Geez, man, I've died in my dreams more times than I can count.

I've been shot, stabbed, set on fire, and suffocated. I've drowned, I've fallen from enormous distances, I've had car wrecks (because my dream-brakes never work), I've exploded... hell, I even died of old age in one dream, now that I think about it.

Before I tell you what happens after I die, though, there's an important detail that you need to know: In most of my dreams, regardless of what I look like on the outside, I'll usually have the mind of an eight-year-old.

There was a dream that I once had, for example, in which a notorious gangster beat me to death with a baseball bat. It was a frightening, bloody affair... but after a few seconds of being sprawled out with my eyes closed, I hopped to my feet.

"Okay," I impatiently said, "it's my turn to be the bad guy now!"

"Nuh-uh!" replied the evildoer. "You're dead! You have to be someone else!"

Even that's only one example, though... and to be fair, I'm not always a child-minded buffoon. On more than one occasion after I've "died," I've immediately "woken up." When that happens, things get even weirder than an immediate compulsion to play pretend.

Following my death, I'll find myself in a small room. Everything around me has a bluish shade to it, and after a moment, I'll realize that I'm laying on what appears to be a spectacularly lavish hospital bed. Sometimes, a blue-suited person of indeterminate sex will walk in and converse with me. Other times, I'll stay completely alone. Either way, though, I'll soon become intensely aware of the cord - about the width of a shoelace - running from a console on my bed and up into my nose.

Now, as I'm sure we're all aware (even marginally), dreams aren't just a sequence of images and events. Senses of familiarity, applicable knowledge, and feelings of recognition all get jumbled into that mix, which means you might "remember" something while in the confines of a dream that you hadn't actually known before. In the case of my cord-and-bed dreams, I'll quickly "remember" the training that I've had with the device to which I'm attached, and how absolutely imperative it is that I not resist the urge to fall asleep.

I'll press a button, relax, and feel myself drift off.

On two occasions in the past, that's when I've woken up for real.

On another, I became Superman.

TL;DR: My dream deaths never seem to stick.