r/WritingPrompts--After you grow old and die, you wake up...

[jdd2]

... 25 million years ago as a Hominid Primate, asleep on a tree. Your whole life was a vivid hallucination you had after ingesting a funny looking mushroom. After this experience, you have great knowledge, and you're the smartest living being on the planet.

I don't read many of these, but it depends on the prompt, and this one looked interesting. The prompt is tossed out for anyone to start with, and people write something to finish the story. Here's one ending that's ranked well right now:

I know it's not a dream, they are out there somewhere in time.
I tell myself for the the thousandth time.

knocking two rocks together I finally fashion what could be a servicable spearhead. The once dull rock flaking apart forming a shape point like that time my neighbor BJ showed me.

Shaking my head I ad to put them back in their box. This wasn't going to work if I kept reminiscing about them. They aren't imaginary, They're just out of reach.
whatever it was that dragged me here, this life, this existance, wasn't the only one I had. I could remember them all, i could feel them all, smell them all.

i could remember the first kiss, I could remember ordering upsized fries at mcdonalds.

It wasn't all a dream.

It had taken moments to prove that my knowledge wasn't just fever dream. counting the seconds as a rock fell into a pond from a cliff, starting a fire, eatin cooked meat. It was all things my furry body had never done before, but my real self knew intimatly, and there were no surprises.

Gravity fell at the same rate. Sticks and dry leaves burned with friction, and the smal herbivore mammal roasted over those burning sticks tassted good, but needed pepper.

The things I knew, the things I had experienced had happened, if not to me,then somewhere, and somewhen.

Placing myseflf in the universe was hard, at first, but after awhile the moons familiar shapes presented themselves. The stars were a little off, but the face of the moon shone down on me with it's familiar smile.

I was on earth, but thing's were different, wilder, more primitive.

I don't know how many nights i woke up, in cold hard sweat having an existential crisis that my existance here would wipe all of them out. that i would eat the wrong animal, or stomp on the wrong sapling.

I wasn't a butterfly in time making small ripples, I was a boulder thrown into the deep end swamping nascent humanities boat.

Or was I supposed to be there? was I the spark that lit the fire?

the only decision i had was to truck on, to try and think of myself as the first, and not the last. Hope, apparently was a new concept to both my daytime and nighttime self.

building a shelter drew from early cadet training, hunting for food, setting traps. the animals i was finding weren't rabbits, but they sure fell for snares rigged from moss and vines.

Every time i upgraded my situation I was reminded of countless youtube videos my bored nighttime self had watched, survivalist stuff, historical stuff... primitive technoology made me chuckle when i remembered it.

life was hard, but geting more secure, and some of the other, and i'm using the term loosly, people had taken notice. I'd started growing a few crops. Mostly berries that my daytime self had found delicious, but other vegetables and some fruit were starting in the field I had planeted. I'd even taken to breeding some of the mammals, I wonder was i responsible for the shape of some modern animals, or was i preventing it?

There are quite a few more alternate "endings" if you scroll down:
www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/comments/b2w4qm/wp_after_you_grow_old_and_die_you_wake_up_25/

[jdd2]

I wake up slowly, quietly. I do not get up though. I am too busy thinking about my night-self. He was strange. He lacked fur and did not nest in trees like my tribe and I do. He used tools that none of us would ever think possible.
I am struggling to remember my night-self. Maybe, just maybe I can use his teachings. I cannot use his tools, for they do not exist. But I can adapt. I can alter them. Make tools like the ones he used out of things around me. Yes, that will be good. I can make wood let out sunlight. I can turn stone sharp.
My night-self could survive in all places. He knew secrets of plants and animals. Those that can kill us, and those that can save us. I can teach these things to my tribe, and with that and the tools I will make, we shall be the greatest tribe. We shall no longer fear the night or the great beasts. We shall walk the land like he did.
I must work now, before I forget my dream-self completely. What was that thing he used to call himself? A name, yes that was it. A name. A good thing to have. I should use that with my tribe, along with this...this language thing he used. And my name shall be his name, for he is my teacher. From now on, I shall be known as Bear Gryllls.

[jdd2]

The primitive create awoke to the sound of rustling birds running through the blades of grass. This world was unfamiliar to her, and she found herself unable to form the words to articulate her feelings, though not for lack of trying. Her jumbled up teeth felt clumsy in her mouth; they pressed against her flat tongue and rendered speech difficult, though not entirely impossible.

Looking down, she could not recognize the hairy bodice she inhabited. The world around her was wild and unkempt. Looking around she slowly started to remember. She was an ape, like the ones she read about in... another time. She felt the world she once lived -- and died in -- slowly fade from memory. In a panic, she held onto those images in a vice. She felt desperate not to lose everything that she once was, now that she had returned to the old world.

The floor was littered with lurid orange mushrooms that seemed to pulsate in her newly-awakened eyes. Memories of The Bible returned to her. She acknowledged them as the fruit of knowledge, and she was Eve. The humans were wrong. The Fruit of Knowledge was not a curse given by some God. They were, instead, the source of humanity. She stood straighter, knowing that she was the first true human., albeit a primitive one.

Another one of her kind approached. She knew somewhere inside herself that they were a tribal species just like the humans of the future. If only she could convince one of them to take a bite of the fruit themselves... She longed not to feel so alone in this world.

[RickW]

...and roll over and go back to sleep, because this looks like WAY too much thinking for this time of the day.....

[AlanC]

That is not bad actually. I have paid for Audible books that were way worse than that little story.

[Village Idiot]

life was hard, but geting more secure, and some of the other, and i'm using the term loosly, people had taken notice. I'd started growing a few crops. Mostly berries that my daytime self had found delicious, but narrowed all of that down to wheat, as I discovered it could be ground to dust and bleached, and after rising with yeast, could be shaped into what I called buns. This was a wondrous discovery, so I called them wonder buns. I'd even taken to breeding some of the mammals, I wonder was i responsible for the shape of some modern animals, or was i preventing it? I'll never be sure, because I focused my attention on cows. I discovered that like wheat they could be ground, and after being cooked by fire could be placed on said buns. Nothing had whet my appetite such as this combination. They just seemed to be made right.

[Chesapeake]

This thread brings to mind The Inheritors, a 1955 novel by the British author William Golding, he of Lord of the Flies. About ninety percent of the book follows a family of Neanderthals around their prehistoric landscape, and itself tells an absorbing story - all from the point of view of this pre-modern human species, or how Golding conceptualized how they might have thought and spoke and behaved: in short, how they perceived the world. Of course this is all as imagined by Golding; but subsequent paleontology and anthropology has suggested that he had some very plausible ideas. In any case it is a tour de force of POV writing, using a limited vocabulary, and postulating that they navigated the world largely by sensory perception. Plot spoiler: In the end, they are wiped out by a band of newcomers who suddenly show up in their stomping grounds. That would be us: homo sapiens.

[millring]

[jdd2]

I'd been reading about Natufians, maybe why the variety of stories seemed good.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natufian_culture

[Marshall]

I'm not a "writing" guy. But the idea of "prompts" as a creative starting point is great. That's eeffectively what the songwriting class is I took. You get musical and lyrical prompts. It's fun and surprisingly freeing and inspiring to take a prompt and turn it into something real.