It’s not impossible to die in a dream, but many people report waking up right before the moment of death or immediately after. The reason? Your mind may not have a mental model of what death feels like — because, well, you’ve never experienced it.
1. Your Brain Can’t Simulate What It Doesn’t Know
Most dreams are created from your memories, experiences, emotions, and subconscious fears or desires. Since none of us have experienced actual death, the brain has no internal “template” for what that final moment feels like. So when a dream leads up to death, it often “short-circuits” — and you either wake up or the dream shifts.
2. The Brain’s Survival Mechanism
From an evolutionary perspective, your brain is wired to keep you alive — even in sleep. The “fight or flight” mechanism remains active during dreams, especially in nightmares. If you’re about to “die” in a dream, your mind may interpret that as a threat serious enough to trigger awakening. It’s your brain pulling the emergency brake.
3. Lucid Dreaming and Exceptions
In lucid dreams (where you’re aware you’re dreaming), some people do report experiencing death — or at least going through a symbolic version of it. In such cases, the “death” often leads to transformation rather than an ending — like changing into a different form or observing from a third-person perspective.
4. The Psychological Theory of Ego Dissolution
Psychoanalysts like Carl Jung might interpret dream-death not as literal but symbolic — the “death” of your ego, identity, or a phase in your life. So waking up could represent your psyche’s resistance to that transformation, or its inability to fully process such a deep shift.
5. Dream Death as a Metaphor for Transformation
Dreams are often symbolic rather than literal. Dying in a dream may represent a psychological metamorphosis — the end of a chapter, belief, relationship, or behavior. In Jungian psychology, this could signal the “death of the old self” to make room for personal growth or self-realization.
🔍 “Dreams are the guiding words of the soul.” — Carl Jung
So, if you “die” in a dream and don’t wake up right away, you might be in a metaphorical transition phase — like shedding skin to become a new version of yourself.
6. The Role of REM Sleep and Brain Activity
Most vivid dreams — including the ones where people almost die — occur during REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep. During REM, your brain is highly active, but your body is paralyzed (thanks to a safety feature called REM atonia). If your dream simulates falling, crashing, or being attacked, your brain may trigger a sudden awakening before the moment of “death” to prevent mental overload or trauma.
That jolt awake? That’s called a hypnic jerk, and it’s part of the brain’s way of snapping you out of what feels like a real threat.
7. Near-Death Experience (NDE) Dreams
Some people who’ve been clinically dead and revived report experiences similar to dreams — bright lights, tunnels, reunions with loved ones, or a sense of peace. Interestingly, these reports often share common themes with dreams about death. It’s not solid proof of anything metaphysical, but it does suggest our brains may have built-in narratives for what we imagine death to be like.
In other words, even if your brain does simulate death, it might do so using emotional archetypes (light, floating, release) rather than pain or terror.
8. Cultural Influences on Dream Death
Your upbringing and beliefs influence how you dream. In Western cultures, death is often feared and avoided, so dream-death might provoke panic and waking. In contrast, in many Eastern or indigenous spiritual traditions, death is seen as a passage or rebirth. In these contexts, dreaming of death may be peaceful or even sacred — and the dreamer might continue on after “dying.”
📖 Recommended read: “The Tibetan Book of the Dead” explores the dream-like nature of death and the stages of consciousness believed to follow.
9. Dreams and the Fear of Oblivion
There’s a theory in existential psychology that suggests the mind resists dreaming of its own end because of the terror of non-existence. This ties into Ernest Becker’s classic, The Denial of Death, where he argues that most of human behavior is subconsciously designed to avoid confronting mortality. Dreams might be playing into that same survival-based avoidance.
10. The Philosophical Perspective
Philosophers from Plato to Descartes have mused about dreams as a window into alternate realities or levels of consciousness. If dreams are mental simulations or “alternate realities,” then dream-death could be akin to exiting one simulation — not total annihilation.
