dream
Explanation
The Joke
A man describes a recurring dream. He is falling out of the sky, knows he will splatter against the ground in a few minutes, and as the earth looms larger, he notices he has twenty unanswered emails. He realizes there is no chance of achieving spiritual transcendence in two minutes -- but there is some chance of clearing his inbox.
So he battles through his emails one by one, deleting and sorting furiously. With his entire being organized around a single goal that will consume his whole remaining life, he feels his heart "strangely unwarmed" -- and then declares: "I feel perfection."
His therapist asks, "Do you consider this a dream or a nightmare?" He responds: "I'm thinking of starting a religion."
The Humor
The comic satirizes modern work culture and email addiction by placing it in the most extreme possible context: the final moments before death. The joke is that faced with certain death, the man does not seek peace, pray, reflect on loved ones, or achieve any kind of spiritual epiphany. Instead, he finds meaning and even perfection in the most mundane possible task -- clearing his email inbox. The comic suggests that for the modern knowledge worker, inbox zero has replaced nirvana as the ultimate state of transcendence.
The phrase "strangely unwarmed" is a deliberate inversion of John Wesley's famous description of his religious conversion: "I felt my heart strangely warmed." Here, the man achieves a kind of anti-transcendence -- a cold, mechanical satisfaction from pure productivity.
The final punchline -- wanting to start a religion based on this experience -- elevates the absurdity further, suggesting that the worship of productivity has already effectively become a religion for many people, and the man simply wants to make it official.
References
"I felt my heart strangely warmed" is the famous phrase used by John Wesley (1703-1791), the founder of Methodism, to describe his spiritual conversion experience at Aldersgate Street in London on May 24, 1738. The comic inverts this to "strangely unwarmed" to contrast spiritual awakening with the empty satisfaction of email management. The "inbox zero" concept, coined by productivity expert Merlin Mann, refers to the practice of keeping one's email inbox empty as a productivity ideal.