Or we won’t learn any of the answers because we will cease to exist in any form; in which case we won’t care because we will cease to exist in any form… I’m not saying that is what happens when you die…but there is always the what if…
And in that case it seems scary but when you think of it…It wont matter because you wouldn’t have any thoughts or feelings… lol… let me know how you feel about this…wouldn’t it suck to not exist…but at the same time not suck…
There’s a movie about this. Including lucid dreaming. It’s called Waking Life and has got this awesome retroscopic (???) looking. Check it out.
That’s one reason to get good at LDing. To give yourself an afterlife of your own design.
Personally, I’m not really of any faith. I believe that we either just stop being or that somehow we can become reincarnated. I’ve never believed in an actual afterlife but having a lucid dream during death would be cool.
But, as your mind is slowing down to a complete shut down, wouldn’t you actually process data slower, so any dream you have wouldn’t even seem like ten minutes… although, again, if you’re actively usiong you’re brain (as in you are concious withing your dream) wouldn’t that prompt a fuller supply of oxygen to your brain allowing you to work at full capacity. And leading on from that, wouldn’t you be using all the left over oxygen to do so and thus be coming closer to your brains shut down more quickly.
I started rambling and I confused myself. I’m still debating whether or not you could make your dream longer or whether it would be a shorter dream because of the fact you’re dying. 
Those are good points 
I’m still quite skeptical about this kind of dream actually feeling very long. But then, i’m not an advanced lucid dreamer so i’m not sure how much is posssible. I read once that tests had shown the brain waves of people in dream sleep were very similar to those of people with amnesia.
Can anyone tell me what research this is? The only place I can find any mention of it is in Waking Life and LD4All.
im not usually the one to be putting down theorys but you dont dream for 90 min after you fall asleep
How do you know that you have not died already and things are getting progressively more and more unreal, until you attain lucidity and transition into a new body?
anyway
the Buddhists call the dreamlike state between births the bardo. if you can attain awareness that you have died, you can prevent any subsequent birth (which is what you absolutely want!) . The Tibetan Book of the Dead states that you can meditate in the bardo effortlessly, even if you don’t know how, in order to get back to the first bardo of pure light… all things in their unmanifested, pure form.
To stay there is to be enlightened… to not stay there is to harbor attachments to the physical, to the sensory.
it is basically like this: When you are dreaming, you can get sidetracked really easily away from your goals, and it can create a huge train of distractions til lucidity is lost.
well… when you are lucid, actually, you shouldn’t dream at all… you should do nothing other than do nothing… plop down and reconnect to the source.
this is immortality, especially if you happen to have died and are aware.
It is of utmost importance not to interact with the bardo at all… if you see people making love and join in, this is generally a way directly back into the womb, to be born again! There are clear signs for you to see what you will come back is.
if you are seeing terrifying things, this is not something to worry about, consider them as manifestations of God, and visualize a loved one with you, or a spiritual figure such as Christ… sincerely intend to return to the source and merge with it.
if you do come back to the living world, and stay away from source, it is imperative to do so absolutely objectively without bias or judgement, this way it is possible to select a favorable new life, where you will have many benefits and a good time.
partially, the Tibetan Book of the Dead seems intended for psychedelic usage, to take yourself through the ego-death journey so that you can rebirth yourself right here in this life, and it is suggested that you can choose one of many personalities, such as a brilliant thinker, a “warrior” , a “learner” and things like that (warrior in a good way, not like, a soldier or a fighter, just a strong will I think) but that you are not supposed to be biased, you are supposed to simply choose, based upon faith in the highest divine wisdom to lead you to a good life.
so I don’t know, if this applies outside of the psychedelic experience (though death is psychedelic, as is the dreamstate!) such as if you are really choosing a new body, how that works.
but it’s best to just be a passive observer, pray fervently for the best, and try to stay in source. if you feel like you don’t want to, or can’t stay in source, then go with love, and vibrate at the highest possible love for all of humanity, pray eagerly to God to help you into the best life possible, that you may work toward liberation.
erowid.org/library/books_onl … ence.shtml
Now.
Let’s get a bit… cooky here.
I remember what I was before this life. I can’t be sure of the validity of these memories, and if they are just my imagination… but I’ll tell you what I recall.
I recall a sense of schism between infant and me, as if I was observing infant and not inhabiting its body. However I feel this is sort of untrue, as I sort of feel like you are still “in” infants body, somehow… and experiencing what it does.
I recall somehow directing my consciousness to persist in utmost lucidity of the fact that I had just come from somewhere else, though I was still a baby.