This view aligns with simulation theory or multiverse models in physics — suggesting that maybe in the dream world, “death” is just a portal to another level.
forget about all those scary mysterious hypotheses about dying in real world as they’re not completely false , but simply hard to test
i won’t go on a much details here to try to explain what is dreaming , why it happens , what happens in it ( medically ) and other stuff , but i will say this :
dreams are in the least complex description , your brain’s way of interpreting your everyday activities , your thoughts ,your feelings ….etc , categorizing what information you learned that you’ll need and what others are useless , helps fixing brain cells apparently and a lot of other wild stuff.
your brain is basically a big mystery that has a lot of secrets that we don’t know and we’re still pretty much ignorant of it, but we know what is the basic logic behind that ( at least we like to think so ) . some people DO have a near death experience in their dreams but they usually end up in waking up ( especially after falling off a building lol ) , because apparently as some researchers suggest, it’s the brain’s way of indicating an emergency situation ( you probably heard that before )
because your brain works as a processing machine and not as a fantasy one that works aimlessly with imagination only , and such situations are preserved by the brain for a response to an extreme situations , which your presumably you aren’t facing.
in a pseudoscience way of thinking , some suggested that your brain dreams of moments before death , sometimes maybe after death ( wild imagination for that ) , but never in the moment of death because your brain reaches a state of an absolute maximum peak of stress that it simply breaks ( hence the idea “die in your dreams, die in real world” ) , and your brain won’t go that far because of it’s survival mechanism and because it’s basically impossible for it to picture what that feeling even seems like.
I’m assuming by “Die in a dream” you mean, we can’t experience what it would feel like to die in real life, in a dream.
That’s because most, if not all of us, have no prior experiences of dying. Most of what we dream of is accumulated experience, mixed and matched, combined to form something interesting. If you never experienced something before, the dream will pull up every memory close to that experience and try to simulate it. As we cannot really tell what happens during the process of death, or after death, you can’t die in a dream because the dream has no prior experience, and therefore can’t simulate it.
Just recently I had 2 dreams where I died and remember dying. I remembered the feeling in. I remember the thoughts. It was very weird. And the dreams were somehow peaceful.
One dream I was driving in a car with my mom and dad. I saw a bright orange light in the rear view mirror. I looked behind us and there was an exploding volcano. My mom and dad saw it and just shrugged. I wasn’t scared. I just told them that i loved them and then everything turned bright. I felt a sharp pain and heat everywhere, and then nothing.
The next day I had another dream like this.
My mom and i were in a thing made out of tent material. (In my head I thought it was a space ship. We were in space) It was so small that my mom and i were hugging. I then felt us being bumped into. There was then a rip in the ‘space ship’ and everything got very very cold. As my mom and i were freezing I looked up at her, hugged her closer, and once again told her I loved her. I then remember not being able to move, and then everything slowly faded out as I passed.
Funny that you and the two folks who have already answered this think that you can’t die in dreams. I die in dreams all the time. I think in my 60+years, i must have died in dreams at least a thousand times. Just a few of my deaths that i can remember:
- Falling into a chasm, hitting the rock walls multiple times on the way down
- Drowning (i think, by far, the most times i’ve died has been by drowning. I’ve even drowned in a deluge of rain.)
- Being eaten by sharks
- Being cut in half by a huge, slicing, blade-like machine
- Being eaten by monsters (this is my second most likely way to die in dreams)
- Being squeezed to death by a giant snake (when i was a kid—it was a definite puberty, sex-fear dream)
Since getting into my 60s, ironically enough, i’ve only had the one blade-like machine death. That one was, from what i can tell, me actually, really, realizing that death was a surety and soon.
(we all come to a realization of our mortality at some point; mine was partially because of age, partially because of cancer.)
The other dream deaths weren’t really about actual death—they were about fears, changes in my life that horrified me, loss of other things besides my actual life.
And since that last dream death, my unconscious has, perhaps, come to some real understanding that this heart will cease to beat, these lungs will exhale and not inhale, and this soul will leave this body some day. And it hasn’t felt the need, any longer, to use death as a metaphor anymore—maybe the idea of death is too real to me, now.
If you don’t die in your dreams, perhaps your unconscious already knows that and acknowledges it, and it doesn’t want to use the metaphorical death, either. But people do dream of their own deaths. Lots.
