Mundane Afterlife: Difference between revisions

** Though at the very end, the narrator is carefully cautioned that he is only dreaming it and he must make it clear that it is a dream, with the implication that it was [[A Form You Are Comfortable With]].

* In one of [[Mercedes Lackey]]'s ''Five Hundred Kingdoms'' books the protagonist visits a local afterlife which is basically total apathy. People freshly arrived will work out of habit, making nets and cleaning clothes, or they will wander seeking answers, but the work never goes anywhere - nets never get bigger, the clothes aren't cleaner - and bit by bit they forget everything, until they lie down and sleep. They can be roused, but not into interest, and if reminded that they are dead they will attack.

* In ''[[The Lovely Bones]]'', each person has their own heaven, but they overlap if they meld together well. The narrator (a junior-high-age girl who was murdered) has a high school like the one in her hometown, but with swingsets, and she never has to go to any class except art. The other residents include teenage boys who play basketball on the blacktop and adult female athletes who use the sports fields for practice. She has a roommate and an intake counselor. They can get whatever they want in heaven (as soon as they specifically figure out that they want it), but this seems to apply only to mundane things, like dogs for the narrator or speaking English without a Vietnamese accent for her roommate.

* The afterlife in ''The Brief History of the Dead'' is basically the same as the world of the living, except nobody ever ages and people spontaneously vanish when there's nobody left alive who remembers them.

 

 

* In ''[[Scrubs]]'', one of JD's fantasies has him going to Heaven and finding it's really a diner that doesn't serve flapjacks, making him briefly wonder if flapjacks are actually evil.

* The Ancients' form of Limbo in ''[[Stargate SG-1]]'' consists of a diner. Apparently, the food's quite excellent. It's heavily implied that the Ascended Plane looked like a diner because [[You Cannot Grasp the True Form|Jackson Cannot Grasp The True Form]] of it, so his mind substituted a diner instead.