither to heaven or hell, but instead "Mu," or nothingness. At the end of the series, a flashback that shows the entirety of that scene occurs, where Light deduces (correctly) that that just means there's no afterlife for anyone. This is confirmed by Ryuk, the Rules of the Death Note shown between chapters, Word Of God, and an Eye Catch in the anime. It's not clear if this just means they'll go to The Nothing After Death or just cease to exist, however.
- In both Dragonball and Yu Yu Hakusho, this is what happens if someone who is already dead is somehow killed. In addition, in Yu Yu Hakusho, certain creatures can eat a person's soul and cause them to cease to exist.
Real Life