I had this sensation before watching a home movie… however recently I saw this home movie of me as a fairly newborn, and my mother was telling me to say hi 
I tried! I tried to talk to them. You could see me moving my vocal chords but nothing would come out. It was as if I was well aware of exactly what was going on… but … goodness me I was just a little baby, the baby didn’t know how to talk yet.
my mom commented on the video saying it was like I wanted to talk already, but couldn’t.
now… before the body, I may remember the light, but it’s mainly just imagination. I seem to remember encountering two people and wanting to learn martial arts from them. They said they would teach me. I only remember this AFTER running into my tai chi course, and the two figures in it, so it could be imagination.
I seem to remember a sense of freedom, flight, and motion, and observance, as things came into fruition.
I seem to remember circumcision as being a terrible event for me, though this may be my negativity imagining the act… if this is a real memory, it was largely a symbolic and “psychedelic” suffering… sort as if the pain was seen in visual symbol, for my consciousness to react to.
i do not recall birth but… my imagination would like to say i was not “present” for it, perhaps a deity let me not have to go through it consciously… perhaps this involved Jesus? I am very hazy and sort of making this up…
now…
I lost my train of thought.
Okay. I remember the TV. The TV is a very psychedelic form of communication (sad to say being used for very bad things in this world, mainly, but good things too here and there, it depends on what you tune into) … I remember that I used to stare at it and I was in this vast purplish sea of communication, very trippy, just flowing along with it… it like bubbled out from the TV, and I was aware that “soon” I would have to stop using this ability… but I planted the need and want to go back to it…
as far as I know I have not retained an ability to go back to it… but I do feel that media is communicating TO me in very… direct ways… often times not good, but it’s just a reflection of my internal state, and sometimes has important messages for me.
umm.
well that’s about it really. i could say that i remember past lives, but not really, it’s like I imagine them, or access shared collective memory… I can’t point out something and say THAT WAS ME… more like I just see connections.
like i recall being a football announcer and being ready to purchase acid, but did this happen, or am I remembering someone else’s memories? Probably the latter…
because I “remember” being people who are alive right now, and feel a sense of “hmmm that’s familiar”.
but man oh man.
you just want to be free. don’t play around in the bardo, just work your best at being free, don’t be deceived by heavenly realms… either. you want eternal freedom, eternal life, eternal bliss, eternal salvatoin. don’t settle for less… to the Buddhists the heaven realms are only temporary stays.
to the Christians its another story. Jesus is probably more than trustable and could probably be reached out to during the DMT trip of death, acting as a shepherd to herald you into peace.
I hope so.
and finally i have no idea what I’m talking about, this could be all fiction, but it exists as “memory” blurred with “imagination” in my mind, and seems real enough.
So yeah, dreams can help you… I’m sure they can. work very hard while you’re awake to. manifest unconditional love even for your enemies as Jesus says, that way you will always be at peace no matter what… and will be moving upward towards divinity.
also consider that life could be a broader collective dream, and if you gain mastery of the understandings of it you may be able to manifest any kind of “life” you want in the present moment… with some restrictions sure… but… want a soulmate? tune into the desire and hold onto it with love… want a good home? do the same…
and don’t take me as authority. i’m just regurgitating information!
Connections that may not come from past lives, rather from the oneness of all people.
This is something everyone has to find out themselves. And if it is possible it would acually suck, knowing that after this dream you wont be alive on earth anymore.
That’s true. You will probably be so upset that you are leaving the people you love, you might even lose lucidity…
Its really weird… life, death… (I will have the first one, thank you!) 
actually there is a limit to what actions the brain can take in a given time , to emulate time of even one hour in 10 minute of a human dream you need a brain 6 times faster
the 100 year LD was probably a memmory and nothing else , unless of cource LDS are OBEs or related in which case immortality is not nessesry in that state
Someone’s been watching waking life. I think it’s been pretty well established that dream time and waking time is almost identical, even if it seems you dreamed a really long intricate in a minute, you probably didn’t. And even if you could have 100 year dream in 10 minutes, you’d still be dead in 10 minutes. Believing in Jesus is the safer bet.
You said it.
I don’t think it has been exactly Established that dreams ALWAYS follow clocktime. I have in fact only heard of one experiment on the subject. Yet I’ve heard of many people claiming to have had extended dreams. I wouldn’t call every one of them a liar or a fool. You may say it’s not really 100 years of “time” whatever that means. But if it really seems to the dreamer that it was, even if impossible, then the technicalities don’t matter. A dream is what it seems to be right?
I hate to be the one to bump an ancient thread, but you CAN have a bounded infinity, mathematically speaking. That is, there can be an infinite amount of numbers that is bounded on both sides. For example, there is an infinite amount of real numbers between 1 and 2.
As it pertains to lucid dreams in a finite time span, the number of “dream seconds†would have to be at the bsre minimum bounded by how many planck time lengths there are in ten minutes, so eternal immortality is not possible. Furthermore, it would have to be bounded by the minimum size of the electrical/other components of a thought, and in term bound by how long it would take a light beam to pass by one, multiplied by how many times this could occur in the space of the active brain and the time limit in the real world.
