In the Vertigo Lucifer Morningstar, Izanami is the Japanese goddess of death and the after-life, presiding over an elaborate hell, the carefully crafted Realm of Windowless Rooms. 

Each inmate of this hell is confined to a single room of minimal dimensions, where the inmate spends his/her eternity undergoing no tangible physical suffering, but instead exists in a perpetual state of dreaming where he/she experiences, literally dreams all the nightmares people in the world of the living are dreaming on every solitary or social night. The nightmares circulate within the infernal labyrinth with supreme efficiency, and no windows exist to provide any hint of escape or relief.

The entire mechanism is best imagined with the nightmares visualised as winds ricocheting in perfect symmetry from a mind in one cubicle to the other. 

One would imagine that such a universe would not pride itself on its notions of privacy. I mean, of course, the privacy of the imagination rather than physical privacy, which, somewhat paradoxically, is absolute to the point of perfection in an inferno where there is only an endless staccato repetition of brick on brick ad infinitum with nospace, no speck of coincidental, momentary insight left to fleet in their own quaint sparrow-belike forms. 

There would also possibly be a great fear of epidemic. Of plagues of the mind where the winds of imaginary (and dare i say, political) disease would not only spread like epochal wildfire, but would also cast a long shadow across the labyrinth, nevermind that its already dark, no light except the sort which blinds would be allowed here. This shadow, somewhat one imagines like the shadow a swarm of locusts would cast across a valley they have chosen to besiege, would create clouds of such dense death that even the dead would gasp for breath – visiting the souls of the dead with overwhelming despair, but would yet be spawned, very interestingly, not from despair in the living, but with something a bit different, a feeling of omniscient dread. 

Despair knows that the will has reached the end of its tether, like a donkey whose driver knows on one fine morning that however much he whips it, the donkey shall not canter. Despair leaves no open windows. The dead would of course, be all too familiar with an absolute finishing, an unequivocal ending of the active will. The living, on the other hand, will wake up on the morning after and retain a metallic after-taste in their mouth to remind them, un-completely-forgettably of just what their nightmares have told them, of the horrors that their much-vaunted, alive, intellects are capable of manifesting. Dread rules the realm of the contingent future, of the next step forward into the unknown, of choice and of possibility – whereas the dead would probably find a curious solace in the knowledge that their lot does not account for choice, and that only one, unitary song of despair is possible.

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The muezzin’s call brings an ineffable peace in the morning. Like Anna Kavan, something special.