About eight years ago, a younger, male friend of mine committed suicide because his best friend ended up with the girl he pined for. He blew his head off with a shot gun one night. Both his best friend and the girl had heard it, but they thought it was a truck backfiring. The girl found him later.

At the beginning of his funeral, in the church, I closed my eyes as one of our friends honored his memory in song. I saw remarkably vivid images, as if the insides of my eyelids were projection screens. It was as if I were looking through someone else's eyes; I didn't have control of what was looked at.

I saw a room with curtained walls, a checkered floor, and something that looked very much like a coffin off to the side. Very Twin Peaks. The eyes looked around the room and eventually found steps leading down into a darkened area. It was the only exit from the room as far as I could tell. But the one whose eyes I saw through didn't want to go down there. Somehow, I knew that. From what I saw in the last few seconds, it looked as if the person turned away from the steps leading down, and slowly closed his eyes (felt male to me). The vision faded away and was done, gone.

I don't claim to know what it all meant. As I sat there, watching all this, I told myself: Just be open to it. Only watch. Something is being shown to you, or you're lucky enough to have happened to pick up something here and now. Either way, pay attention.

My own impression of what I saw is this: I believed I may have been seeing through the eyes of my dead friend's soul. When I saw the coffin in the room, I felt it was his coffin, and he was being allowed to be alone with it (or forced to be alone with it). The downstairs room definitely seemed to represent Hell � and it was the only place to go if he was to leave the room at all. He was ashamed and turned away from the darkness below. But still, it was either the room with the coffin, or the place down there. It was quite sad. It was like he either had to walk into Hell willingly, or stay in that one little room with his coffin for eternity.

I wonder if he's still there....

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But whatever lies behind the door, there is nothing much to do... Angel or devil, I don't care. For in front of that door...there is you. -- David Bowie, "My Death"