I always thought it was impossible to die in a dream, because every time I was falling down from a building, or being in an airplane crash (I’ve had a few of those), I would wake up before dying.
Just about 5–6 weeks ago, I died in a dream for the first time. I was with four other guys, fighting against some enemy. No, I wasn’t dreaming about that war currently in the news. The enemy overran us, and my four teammates were killed. Five enemies surrounded me, and I gave up. I sat down and I said, “OK, just shoot me.” One of them shot me in the head from behind. I fell backwards and everything went dark, and I thought, “Hmmm, is this how it feels to die? I didn’t feel anything, and it didn’t even hurt. ” Then I felt my soul sliding down my body and leaving through my feet. That’s when I felt a jolt and was wide awake.
It was an interesting experience and a first for me because I always wondered what it would be like to die in a dream.
Many people claim that it is possible, although I have never experienced it. I dream quite often where the situations differ from drowning, falling, being eaten alive to getting shot in which miraculously I’ve survived all of them in one way or another. It’s almost like my dream made itself an excuse for me not to die, like drowning where I wake up before I die, being shot but the gun not being loaded or being eaten alive where I always find a way to escape or a major plot twist.
I personally don’t WANT to find out what it feels like to die in a dream since simply surviving them on my own have been traumatizing enough, but to answer your question I think it might differ from person to person whether you’re actually able to die in a dream or not.
it is not impossible to die in a dream.
our mother deliberately programmed us with an oedipal complex.
every time that we dreamed we were having sex with a nice girl our father would show up to interfere with us and we would fight with him to the death.
sometimes we lost.
sometimes we won.
however, our father never showed up if we dreamed about sex with a boy.
socially, we tend to prefer girls over boys by about seven to one.
eventually we stopped having any dreams about any sex at all for a very long time.
we have died in dreams in other ways, quite often by falling out of the sky when we lose our concentration while we are flying.
running into overhead electrical wires while we are flying has killed us quite often as well.
being snatched away by a strong wind until we are too exhausted fly and get dashed upon the ground was a common way for us to die while we were learning how to fly.
our most frequent reasons for dying when we are flying in our dreams are due to being chased by government assassins who are always intent upon killing us on sight for the terrible crime of teaching other people how to fly in free public seminars.
we let them kill us at the end of every seminar to show how pointless murder really is, but still, it hurts a lot to be murdered and it disrupts our lectures if they kill us too early in our discourses.
once you know how to fly you are a free agent.
you cannot be killed and remain dead.
death is only an inconvenience at that point.
you are no longer under any government’s control.
they don’t like that.
so we have died quite a lot in our dreams.
but its no big deal, really.
we also die quite a lot in our real life.
life is eternal, death is just an intermission.
there are lots and lots of intermissions.
I don’t know about others, but I have never died in my sleep, although I had several dreams where I was close to or in danger of dying. One of them went like this (a shortened version):
I stood by a pond where there were many small snakes. They looked like hybrids between a snake and a worm, and they were fatter than common snakes are. I felt they could bite and kill me, so I tried to leave the place. But 5 or 6 snakes jumped out of the pond and bit me several times.
At first I thought “that’s it, I’m finished”, but the very next moment I thought “actually, not, ’cause I’m stronger than that”. As a result, I felt a slight dizziness, but I fully recovered and walked away as if nothing had happened.
I died in a dream once. Woke up in another dream, characters and scenery slightly different … defeated the boss this time 🙂
Was a pretty scary experience as usually when you die in a dream you wake up. I was like “FFS, lemme out!!!”. So obviously, I went into lucid mode and rearranged things a bit. I also experienced sleep paralysis once … which is a whole new level of fun. Your nightmare just comes to life.
Actually, it isn’t. 2 of my most interesting (to me) and startling dreams featured my death, both by gunshots.
- After a long annoying headache and watching both the original Borne identity and Sopranos, I dreamt I was sitting at mid century kitchen table about to eat blueberry pie. I noticed an assassin on either side of me. I knew what was coming, and nonchalantly asked if they cared if I ate my pie first. I was pissed when I heard the gunshot as I felt the barrel to my head, before I fell face first into the pie, as I only had the one bite, and it was really good pie. I awoke and the headache was gone.
