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End-of-Life Dreams

commonwealmagazine.org

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Re: End-of-Life Dreams

#111

Post by hhjinks »

ggm wrote: post #70
LoganDark wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Since I have a rich interior dialogue with myselves "inside" Interesting~! We are a DID system that contains around 8 people but we don't have a very rich internal dialogue between ourselves despite the fact that we're capable of trying if we focus. What is this like for you? How rich is 'rich'? -Emily

Not that rich. It's usually a two-person dialogue. But the quality here is that most people have some kind of interior dialogue with themselves. Most? Above 50%. I think well above, the web disagrees. If it's couched by most people as an interior monologue rather than dialogue, I think it stands as a distinct state which argues at a minimum 2 participants (the one listening, unvoiced?) Sometimes mine is in schoolboy…

Learned English from age 6. I use English more than my mother tongue these days, but mostly in written form. I use both languages in my internal monologue. Sometimes, when deliberating something for example, I may also have a wordless and languageless inner monologue. It's difficult to describe.

Re: End-of-Life Dreams

#112

Post by Kaizeras »

asdfman123 wrote: post #12

People have a lot of good intuitions about how they’re doing. They know what being sleepy feels like, they know when they’re angry, and a number of other things. Seems like knowing when you’re going to die might be evolutionarily useful to the rest of the tribe, and it might seem normal if we somehow died multiple times in a year.

Cats (and perhaps other mammals/animals with complex nervous systems) have the tendency to „disappear“ a few days before they die.

I lived in the countryside as a kid and saw several generations of our farm cats come & go. We never found out where and when they died, but all of them lived a long (cat) life and I‘m pretty sure most of them died of old age.

My assumption is that humans can feel that their time is coming as well, and apparently the experience seems to be similar for all of us.

Re: End-of-Life Dreams

#113

Post by ly3xqhl8g9 »

mejutoco wrote: post #109
ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is nothing. It is always nothing. The "spiritual", the "religion" is always about hiding the politics in the mystery. We didn't know we were on a planet and we believed meretricious speculators rambling on and on about the "genesis" of the sun, the moon, and the earth. We didn't know why and how were there so many kinds of animals around us and we listened to stories. Nowadays we don't know how the brain encodes m…

> Give it 150 more years and all the current "mysteries" will appear more or less ridiculous. My bet is in 150 years we will have even more questions, and maybe one or two solved ones. Let’s look at history. If you were blind 500 years ago there was no cure. If you are blind now, while the life conditions might be better (guide dog, support from organizations) there is still no cure. We really do not know much. Scien…

There is no cure for blindness? What kind of blindness? Even a popular entertainer made news when curing 1,000 cataracts with a today's standard procedure. How would cataracts be cured 500 years ago? Bloodletting? Very soon (10 years, 20, maybe more) we will be able to restore full eyesight, even regrow eyes [1], and beyond.

But sure, cling to dusty metaphysics while sending messages at light speed across the entire planet with a detour in Low Earth Orbit using materials which were invented 116 years ago [2], it's your privilege.

[1] "Researchers restore lost sight in mice, offering clues to reversing aging. But many hurdles remain before approach can be tried in people", https://www.science.org/content/article/researchers-restore-...

[2] "In 1907 Leo Baekeland invented Bakelite, the first fully synthetic plastic, meaning it contained no molecules found in nature.", https://www.sciencehistory.org/the-history-and-future-of-pla....

Re: End-of-Life Dreams

#114

Post by Jataman606 »

clnq wrote: post #33

Whatever is happening, it is sad to hear about yet another case where doctors are too arrogant to listen to their patients and try to understand. It might not be a spiritual experience, it might be delirium. But perhaps it is important step in the human mind making peace with death. And it disappoints me greatly that the medical community shuns this phenomenon and anyone who tries to research it. There is nothing wor…

Would you like to make bonds with people that will soon die over and over again? I think many people misunderstand the kind of stress and mental strain that many doctors are subjected to regularly. Ironically, people who call for doctors to be more empathetic, often lack empathy themselves.

Also medicine is very broad field, it's probably hard to stay up to date in every new study. Especially that academic research is filled with less than ideal studies, so not only you need to read and understand them properly, you also need to make sure that source is trustworthy.

