This article is classified "Fictional"
By definition, life stops at the beginning of death. As we have read in the "Life After Death" article, after or in death there is no existence or consciousness. God said so himself. What he failed to see, however, was that from the point of view of the dying, everything looks completely different than the casual observer in the "real world" observes. In the real world, we observe the decay of the bodily functions, the disappearing of consciousness, and finally the disappearing of all life signs. As an introduction to the explanation of the reality you know nothing about that I will put forward very soon, I will briefly describe the observations of someone falling into a black hole as opposed to the observations of someone observing that. This I do to point out that observations are relative. The poor soul falling into the black hole, when he looks up from his computer on which he/she is writing a Guide entry, will see and experience what we all expect. He will feel an increasing pull resulting in being torn apart and being disintegrated by the tidal forces, after which he will, after a while, reach the nucleus, whatever that may be. The observer standing alongside will however, uttering a sigh of relief that he/she isn't in the observed situation, see the in-falling spaceship, getting redder and redder (gravitational redshift), slow down until it stops moving on the event horizon and remains there forever with the tortured and distorted face of the astronaut, even redder than expected through fearal redshift, clutching at the port-hole. In fact, everything will be crispy black at the event horizon, because after all we are dealing with a black hole, not a red or white one. When dying the reverse happens. As we, the living, see the beloved or whatever cease to live, that person experiences an afterlife with a duration extending to infinity. This effect is due to a change in the speed of the internal clock, induced by death-related chemical reactions in the brain. The voyage into the afterlife begins, as near-death out-of-body experiences teach us, with a voyage through a large tunnel to a very bright light. The living have never been able to get further than meeting the light. What happens to dying people is that they, at that point, start dreaming. At the same time, if we can use that concept, chemical changes in the body due to the process of dying cause the perception of time to change, speeding up close to infinity (causing a second in real-time to last for ages), causing the mind to escape in a kind of tangent to our time to a different time dimension, so to speak. In short, you start to dream. First you do this as incoherent as in your regular dreams. This might be considered as the purgatory. If you are lucky you will learn to be able to control the neverending dream, as some people can do already, and create your own private heaven. On the other hand, if you fail to ever control your dreams, you will remain in purgatory for ever, for some people being equal to hell. But it can be worse. If your dream turns into a nightmare you will learn what real Hell is. It is all in your own hands. Well, that is, this is not completely true. As we all know there are several ways people can screw up your peaceful dream life. War traumas are an effective nightmare creators. From this we can conclude that as sad and harsh as it may be, it is true that Heaven or Hell partly depends on people other than ourselves. I could give you the advice to be good to others, hoping they'll be good back to you (give them some heaven and get some back). This is cruelly moralistic, but worth a try. My last advice for a better afterlife is to enjoy yourself as much as you can now and thus create some fine memories to dream about. Hitchhiking is an excellent way to do this. You could also stay at home and read a lot, but nothing's better than the real thing!