- As I emerged from the elevator of my high rise apartment, every tenant in the building was there, freaking out. I looked out the huge window which gave a view of downtown L.A. and the streets were filled with zombies. Zombies that could climb the outside of buildings quickly. It was obvious we were doomed and about to be overrun. Rather than die horribly, eaten alive by zombies or let my dog suffer the same fate, I apologized, then killed the dog with one shot, (Totally out of character, I loved that dog) then told everyone else, ‘good luck’, then put the gun to my own head, and woke up.
So I seriously doubt dying in a dream kills you. Besides, there is no way anyone would tell you if they just so happened to die in a dream that didn’t wake up, lol.
Cause even if you die you’re still conscious in the dream. I once had a dream where I was dead and being buried while my family was crying around my grave. But the fact that I could still see that technically means I’m alive in the dream. After that I woke myself up because I didn’t like the direction the dream was going. I’m not entirely sure what you mean by impossible, but if you manage to continue the dream past your death you might be able to bring yourself back to life if you’re really determined. Often my dreams follow my mindset of trying to overcome stuff. Like the other day it was about my charger breaking and me trying to fix it with decent success. So if this is about dreaming after your death, you got to mentally prepare yourself of the possibility of survival or wanting to comeback. It’s all about what you are determined to do in the face of worrying circumstances.
I imagine it’s because dreams are constructed from the memories of our past experiences. Unless you have experienced death, your subconscious has no memories to construct an experience you would recognize as such.
You can die in dreams and even find yourself as a ghost or resurrected. In dreams, it is your mind, you can represent things to yourself in infinite ways. So anything is possible. For the most part dreams are not literal. Most are a window into your psychological processes as they are focused on what you concern yourself with during the day. What you expect you tend to find in dreams.
For example I knew of someone who dreamed that she had been killed by her mother while at school. She then found herself walking in a beautiful garden filled with statues that were of a dark brown metal with lichen covering them. One had an old bird’s nest. She knew she was dead. As she walked through the garden she noticed a large crowd of people standing along the edge of the garden, and down a hill looking up at her and following her movements. She realized she was in heaven and started to fly around. On waking she felt very euphoric and energized.
When working with the dream, she immediately knew it dealt with her mom who was worried about her in school. She was in high school and her mom was suspicious and jealous of her. There was some funky problems with her step dad as well. She related the killing to her mom telling her teachers and other parents about her motherly fears. So people started to look at her differently. Her reaction though was not to get angry, but a sort of detachment and peaceful resolve that she would soon graduate and leave for college and that none of it really mattered. She found this liberating and realized that she could reinvent her self else where or even be more of who she was. She thought of the garden as this feeling, a sort of heaven, the flying was the freedom, and the people watching was the social pressure. The statues she thought was some sort of rules embodied by these old forms. The bird’s nest was something she remembered as being really cool to find as kid, but her mother thought it was something nasty.
I’m pretty sure that I’ve answered a similar question before, but I’ll answer this anyway because potato.
No, this is not true at all. I’ve died plenty of times in my dreams, sometimes multiple times in a single dream.
What might cause someone to wake up before actually dying, would be extreme fear at the sight of their incoming death. This would be able to wake someone up, and is fairly common. This does not mean that it’s always the case.
