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When you die in your sleep you really die

M

Mighty_Emperor

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So I had this dream last night:

I'm in the passenger seat of a van or SUV type vehicle being driven down the motorway by my Dad. Everything is going swimmingly for a bit but then he starts saying weird stuff that made no sense (no idea what it was now - think it might have had something to do with the Devil) and he started looking all wide eyed and crazy. Up ahead part of the road had been coned off and he just drove straight at it, the van tips onto its side and continues sliding along. All of a sudden I get this roaring sound in my ears and I look down at my hands and everything has slowed down and oddly its like the contrast and brightness are changing as everything was looking really black except my hands which were looking whiter and whiter and getting weirdly bright.

And then I woke up.

It led me to wondering about the UL that if you die in your sleep you really die.

Now I wonder how you can possibly test this ;)

I have some resources on this and will dig them out and post them in a mo.
 
Some research:

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Parmar, M.S. & Luque-Coqui, A.F. (1998) Killer dreams. Canadian Journal of Cardiology. 14 (11). 1389 - 91.


Emotional stress is a recognized trigger for coronary artery spasm. An association between dreams and sudden death is described in folklore and medical history, and originates from the common experience of being awakened by vivid, frightening dreams, with racing pulse, cold sweats and other physiological responses associated with intense distress. Intense alterations in autonomic activity during dreaming can have dire consequences in patients with cardiovascular disease. Four patients with no evidence of underlying coronary artery disease, where emotional stress produced by nightmares or 'deadly dreams' caused coronary artery dissection in two and vasospasm in the other two, leading to life-threatening cardiac events, are presented. A possible mechanism is speculated.
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http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://pha ... darc7.html

That link also contains some discussion between cardiologists and other relevant people on the topic at hand.

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Richard L Verrier, James E. Muller & J. Allan Hobson (1996) Sleep, dreams, and sudden death: The case for sleep as an autonomic stress test for the heart. Cardiovascular Research. 31 (2). 181 - 211.

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Adler, S.R. (1991) Sudden Unexpected Nocturnal Death Syndrome among Hmong Immigrants: Examining the Role of the 'Nightmare'. Journal of American Folklore. 104 (1). 54 - 71.
 
I have some resources on this and will dig them out and post them in a mo.
Click to expand...

I read that as dig them up and thought, for a moment, that the spirit of enquiry had been taken to it's logical conclusion.
 
So you could be awoken by a frightening dream, think "Phew! It was only a nightmare", then drop dead of a heart attack? The grim reaper would be well and truly taking the mick with that approach, wouldn't he..?
 
Whistling Jack said:
So you could be awoken by a frightening dream, think "Phew! It was only a nightmare", then drop dead of a heart attack? The grim reaper would be well and truly taking the mick with that approach, wouldn't he..?
Click to expand...

It is the ultimate (and distinctly final) irony.

Its like Death is standing there waiting for you to wake and going "You think its all over? It is now."
 
I dreamt that I died once. There was nothing dramatic about it, though. In my dream, I was an old man lying out on the lawn looking up at the Summer sky. I suddenly felt very weak and realised that I wasn't going to be able to get up. Ever. "Oh well, this isn't such a bad way to go, I suppose," I thought. Then everything went black.

I regained consciousness in the afterlife. The afterlife looked very much like an airport check-in area. There were long lines of people queueing up to see smartly dressed men who sat behind desks tapping away on computers. I instincively knew what was going on. All the people here were going to be reincarnated back on Earth, and were waiting to be told who they would be in the next life.

I joined one of the queues. As I waited I looked around and noticed that there were a lot of black labradors wandering about rather aimlessly.

"What's with the Labradors?" I asked the person next in line to me.
"Oh, they were Vicars," he replied. "They always get reincarnated as dogs!"

Eventually I reached the head of the queue and sat down at the desk. The clerk gave me an appraising look and tapped away at his computer. I was about to find out what was in store for me in my next life.

Then I woke up.
 
When we close our eyes and slip into unconsciousness, we might as well be dead. For all we know.

Perhaps, dreams are a heads up to the fact that non-being might not be quite as straightforward as we'd like to think?
 
I can only recall one really horrifying death-dream. It was in the Eighties, when there was heightened anxiety about the cold-war turning hot.

I dreamed I was in my bedroom and was awaiting the impact of the mutually-assured destruction we had been promised. There was a bright light at the window and I fell to the floor. My face was on the dusty patterned carpet as it began to burn. My last thought was to wonder if the smell of burning hair was the carpet or me. Then the sensation of the marrow boiling in my backbone.

It was memorably nasty and made me resolve to vacuum the carpet a bit more often. :eek!!!!:
 
I always thought this was a weird claim. If somebody really DID die in real life at the same time they died in their dream... Then how do we know they dreamed about dying? :?

I've never died in my dreams, but my girlfriend claims that she dies all the time in hers. But instead of waking up just BEFORE she dies in the dream, she wakes up just AFTER.
 
I've died in my dreams before, but possibly because I'm a bit of a gaming geek, I tend to respawn and play out the whole scenario again, dying once again and then respawning. I think that's how you know that you play too many video games ;)
 
Like everyone else I also have died in my dreams, from everything from falling out of a plane to alien invasion in greek temple by paper plane, ( no you really don't wanna know), and I am still alive, so I guess that is one urban myth that is debunked.
Now how about the related one that Freddy krueger is based on a story from a small town newspaper about teens afraid to go to sleep and then dying in their sleep.
 
Shit the bed. I suffer from a lot of horrible nightmares, that more often than not result in me waking up in a cold sweat at the dead of night. I can't honestly remember if I've ever been killed in my dreams, but I tend to wake up with a start in a truly horrified state sometimes.

Let's hope the old ticker keeps me going then......! :shock:
 
I'm a prolific dreamer and have dreamt that I've died many times.

(Most of them came at the same time, before I was due to move city and job, don't know if that's related.)

I jumped from a window when depressed and died from an overdose (in my dreams, in real life I'm not so stupid) amogst other things. I was me and then when I died I was nothing and could see my body, I felt very serene.

I was also told by someone that if you fall or crash in a dream that you also die, which is rubbish, I often fall or trip in a dream which always wakes me up.
 
I've always assumed this to be bollocks because I always wake up - but perhaps a point is, I always wake up just before the point of death.
Maybe I would die if I stayed asleep a few more seconds :eek:

I read it not as a heart attack idea but more that your soul/mind dies, so youyr body does.
 
My friend told me about a dream he had the other week in which he died, only waking up a few seconds later. And he isn't dead.
 
Some people seem to say that they wake up a moment before dying.. others saying that they have some experience of the afterlife in their dreams.. I wonder if people's dreaming experience corresponds with their own personal beliefs?

For instance, would someone who is undecided about what they feel happens after death maybe be more likely to wake up before dying in their dreams? or perhaps the dream just ends at that point because of a feeling of the "unknown"?

In my personal experience I have had a few dreams where I have died; one, when I was a child, and had vague notions of heaven, I dreamed that I started rising up to the sky and was looking down on myself.

In later years, since I have decided I have no firm convictions about such matters, when I have died in my dreams there has been.. nothing...until the next dream.

More interesting perhaps would be people having dream-death experiences that contradict their belief system...
 
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