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End-of-Life Dreams

commonwealmagazine.org

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Re: End-of-Life Dreams

#151

Post by francasso »

zabzonk wrote: post #9
hughw wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You experienced something different from these cases: "These dreams are distinguished from regular dreams by being especially vivid. When asked to rate the degree of realism of such dreams, most rate them ten out of ten—the highest degree of realism. Patients often report that they are “more real than real.” They occur both during periods of sleep and periods of wakefulness, and they are easily distinguished from hal…

> they are easily distinguished from hallucinations or bouts of delirium how so?

My interpretation, and assuming they are like lucid dreams or out of body experiences in quality: you retain your normal waking consciousness, the environment changes but your emotional and rational capability of processing events doesn't.

Re: End-of-Life Dreams

#152

Post by ly3xqhl8g9 »

mejutoco wrote: post #147
ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a funny way, by dusty metaphysics I actually meant the great Swiss philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. In Genealogy of Morals he has quotes such as "Science is not nearly independent…, in every respect it first needs a value-ideal, value-creating power, in whose service it can believe in itself,—science itself never creates values." [1] using the word wissenschaft for science, knowledge-making, translating literally…

Thanks for the detailed response. I will try my best to answer. > science itself never creates values I did not say I agree with Everything Nietzsche says. I disagree on that one. > The point was that we are already beyond any dreams Nietzsche could have imagined, the dichotomy religion/science was merely a cultural artefact of the Enlightenment. Hence the replacement you mention is not even an issue. Why are we alre…

On Nietzsche's dreams, I guess ibuprofen comes to mind (discovered in 1961 by Stewart Adams and John Nicholson). How many of his headaches would have been easily relieved with just a pill. Chemistry was the fundamentally transformative science of the first part of the 20th century, Better Living Through Chemistry [1] and all that.

And Nietzsche knew that chemistry was the future, it was in the air. "In a letter of January 1869 to his close friend Erwin Rohde, Nietzsche, reflecting wryly on the vicissitudes of fate, breaks the news that has just intervened to dash their common 'dreams of a Parisian future': 'just last week I was going to write to you and suggest that we study chemistry together, that we throw philology where it belongs, among the household effects of our forefathers'" [2] However, he doesn't pursue chemistry, "In commenting on this same episode of 1869, Mittasch muses: what if Nietzsche had carried out his plan and begun studying chemistry, for instance with O.L. Erdmann and H. Kolbe in Leipzig: would we be counting him nowadays among our great German chemists?" [2], as we know, he falls back into philology and publishes The Birth of Tragedy in 1872. Incidentally, in 1869, apparently in one day, February 17, Dmitri Mendeleev conceived the first periodic table of the elements [3]. No one could have guessed the power that lies in those scribbles, and that's the point: if Nietzsche could have dreamed all the polymers and drugs of today he would have forgotten Greek and Latin.

Yes, in physics, plenty of "low hanging fruits" such as general relativity or black-body radiation have been picked early. The incompleteness theorems have crushed the mathematical optimism for only 5 years, from 1931 to 1936, when Turing showed that even without an algorithm to solve the halting problem, you can still build an computer, as we are well aware.

Hopefully not even 150 years to cure all illnesses, I'm hoping for 50 because, you know, the clock is ticking. The source for this hope is the work that is being done in regenerative medicine and in programmatic tissue control [4].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Living_Through_Chemistr...

[2] Nietzsche’s Conceptual Chemistry, by Duncan Large in Nietzsche and Science, p. 190, https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/97813152479...

[3] https://www.asbmb.org/getattachment/f3f8ab0a-4766-42d2-8a47-...