Well, from what I know, you cant really *die* die in a dream, right ? It’s just your brain making stuff up. Like , its creating this whole world and you’re in it , but its all happening inside your head . So even if you fall off a cliff or get eaten by a giant spider – which, honestly, happens way more often in my dreams than it should – you just… wake up . Or the dream changes . It always does , it’s weird , right ? I mean , once I was being chased by zombies in my dream , and I think I got bitten ? But then I was just kinda sitting on a park bench, eating a sandwich. No explanation. It was bizarre . The sandwich was good though . So maybe its a survival mechanism thing? Like your brain’s going “Nope , dont wanna process that death thing, lets have a ham sandwich instead”. It’s kind of fascinating actually , how our brains protect us from that . I guess its like that saying, “you cant die in a dream, you just wake up” But why ? Why cant your brain just keep going with the horror show? Maybe its because , you know, actually dying is pretty serious . Its a big deal. Your brain isnt ready to deal with that kind of finality. Its all hypothetical in dreams. I had this other dream once where I was a superhero and… man , its all fuzzy now . But something happened . I think I sacrificed myself . But then I woke up. Pretty anticlimactic . See? Its impossible, or at least it feels that way. Even if the dream *feels* real , even if you’re terrified, the underlying reality is , it isnt . Its just your brain playing games. Crazy games sometimes… Makes you wonder what else is going on in there , right ? All those weird thoughts and scenarios…anyway , I think I should probably go and get some coffee . I’ve been thinking about this way too long . Check out my bio for more random thoughts and dream analysis stuff , or maybe just more rambling . Maybe .
A lot of people had some experience with dying in their dreams. They all confirm they remember the whole story until the precise moment of death and it is the death itself what woke them up – not being nervous, scared or shocked (I remember myself dying peacefully in bed in one of my dreams, no fighting or falling involved).
I have never met anyone who continued dreaming after dying – although some religious people should be deeply convinced that the death is not the end of their story. It also quite a common plot of novels or movies: the main character dies and appears in some kind of “afterworld” – I have never met anyone with this experience, though.
Is it caused by the fact that our brain just does not know what happens next when it is all over?
Or is the moment of death such a “low-level” shock for our minds, that it just “reboots”?
I think you can die- and then you either wake up, or forget, or a new dream happens. I think that’s just becasue we don’t know what happens after death, and may be expecting the dream to just end once we do so much it does, or maybe it’s the government keeping the truth from us, and maybe I’m a paranoid schizophrenic. (I’m not, I made the government thing up). I’ve died in dreams. Not often. But it always ends there. Unless it doesn’t, and I’ve just forgotten. Most of the time I wake up from fear right as I die.
When we die in a dream we wake up because our brain doesn’t know what happens after death. Some people are able to continue sleeping but what happens is entirely a theoretical situation constructed by your brain. Religous people will often have dreams of what their imagined heaven would be like, for example. I dream of being set free to fly through the cosmos allowed to explore and go as i please to take in the entirety of what we come from.
It is possible to have a dream in which you die. Anything you yourself can imagine can be dreamed about.
There used to be a silly superstition that said if you died in a dream, you would die in real life, i.e. not wake up. That’s not true either.
Dying in a dream can have many meanings, starting at no meaning at all 🙂 all the way to a philosophical mental exercise, depending on who you are, your experiences, and what you ate just before you went to bed.
I just awoke 1 minute ago panting, holding my chest and grabbed my phone to awnser this while its fresh. First off, when we die in a dream, or in my case dying, our brains release a flood of adrenaline into our bodies. Our bodies still react while dreaming. Dying, severe injury and extreme fear are extreme stressors. Imagine your awake and in real danger, your body will try to keep itself alive by dumping adrenaline allowing you to react fast, overpower an attacker or lift a car off your child. Our body’s have the same chemical reaction when we sleep. In my dream just now I was in an RV with my best friend vactioning without my wife and kids but for some reason I was in constant danger. There were motorcycle gang members shooting at me and one dropped a grenade. Somehow my buddy Matt just pulls a rifle out of nowhere an shoots these dudes scaring others away. After the situation calmed down he left to get a first aid kit and as I turned around a man ran up the R.V. steps toward me in the drivers seat. It happened in slow motion as I saw the knife raise and I remember this horrific sense of dread as I knew I didn’t have my handgun. He stabbed me in the left side of my chest next to the heart and as he pulled the knife out to stab again my friend appeared and shot him to death. All I remember next is the feeling of blood rushing out and Matt screaming for someone to call 911 in a crying, shrill voice. I started to lose consciousness thinking this is it, this is the end when I suddendly awoke holding my chest panting. I felt like I could jump 10 feet in the air my body was so full of adrenaline. I know this may not be the most coherent train of thought but I feel obligated to awnser this question the best I could.
Everyone has a dream. Or two. Or a lot.
