woke up from a weird dream

It's rare for me to remember the content of my dreams. Often, when I wake up, I'm left with fading echoes of emotion, e.g., if I wake up crying from a sad dream (sad dreams happen a lot, alas). But every once in a while, I'll wake up remembering parts of the dream itself, images and events, and that seems to have happened this morning.

It was a death dream, and per the mythology given to us in the 80s movie "Dreamscape," I woke up before my dream self died. But I remember that I was on my way to Hades.

In the dream, I had participated in some "Squid Game"-type scenario, and I'd just lost. The competition had involved some weird activity like tobogganing down a hill on a shield, and somehow, I'd lost along with someone else. The penalty for loss was death. The rules of the game were ironclad, and I'd known them going into the competition. What struck me, though, was how friendly the people running the game were. With bland and smiling detachment, they handled my own grinning, half-hearted attempts to get out of the punishment, which was death by asphyxiation. Not hanging or anything horrific like that: I was placed in a room with my fellow game-loser, and we were given a small brazier and a paper-wrapped package of something or other. The door to our room was shut, and the expectation was that we would light the package, breathe in the fumes as it burned, fall asleep, and die. 

There didn't seem to be any rush about any of this, and there was no audience to watch us. My partner and I had some kind of discussion, and it was agreed that I would light the package, and we'd both lie back and just breathe, making an effort to sleep as the fumes eventually took us. The means to light the brazier had been supplied, so it was just a matter of starting the fire. I did so, and we lay back. I stared at the ceiling, willing myself to try to sleep and wondering what death would be like. 

Somewhere in the back of my mind, though, was a sense of horror and crushing inevitability, as well as the knowledge that I was essentially doing this to myself willingly. I'm not sure, but I think that, as the horror grew in my head, something rebellious arose in me, something that quietly but desperately clawed for life, and that's why I woke up, relieved that this had only been a dream. I'm still left with that weird, unpleasant feeling of being complicit in my own death, in a society where this was just a ritual, and everyone was friendly about what was happening. There's still a kind of subtle horror in my mind that I can't quite shake. 

Anyway, I'm glad to wake up from that nightmare. Maybe someone will come along in the comments and provide the Freudian or Jungian interpretation of what I'd experienced.