so you know that story about how if you die in a dream that you die in real life? well, i hate to break it to you folks but that myth is completely untrue.
yes, you heard it here first, from the dream expert (at bullshitting) jenna.
how can i make such a preposterous claim you might wonder?
because i have been there. i have seen death in my dreams. i have faced it. i have felt my life ebbing away. i have (you guessed it) died in a dream. really died. and look- i'm still here to tell the tale. take that jason or freddy krueger or whatever scary movie monster used to kill people in their sleep. it just doesn't work and that's all there is to it.
so that's the good news. the cooler news is that i have felt what it's like to die and yet i'm still alive. sure it was a dream, but my dreams are quite vivid and intense. i mean, i really feel every physical sensation, good and bad, that occur in my dreams. the dreams i like best are the ones where i encounter sensations that i've never felt in real life. like the time i was a man (stay tuned for an upcoming entry) or like the dream where i died. in both cases, i'm glad that the physical implications didn't carry over into my real life, but they are still quite interesting to look back on. not that i can say for sure that the sensations i feel while asleep are legitimate, but i can say that i have experienced things while dreaming that i have never felt while awake which is cool enough for me.
anyway, i can't remember how i died anymore but i think i was shot. what i can remember is lying on the ground and feeling a unique sensation that i recognized at once as death as it progressed and my body shut down. i can't explain it very well, but let's just say that everything was fading. i was fading. it wasn't pleasant but it wasn't awful. i was more curious than frightened because it seemed stupid to fear the inevitable. so instead of fearing death, i felt it. the sensation of death, that dreaded but unavoidable accompaniment of life. i knew that i couldn't escape so i just lay there as it took over and i became less and less me and more and more a part of some great nothing and then there was nothing and that was it. i was nothing. i was dead.
some time later i woke up and thought, "damn, i just died. that was pretty fucking crazy." then i went back to sleep.
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4 comments:
You may have busted that myth, but what about the myth that if you are running in in your dream you are running in your bed?
oh, and on a related subject; i watched a show about anesthesia awareness last night. this is where one or two of the anesthesia drugs a surgery patient gets doesn't take hold. Essentially, you go under but come back to consciousness yet all your muscles are paralyzed but you are aware, can hear and can feel. You are trapped in your own mind listening to the surgeons and feeling the extreme pain of hours of incisions and burning inside your body as the surgery is completed.
One woman was enucleated (had an eye taken out) while she was aware. she witnessed her own sight going black and all of this to disco music playing on a jam box in the OR.
I know what you are talking about. For years, I kept a dream journal. I practiced and worked on lucid dreaming. I even got the point of having amazingly realistic dreams that I could control and having such intense dreams that I was unaware when I woke up if they had happened or not. I died many deaths. I fell and then landed, severly injured. I've had dreams about being a woman, a child, other people, animals, etc. I used to think that these were just my brain tricking me into thinking how said event/occurence would feel.
What really convinced me of the reality of what I was dreaming about was the first time I tried LSD. I had LSD dreams at various points in the past and had shrugged them off as inaccurate and based on what I had seen. But after actually consuming LSD, my experiences were indistinguishable from the dreams. It was like this for other drugs, too. It was as if I had already done it, even though I had only dreamt about it.
I realize it sounds really weird, but I wonder if dreaming can help you prepare for what death (or being the opposite sex) would be like. Or something like that, I don't know. I'm just rambling...
Woah. The exact same thing happened to me recently - what do you think it means?
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