Precious little hopes we keep warm and safe against our chests. Little hatchlings, fragile little treasures. Things we would do anything to protect and nurture.
Sometimes we drop them. They fall to the ground and shatter into a thousand fragments. We try to glue the pieces back together, but it’s pointless. They’re broken. Their soul is gone forever. Dead.
Sometimes they get heavy. We have to put them down because we can’t carry them anymore. They are too cumbersome, too much work. It’s unrealistic to expect us to look after them. If you set them down, they shrivel up, blackened and withered. They die too.
Sometimes that dream is the one thing you want to cling to. But it’s the one thing you can’t keep. Even if all you want is for it to take flight and soar to the skies, to be free, it can’t be. It’ll falter and tumble to the sharp, rocky ground. It’ll perish as you watch, helpless to save it. It’ll die too.
It’s hard to accept that they won’t come back. It’s hard to take them to the little graveyard of dreams that will never be. It’s hard to bury their tiny, fragile remains in the sand, knowing we’ll never see them again.
It’s hard to accept that not all dreams come true. Some of them die.
But that doesn’t mean we forget them.
Well, from what I know, you cant die *really* die in a dream , because its just your brain making stuff up . Like , its processing information, remembering things, making up scenarios , kinda like a really weird movie playing only for you . I had this crazy dream once , I was falling off a cliff, it felt *so* real , my heart was racing even when I woke up . But I knew , logically , even while falling, that I wasnt actually dying . It was just my brain being dramatic, you know ? Its like… a simulation , I guess? Your brain is the computer and its running this program, this dream . And the program doesnt have a “death” function, or at least not one that translates to real life death . Your brain cant actually *kill* your brain, even in a dream. That would be kinda messed up, right? Makes sense. Makes no sense. I dont know , its weird . Maybe it’s a safety mechanism ? Like , your brain wont let you experience the ultimate fear, death , in a state where youre basically powerless . I mean , if you *could* die in your dreams , that would be terrifying , youd probably never sleep properly again . And then you’d die in real life from lack of sleep. That’s a pretty crazy thought … I had another dream where I was fighting a giant squid , I was losing badly, I was totally convinced I was going to die . But then I woke up . So yeah , no real death in dreams , at least not for me! Though some dreams are so intense , waking up is a serious relief! It feels like my brain just went full throttle and when you wake up its like ‘whoa’. And speaking of crazy dreams , I had one recently with. . . well I wont go into that , it was pretty personal and weird , lol . Anyway , yeah , dreams are weird, man. Its all about your brain and how it processes things . It can be really intense but ultimately harmless . Except that one about the squid , that was pretty intense . I should probably check out my bio for more information about my dreams and what not .
Freud started it. He said we never die in dreams. However, about 40 years ago I had a vivid dream that I was lying in a hospital corridor, dead, with gold coins pouring out of my — well somewhere. Yet I was ‘aware’ of people walking past me, so I couldn’t have been dead.
You can dream that you die, experience dream death, and you will still be alive and wake up. You can dream while actually dying. That’s what I think images from NDEs are. Since you can’t take your physical eyes with you, you can only use images from your subconcious to symbolize your experience.
I agree with some of the others, it is possible to die within a dream,but you usually can get up as if it is an act in a drama or relive life again in the next dream.
There are people who die in their sleep, but we have no way of determining if dreams have an impact on this event.
Lastly the idea of death in a dream may be to prepare self for possibility of something we may fear psychologically. It is there to repeat itself over so that certain possibilities are noticed so that we could avoid them or get used to the idea in that this event could happen.
As a kid I used to go over to my Joey’s (my friend) house and we’d climb trees. I mean that is primarily all we’d do for hours is just climb trees. Sometimes we’d try climbing different ways or climb even higher than normal. One time we climbed to the top of a 40+ foot tree and used a pocket knife to cut the top 5 or 6 feet off (don’t ask why, I don’t know). My point is that we climbed a lot of trees. And I loved heights.
One day we were climbing an old looking tree. You know the type, the kind that looks half dead and it just makes it look really really old. I was about 20 or so feet up in the air and I climbed onto a really thick branch. Big enough that I could put both hands around it and not touch my fingers. So I felt very safe and when I got my feet planted I let go and stood up, reaching for the branch above me.
