28 January

In this excellent new Dracula, at one point there’s a chilling dramatic device where he says that people shouldn’t choose cremation because ‘it hurts’, and then allows us to hear people buried in a cemetery screaming to be let out. As I said, a dramatic device. But it made me think, because what we call ‘death’ is always shifting depending on current technology, how do we really know that a ‘dead’ person is no longer aware? We don’t even know that for a sleeping person (or in fact we do know now that sleep isn’t even unconsciousness).