Re: End-of-Life Dreams

#115

Post by retSava »

When my dad died, he spent the last week or so in the hospital at the palliative care unit (where the primary concern is to ease suffering and not extend life, for those fatally ill). When I arrived I was given a small booklet called something like "At the end of life" which in a very matter-of-fact went through how life ends. It described how the body works, what gives in first and last, what often happens at the moment of death (eg agonal breathing). It based this on medical facts and experience, not religion or beliefs.

I found it to be a great support during those days. Leaving out beliefs and religion and focusing on the medical/biological, and to-the-point made it easier to accept. There is likely something like this booklet in every language for those that search for it.

Re: End-of-Life Dreams

#117

Post by LT_SPA »

wishfish wrote: post #10

When my father died, he had a waking dream of this. Saw a river with all his dead family across the water. Smiling and waving. Coming to the banks. Waiting for him to cross. His last words were “Cover me in a blanket of sunshine.” He died two hours later. What’s a little remarkable to me is that he had these visions in this detail despite being lifelong blind. As I was reading the article, I kept wondering which came…

> If this is universally true, then the religious beliefs about death & heaven are shaped in part by the dreams and not vice versa.

However, it seems not explained why we will have this kind of dream.

Re: End-of-Life Dreams

#118

Post by d3ckard »

cjohnson318 wrote: post #65
Jeff_Brown wrote: post #47

I have an aggressive cerebral garbage collector. I've forgotten all the dreams, visions and miraculous experiences that I thought were personality- and/or life-changing at the time. I've come close to dying a couple times and that's literally all I can say about it. At some point I concluded that the question of an afterlife is irrelevant. Spirit or no spirit, I want to live this life well. If there's something good…

> I concluded that the question of an afterlife is irrelevant... If there's something good on the other side of death, great... I agree, I think you just cease to be, and that's it. Frankly, I find that terrifying; I'm not sang-froid about it at all. I totally see why people come up with buy into the idea of an afterlife.

Quite the opposite here. I was raised catholic and as a child nothing scared me more than concept of eternal life. I am much more comfortable as an atheist, just assuming that game over means game over. Dying and being hurt is still scary, but death itself? Hopefully it comes when I am old, but I am getting ready to embrace it when time comes.

Re: End-of-Life Dreams

#119

Post by ly3xqhl8g9 »

TriNetra wrote: post #110
ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is nothing. It is always nothing. The "spiritual", the "religion" is always about hiding the politics in the mystery. We didn't know we were on a planet and we believed meretricious speculators rambling on and on about the "genesis" of the sun, the moon, and the earth. We didn't know why and how were there so many kinds of animals around us and we listened to stories. Nowadays we don't know how the brain encodes m…

Having done 8+ years of regular meditation, after getting inspired partly by an HN post [0], I can say with certainty that we're more than the body. I live with constant sensations, which are profound when I meditate. Building up from the bottom of the spine, where the kundalini is said to be sleeping in yogic scriptures for most folks. 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6910041

Having seen my arm split in two, being unable to move it for a year, and slowly and painfully starting to regain control over it, I can say with certainty that we're less than the body, that we are some "strange loop", an information processing algorithm, shaped by memories, which is most probably substrate-independent, but for now stuck in the body of a tailless primate. Funnily enough, in my wounded arm I also have constant sensations and even today, although less pronounced, when I move it, I feel more like I am controlling a robotic arm through a joystick rather than something which "is" me or mine.

Re: End-of-Life Dreams

#120

Post by asdfman123 »

Kaizeras wrote: post #112
asdfman123 wrote: post #12

People have a lot of good intuitions about how they’re doing. They know what being sleepy feels like, they know when they’re angry, and a number of other things. Seems like knowing when you’re going to die might be evolutionarily useful to the rest of the tribe, and it might seem normal if we somehow died multiple times in a year.

Cats (and perhaps other mammals/animals with complex nervous systems) have the tendency to „disappear“ a few days before they die. I lived in the countryside as a kid and saw several generations of our farm cats come & go. We never found out where and when they died, but all of them lived a long (cat) life and I‘m pretty sure most of them died of old age. My assumption is that humans can feel that their time is comin…

I’ve always wondered if that was a last ditch effort to survive: hide so that no one can attack you while you’re weak.
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