I enter the dream, and I am in prison, wearing baggy orange coveralls, handcuffed, and being led ... somewhere. Someone injects me with something. I'm told it's morphine, and that I am allowed only two shots of it before my electrocution. Then someone tells me I have to shave my beard, which I do (remarkable since I'm still handcuffed) with regret. However, this is apparently necessary so I can have a piece of thick plastic tape adhered just underneath my lower lip. This is essential to the process of electrocution.
When this tape has been applied, I'm overwhelmed with terror. I finally realize I have been sentenced to death and that death is imminent. Despite the soothing effect the morphine has had on me, I begin to freak out banging my head on several hard metal surfaces so much that it alarms the various authorities attending to me, who restrain me and give me another shot of morphine. At this point in the dream, I fall asleep ...
And wake up, briefly, to let the cat into my room. I immediately drift back into sleep ...
And wake up in the dream, right where I left off. I'm being strapped into the electric chair. I realize that I've been given morphine because they have lied, the process does hurt, the person being fried can feel the electricity killing them for far longer than anyone imagines. I begin to demand a lethal injection of morphine, I begin to wail, to sob, to rend my clothes and beat my breast about how unfair it all is, that I don't even know what the crime I'm being killed for actually is.
None of that matters. The switch is thrown, and I am electrocuted. My window of sight onto the world recedes into a tunnel made of black velvet ... and I die.
...and then I wake up again, this time because the cat wants to be let out of my room. Perhaps I was thrashing about in my sleep, and I disturbed him.
I go back to sleep, yet again, and again, I am alive. I am walking out of the prison I had been in from the prior dream(s?) and I'm wearing an orange shirt, similar to the coveralls, and black slacks. The prison is, apparently, in a brownstone building in downtown Los Angeles, and as I walk out, I marvel at my seemingly miraculous survival.
I then realize that I did not survive. The people populating the street are dead, as am I, but this is not the afterlife. It's just another place, another dimension, and my death in one existence has sentenced me to existence in another dimension, or universal variant or something.
And knowing that I'm alive, yet dead, I then fully realize the doom of my sentence. I've been doomed to live my life over and over and over again, experiencing it from all possible angles, experience every possible consequence I can possibly experience in this shell that is the person I am. Every death leads to a new existence wherein something as simple as the color of the socks I wore on a rainy day in 1981 makes a difference in how the following events will play out.
I run down the street in Los Angeles, screaming, screaming that this must be hell, this constant and infinite reincarnation. And as I run, I separate from my body, and, disembodied, I watch it run away until I can no longer see it ...
... and then I wake up. And vow not to go back to sleep this night.