[4] Regeneration, Intelligence in Life & Memory - Dr Michael Levin, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Bwq1oOST7w

Re: End-of-Life Dreams

#153

Post by mistermann »

pazimzadeh wrote: post #35
zw123456 wrote: post #14

I am an atheist, a science-based person, but I have been in the presence of someone passing a couple of times. I can tell you that, I do not care how science based you are, there is something about this experience that you simply cannot dismiss. I was with a person who I loved deeply, the details are, personal and I am going to skip over. But when she passed... Her breathing moved from the rattle to just a quiet rhyt…

The phenomenon described in the article does not require any non-naturalistic explanations. This is pretty much the role that people ascribe to DMT all the time, which is supposedly secreted during our final moments. I was in the presence of my mother during her final night and it was the most harrowing and traumatic experience I've ever had. It was obvious that she was in pain towards the end, but interestingly over…

> The phenomenon described in the article does not require any non-naturalistic explanations.

That would depend on:

- the true metaphysical nature of reality, which is not known (though it typically seems otherwise, human consciousness & culture, 2023, being what it is)

- whether you want your explanation to be consistent with the true nature of metaphysical reality

Re: End-of-Life Dreams

#154

Post by alchemist1e9 »

tomohelix wrote: post #30
UncleOxidant wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yet I believe this article. Because even I had a spiritual experience too real for me to discredit or brush aside, I've had dreams about things that happened prior to them happening too many times for me to discredit this. For example: Early on the morning of 9/11/01 I had a dream that I was in some kind of large, room-sized elevator (probably some kind of service elevator) in a very tall building. Suddenly the ele…

Yeah, me too. Many of us have had dreams that were strangely prophetic, powerful, or both. I often try to think of it as the subconsciousness of the pattern matching brain managing to piece together something that the waking mind missed or too busy or afraid to dig deeper into. But of course, it cannot explain everything. Like you said, there are sometimes dreams preceding events that simply can't be expected or expl…

I can relate somewhat to your comments. I suggest you may be describing what is called Synchronicity by Jung.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity

Re: End-of-Life Dreams

#155

Post by demomi »

spirit557 wrote: post #93
monero-xmr wrote: post #13

One reason I love mystery so much, is that rooted in the human experience is the ultimate mystery, one we will all get to know for sure - what happens when you die. Even if we extend life by thousands of years with technology, eventually we will all experience this mystery. What happens upon death is unprovable, and one of faith or logic or whatever. It’s really about gut feeling. But we will all find out, one day.

I have pondered this too and lately I think a certain way about it. It may not really answer the question but I dunno. You say "But we will all find out, one day." I think... maybe we already know? Before I was born, I did not exist. When I die, I will again no longer exist. If Earth is ~4.5 billion years old, what was it like waiting for all the things to happen before I could be born to crawl upon its surface with…

It's as if we never experienced those ~4B years. Or the ~13B years for the supposed age of the universe. Neither do we experience the ~8 hours of unconsciousness we have every night. We only know how much time has passed based on memory of previous sleeps, how groggy we feel, and how sunny it is behind the curtain.

The status quo belief today seems to be as you said: the nothingness that awaits us after death is also what came before our birth. But what came after the supposed nothingness of pre-birth was your birth, so why wouldn't there be another birthing which becomes you after the nothingness that comes after your death? To believe otherwise is tending towards solipsism. It would be thinking there is something special about "you" and why "you" were born into and inhabit "your" particular region of spacetime. When our feeling of personal identity, the feeling of "you"ness is really mostly an illusion of memory.

Imagine what it was like to be patient HM, with your memory being wiped every ~30 seconds. But imagine even further that you had no long term memories at all. It would be almost as if you were being reborn every time you have a memory lapse.

Re: End-of-Life Dreams

#156

Post by globular-toast »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #24
tomohelix wrote: post #21

I am as irreverent as you can probably get, in fact, if I have to say what I really think about religions in general, I am probably a blasphemer in every sense of the word. Yet I believe this article. Because even I had a spiritual experience too real for me to discredit or brush aside, and I meant it not just mentally but physically too. It didn't completely change my views about religions, but it did soften my stan…

> Yet I believe this article. Because even I had a spiritual experience too real for me to discredit or brush aside, I've had dreams about things that happened prior to them happening too many times for me to discredit this. For example: Early on the morning of 9/11/01 I had a dream that I was in some kind of large, room-sized elevator (probably some kind of service elevator) in a very tall building. Suddenly the ele…

The lift dream seems to be a common recurring dream, like no trousers or teeth falling out dreams. I've had it many times. It usually centres around a skyscraper and a lift shaft and the lift going higher or lower than it is supposed to.

My dreams have never coincided with any real-world events that I'm aware of. My dad has several stories about his dreams "coming true", though. I don't completely write it off as nonsense, but I do suspect there's a strong element of confirmation bias, some embellishment and the "broken clock being right twice a day" effect.

I find common recurring dreams really fascinating. I can understand the teeth falling out one as losing your teeth is a primal fear: you lose your teeth, you die. But no trousers, skyscrapers, lifts, school etc. are all learned cultural things and I wonder why so many people seem to place the same significance on them.

Re: End-of-Life Dreams

#157

Post by sethammons »

andrepd wrote: post #145
amatecha wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, one time I was startled by a phone ringing full seconds before it actually rang. The person I was around was startled by me reacting to it, because "nothing was happening", then the phone rang. Unless we both simultaneously falsely constructed that memory :) lol

You live for 700,000 hours. There's bound to be plenty of weird coincidences during your lifetime. You're not a psychic.

Human perception is not fully accounted for. My speakers used to crackle right before my cell would ring. Could be something like that. Just because you can't imagine that someone's account as being real doesn't make it not so.

Re: End-of-Life Dreams

#158

Post by gspencley »

> I have spent a lot of time since my wife’s death trying to make sense of this paradox. In the high-tech, evidence-driven world of contemporary medicine, it was a dream that led a physician to conclude that my wife was dying. How was that possible?

Here's a sobering hypothesis: it is not unheard of for nurses and physicians to be murderers and to target their patients. I'm not accusing anyone of anything, but this claim is choosing to trust a physician who is alleging that patient-reported dreams are a predictor of death.

I call bullshit.

My wife has been helping her father care for her 104 year-old grandfather. He lost his wife, my wife's grandmother, several years ago. He has dreams and hallucinations about his late wife on a routine basis ... and we're starting to think he's never going to pass.

So if my doctor told me that my wife has less than 24 hours to live, based a dream that she reported, and then it actually happened... I think I would demand an autopsy to confirm it was the cancer. Could have been coincidence, maybe the physician was telling the truth ... but call me skeptical.

Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence.

Re: End-of-Life Dreams

#159

Post by michaelsbradley » 

   Márgarét, áre you gríeving
   Over Goldengrove unleaving?
   Leáves like the things of man, you
   With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
   Ah! ás the heart grows older
   It will come to such sights colder
   By and by, nor spare a sigh
   Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
   And yet you wíll weep and know why.
   Now no matter, child, the name:
   Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
   Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
   What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
   It ís the blight man was born for,
   It is Margaret you mourn for.
– Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1880

Re: End-of-Life Dreams

#160

Post by dctoedt »

elzbardico wrote: post #50
pazimzadeh wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I'm just confused why so many people are pre-facing their comments with some version of "I'm a life-long atheist but I can relate to this story somehow" as if there is a discrepancy between atheism and the article. For the record, I think strong atheism, or the confidence that there is no god or after-life, is just as wrong as being confident that there is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_and_positive_…

Oh, thanks for that! As an atheist I always wondered what annoyed me so much in other more vocal and militant atheists. I'd love to believe in God, a superior power, benevolent aliens, re-incarnation, anything! The problem is that I just can't, no matter how much I try.

> I'd love to believe in God, a superior power, benevolent aliens, re-incarnation, anything! The problem is that I just can't, no matter how much I try.

I hope people here don't get tired of my self-cite about how I came around to a sort of agnosto-theism: https://www.questioningchristian.org/2005/05/why_i_call_myse...

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