Just as my fingers were reaching that branch the one below me snapped and broke off. As it snapped and I felt my feet falling I instinctively clasped my hands around the next branch. It scared me quite a bit as you can imagine. Scared my friend too since it almost fell on his head. I climbed down and that was the end of trees for the night. The next day we were right back at it though.
I’m including that story to highlight that I was absolutely thrilled about heights. It gave me an adrenaline rush to be high up on something and look down. I respected heights, I was careful. I would, however, do things that other people would have considered too risky. It didn’t bother me though, I was careful and it was fun.
And then I had this dream. Ever since this dream I’ve had a partial fear of heights. Nothing major like acrophobia or anything. And I still found heights thrilling, but I found them thrilling and scary now. One singular dream turned something I love into something I love and hate. Enough preamble, on to the dream.
In the dream Joey and I were climbing trees again. Which is odd since this happened in my late 20’s and I hand’t climbed trees since I was around 13. It didn’t seem odd of course, in the dream it was completely normal. We were climbing up this skinny tree and were around 30 feet up in the air. We couldn’t climb any higher on this tree, but we were right next to another tree that went higher.
The other tree wasn’t very far either. It was real close. We could easily jump from this tree to that one. So Joey jumps over. No problem, he gets his feet on a branch and grabs the trunk. He climbs around the tree to get out of my way so I can jump over too. So I gauge the distance, get my balance, pick my landing, and I jump. I easily clear the distance.
Unfortunately though, I cleared it too much. Instead of landing on the branch I hit face first against the trunk. This dazed me of course so I lost my balance and I fell. I fell straight down, not hitting a single branch. And I landed face first. Ouch.
At this point the dream shifts. Which I don’t think about because dreams do that. They’ll shift from first to third person and back again. It doesn’t mean anything. Usually it doesn’t mean anything. This time it did. I was looking down at my body and thinking “Huh, that doesn’t look too bad”.
Then my friend got to me and turned me over. My face had basically collapsed. I was clearly dead. This shocked me even in my dream. I was dead? How could I be dead? I’m right here! Except then I looked at my hands and noticed I could see through them. And at that point I started to float upwards…
I woke up, sweating and panting. Extremely frightened but not really understanding why. It was just a dream. Why would I be frightened because of a dream? I couldn’t put my finger on it, but it felt way more real than just a dream. And unlike most dreams I couldn’t just forget it either. I rarely remember my dreams for more than a few minutes on waking. Not this dream though. I can still remember seeing my own body being turned over and realizing I was dead.
So yes, you can die in dreams. It is a myth that if you die in your dreams you die in real life.
Whilst dreaming last night, I dreamt that I was shot. There was some kind of intruder and I pretended to be dead, laying on my stomach and face down with my hands over the back of my head, thinking they then wouldn’t shoot me.
I remember they came up to me, I felt their presence and basically accepted that I was getting shot and was going to die. I remember thinking, ‘Don’t worry, it’s quick and won’t hurt’.
They then shot me in the head. It felt like some parts of my body kind of switched off as they did it. They shot my hands, and suddenly my hands went numb. They then shot the final shot, and I lost all feeling of my body as everything went black.
I was stuck in this complete blackness (dream wise), knowing that I was dead.. but my real life body was was paralyzed. I couldn’t move anything, though a part of me knew I had to wake myself up to get out of this limbo. I could feel my muscles start to ache – the way they do when you haven’t moved in ages – but I couldn’t move my body.
I don’t know how long I was in this dream limbo, and how long my physical body was paralyzed.. but eventually I came to.
Most likely is that our true self is our soul which is eternal in nature and design. The body is mortal but our true self is eternal for we are made in this respect to be in the likeness of God who is eternal.
I am not a phycologist. I do not have great answers for this question, but it seems interesting enough.
I think that you wake up before you die in your dreams because you can’t dream of what dying would be. When you die, you don’t know what it would be like, because you physically can’t tell anyone, and when you’re alive, you can’t know what death would feel like, because you aren’t dead yet.
