Within medieval Christianity, accepting that one had to die was an ethical and spiritual imperative involving realigning one's priorities towards God and eternity and away from earthly reality and the worldly pursuit of ease, wealth and power. A substantial effort was therefore poured into persuading and enabling subjects to acknowledge what Ariès calls ‘the death of the self’ (as opposed to ‘the death of the other’). Medieval texts, like modern theorists, recognize certain challenges in the project of contemplating mortality. One is the difficulty of imagining one's own death. Thus in Guillaume de Deguileville's influential fourteenth-century dream vision, the Pèlerinage de vie humaine (first redaction, 1330–1), when Death arrives the narrator-Pilgrim wakes, bringing to an end both narrative and poem: