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End-of-Life Dreams

commonwealmagazine.org

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Re: End-of-Life Dreams

#71

Post by virtualwhys »

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…

> Cover me in a blanket of sunshine

That's a truly wonderful, life affirming expression in the face of mortality.

Re: End-of-Life Dreams

#72

Post by LoganDark »

36933 wrote: post #11
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…

You can easily experience this yourself by doing grounding exercises in a lucid dream. “more real than real” is always the first thing that comes to mind.

"lucid dream" and "easily" don't mix for us. We've been trying for almost a decade with not a single actually-lucid dream. :(

We have only ever gotten close where, during a daydream, we managed to figure out that we could have been daydreaming, but past that, even our daydreams are completely non-lucid as well.

We suspect our autism is the culprit... but as for how to overcome it, we are at such a loss.

-Emily (our HN profile explains our signatures)

Re: End-of-Life Dreams

#73

Post by virtualwhys »

"I leave you, my dream"

These were apparently Ossho's parting words.

Hopefully if one has time to die (i.e. not suddenly) then such truths as in the article emerge before the end comes.

Re: End-of-Life Dreams

#74

Post by LoganDark »

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…

> the quality here is that most people have some kind of interior dialogue with themselves

Oh, yeah we definitely do. We usually only get one interior monologue per physical body though, of which we only have one. Bit weird how that works, but I suppose that's what was intended as DID wasn't exactly designed to happen.

(Sometimes we'll have a dialogue towards members who are cofronting, the funniest ones are "who had that thought I just saw? knock it off", lol.)

> I have often wondered if children who grow up multilingual consciously use more than one interior monologue language

What's funny is that we often narrate to ourselves things that we're thinking about, but if we stop trying to understand what we are thinking, it can evolve quite quickly into thinking in terms of abstract concepts with no associated voice or words.

It's probably an autistic thing that helps us form very complex thoughts at speed, but it's still very interesting because people describe conceptual thinking as being an effect of psychedelics like LSD and not something that you can trigger just by not narrating things to yourself internally.

Considering we can have a monologue in either English or nothing at all, despite not even being bilingual, I'm sure people who are bilingual can have one in any language that they know. Despite how proficient they are or aren't at any given language, they will always understand their own thoughts basically the same.

-Emily

Re: End-of-Life Dreams

#75

Post by NovaDudely »

drain wrote: post #45
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…

I have similarly experienced dreams (day dreams even) that seemingly predicted the future. Not discounting a possible spiritual phenomenon, but at least for me I reconciled these situations as being possible "memory falts". E.g. one time I knew exactly what a friend was going to say before they even said it (phrase was long and unique enough to seem unlikely for me to just be able to predict it). Although it seemed m…

One does have to wonder if it is a case of us reconstructing the timeline after the fact. What we think as being the way it happened and how it actually did could be very different. But when it feels so real it can be hard to dismiss.

Semi related. I remember see someones story about how they would talk to god when on LSD, so one day they figured, get a note pad, ask what the meaning of life is and then write it down to study the next day.

They did that and all they had written down was "Walls." It felt so profound at the time but was probably meaningless.

Re: End-of-Life Dreams

#76

Post by PinkMilkshake »

LoganDark wrote: post #58
ggm wrote: post #3

Since I have a rich interior dialogue with myselves "inside" it comes as no surprise that close to end-of-life minds come up with comforting thoughts to Shepard the close. Thats what your friends would do. If you are one of the smaller cohort without an interior dialogue, I suspect you will have the same outcome because even if unvoiced, I am confident you have more than one brain process at work. Not just the propri…

> 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

I don't really know how to go about asking this, so I'll just ask it. No disrespect intended. What do you mean when you say around eight? Are there like hidden or incomplete/developing selves?

Re: End-of-Life Dreams

#77

Post by amatecha »

drain wrote: post #45
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…

I have similarly experienced dreams (day dreams even) that seemingly predicted the future. Not discounting a possible spiritual phenomenon, but at least for me I reconciled these situations as being possible "memory falts". E.g. one time I knew exactly what a friend was going to say before they even said it (phrase was long and unique enough to seem unlikely for me to just be able to predict it). Although it seemed m…

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

Re: End-of-Life Dreams

#78

Post by jacooper »

Beautiful article, almost burst into tears reading it.

Even as a relatively young person, articles about death are scary, sad and peaceful, it's such a weird mix of emotions.

> there is one finding of Kerr’s research that is somewhat surprising. Almost none of his patients had a dream or vision that was explicitly religious.

I found this to be interesting, isn't one of the main pillars of religion the afterlife? I think the existence of these dreams and believing their possibility is deeply religious.

> I also can’t help wondering whether, when the time comes, I will find myself in Lisa’s presence again. If the research of Kerr and his colleagues is any guide, the answer is likely yes.

This end is absolutely heart breaking and yet peaceful and beautiful.

Re: End-of-Life Dreams

#79

Post by tandr »

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…

Thank you very much for sharing this. Without going much into details, you are not alone with this - there are people that have the same abilities. It is scary sometimes, and rarely can be used beforehand. Maybe you and these who has this experience often, are wired differently, and are more tuned to the Universe's radio than the rest of us...

Re: End-of-Life Dreams

#80

Post by amatecha »

nequo wrote: post #64
c4wrd wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a recommendation from someone who suffered this way too long, your way of thinking is why you only store the bad memories. I often thought “I’m just a negative person” and accepted it, but not until I decided to focus on my mental health did I realize I had to let this go. I’ve been happier each and every day since. It took almost a year or two of “fake it until you make it”, but once you’re on the other side of t…

What were the thinking patterns that you changed? What did you do to fake it in the beginning?

As someone who regularly receives comments like "I wish I thought more like you": literally don't even entertain thoughts that make you feel crappy. Don't give those anxious, negative trains of thought the time of day. Recognize "this is not actually conducive to experiencing a quality existence" and discard that crap. Dunno, that's putting it simply, but gives an idea of the kind of discipline it may take to "resist the temptation" to basically troll your own consciousness. Spiraling negative thoughts are quite self-reinforcing and require conscious effort to combat, in my experience. You could literally redirect to something more uplifting, pretend you're trying to pep-talk a friend, except it's in your own head. Instead of dwelling on "man I said the most awkward thing earlier, what an idiot, that was so bad", you remind yourself "that's irrelevant, people say awkward things every single day, it was probably forgotten within the hour, and in fact the person seemed to really enjoy the rest of the conversation".
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