Sorry if that didn’t make sense. I tried.
The brain writes the dream and plays it out for you the way that it thinks stuff happens or knows it happens. but actual death is something we dont know and is hard to grasp so since we dont know what death is like you cant dream that your dead, which is why you wake up.
You don’t actually die in a dream, close enough is when you’re about to die (probably as a result of a danger).
No one can actually say I died this second in my dream, few seconds to the death are always not known
When you’re close to being dead in a dream, your heart either beats so fast you wake feeling your chest pounding or the pain about to cause your death (in the dream) wakes you.
There is a science behind this;
When you dream you’re in REM sleep (rapid eye movement). REM sleep is only slightly deeper than stage 1 of non-REM which means it’s not hard to wake up in the first place.
Dying in a dream is a stressful event, which causes your brain to release adrenaline. You can’t sleep and have an adrenaline rush at the same time so you wake up.
These dreams where you die and wake up are usually more memorable due to the fact that you wake up whereas most people don’t remember 95% of their dreams.
Being particularly scary or threatening, nightmares can provoke ‘fight and flight’ responses, and the release of adrenalin whilst we are still asleep.
When I was a teenager I had the dream. The one where I am being chased by a figure in a black robe who for some reason is absolutely terrifying. I would not be able to get away. Eventually I woke up still terrified.
The dream repeated night after night. Eventually in the dream I was fleeing in a jeep. The robed figure was chasing in a jeep. I drove up a road that climbed a very steep mountain. Every night I got further up the mountain.
Eventually I drove to the very top of the peak and had nowhere to go. I drove off the mountain. I had the sick feeling of falling and I woke up, in a sweat. The dream kept repeating night after night. I kept waking up with my heart pounding, terrified.
I had heard the folk theory that if you hit the bottom in your dream, you would die in real life. In real life, I was a very depressed teenager. Finally I decided that I could not face that dream night after night. I resolved not to wake up, to hit the bottom and face the consequences.
The next night, I hit the bottom. There was no pain, no shock. Suddenly I was simply floating in the air, looking at my mangled body maybe fifteen feet below me. What I felt was….relief. Peace. The fear, the terror were gone.
Unfortunately, the real life results of my dream death were not clear cut. The dream repeated for a week or two and I let myself die repeatedly and felt the wonderful peace and release from care.
I found in waking life I was not as fearful. The worst that could happen was death and I now viewed death positively. The deep depression lasted another thirty years. On the positive side, I now viewed my pain as finite. There would come a day when I died and the pain would be gone. It was not forever.
In the meantime I had married and had children. My wife’s mother had committed suicide when she was still a baby. It hurt her all her life that her mother did not love her enough to stay for her. I promised her I would not do that to our children.
I tried every therapy and drug available. Except electro shock. I was afraid of that. Nothing helped at all. The drugs did not relieve the symptoms at all and each had its own set of unfortunate side effects. I knew that the pain was ultimately finite. But I had promised not to end the pain myself. The depression got worse every day and I did not know how long it would last. I did not know how long I could keep my promise.
I started having nightly, with no exceptions, dreams that ended with me dying. After a month of that, I discovered that I was pregnant, and the first day of nightmares coincided with the calculated day of conception (of which I had no idea until I did a pregnancy test a month after the first nightmare).
The dying dreams continued for the entire duration of the first trimester and abruptly ended as soon as three months were over. I have no idea of any possible reasons for this uncanny coincidence. Yes, for the first trimester of my pregnancy, I died around 90 times without skipping a single night.
I drowned in quicksand. I fell from a great height. I was destroyed by acid. I was dissected by aliens. I was eaten by a carnivorous plant. I was stabbed. I drowned in flood waters. Was strangled. Died in a shootout. Got cut up by falling shards of glass. Et cetera, et cetera.
I always have very vivid dreams, full of color, sounds, sensations, smells, textures, very realistic. You can imagine the thrill of those ninety days…
I occasionally have other dying dreams, but that case is simply the most outstanding one.
By Amjad Izhar
Contact: amjad.izhar@gmail.com
https://amjadizhar.blog
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