Pretty wordy, but basically living eternally in a lucid dream isn’t possible if dreams only occur in the physical mind, however, the actual limit to how long you can make the dream feel could be very long, depending upon how physical boundaries compare with what actually goes into the smallest unit of thought, whatever that is.
Fascinating:)
Tibetan Buddhists do actually practice lucid dreaming for this very reason. Once you become so advanced in lucid dreaming while alive, you learn how to move beyond all dream senses/scenes/emotions/what-have-you, and just experience being “the source”. The goal of these buddhist monks is to learn to recognize this state of being so that they can find it again when they die. I believe someone else already mentioned this earlier in the thread…
But my take on this whole topic is that it doesn’t really matter how long your brain lasts after you die. These discussions are all following the assumption that the brain is the power source of your consciousness, and that once your brain dies, your consciousness dies.
I think its the other way around. Your consciousness inhabits your body and mind, but is not powered by them. The brain may be amazing, and may be responsible for the vast majority of what we experience in this lifetime–sight, touch, logic–but awareness, existence… I don’t think any organ can claim ownership over that, even one as complex as the brain. No, the brain is the vehicle for our awareness/soul/existence/etc to experience the world as a separate entity. When the brain stops functioning, we return to the source of our awareness (which is everything), or we begin another life.
So, when the brain dies, when the body is no longer able to sustain adequate blood flow the keep the organ functioning, then our awareness leaves. The brain can no longer provide that unique perspective on life for which our awareness sought it out, and therefore it moves on. But we don’t “remember” our awareness from after the brain/body dies, because we no longer have a brain to store memory… doesn’t mean we didn’t exist in that moment though.
In summary, as the brain dies, I believe we do enter a lucid dream of sorts, and it carries us away onto whatever comes next for us, and can continue for infinity, because it is no longer bounded by a time limit, i.e., the terminal moments of the brain.
Sort of turns it into a bit of a religious/belief topic… not my intention
It’s natural for this to become a belief-based topic, I don’t think you need to worry. For it to be a material science topic, we’d need to understand the relationship between consciousness and brain activity so well that we could predict one from the state of the other. Meanwhile, our medical science doesn’t even know how anaesthetic works! Only that it works.
I offer my thoughts from a Catholic perspective; it would interesting to hear others.
We often pray for a good death, and a death we can prepare for. We say, “from an unprovided death, deliver us, O Lord,” or “Lord, let me know mine end, and the number of my days.” To confess all our sins, to be absolved, make our peace with men and with God, is a great good fortune for us in our last days. If we live in a good and holy way, we can enjoy each hour, not only the final one, in just such a vigilant and hopeful state: so that if we’re knocked down by a bus, we needn’t feel anxious or regretful - “live each day as if it were your last”, even the pagans used to say.
Our bodies and the world we can sense around us are a great communication to us from God: a love letter, if you like. Just think how many times in your life you’ve turned inward, chewing over some nasty thing someone’s said, combing over an embarrassing experience, kicking yourself. How may times you’ve been in a sulk - when, suddenly, you hear someone make a joke and you laugh in spite of yourself. Or you say “I need some air,” and as you grumble along your walk, you see a breathtaking view and forget all your anger. The world outside us has this great power of taking us out of ourselves, helping us see things in perspective. Our Father tickles us when we’re trying to be serious and upset, just as our human fathers did, and we giggle in spite of ourselves. What a mercy!
This total forgetfulness of ourselves - which we experience in our best moments, the moments we want to last forever (who knows what his own arms are doing when he’s gazing at a star?) - is part of Heaven. We’re not thinking of us, we’re thinking of the thing we love. Total absorption in ourselves, dwelling on our wrongs and hates, feeling that no one understands, these are part of Hell. We send ourselves there willingly, closing off to every generous and open impulse, because we’d rather be right than be happy! “Just leave me alone, I don’t want to cheer up.” And so we collapse inwards. God is very understanding. If we don’t want to be happy, he won’'t force us.
This is my concern with “immortality” through a dying dream. Imagine you die in your bed, with your family all around you, having said goodbye to all and being pardoned by the priest. You are ready to go, in the perfect state of mind: a well-provided death. But what if another hundred years intervene? A hundred years trapped in your own mind, with nothing but your own prejudices, passions, psychoses to keep you company? There will be no friend sent by Heaven, to bring you back to earth. No landscapes to awe your grumbling into silence. You have your own full attention, for as long as you like. You say, “you know what gets my goat?”, and your dream says, “yes, I do. I really do. Let me show you it again.” And so you finally slip away, not in that state of beautiful resignation and readiness in which your family last saw you, but driven mad by centuries of solitary confinement, gnawing morbidly on your own preoccupations. Not the best way to enter into our eternal state; and a sudden death might be even worse, as we are overwhelmed by the pains we’ve just suffered, the robbing of our future, all our regrets and unrealized hopes. Better that we have no time to think.
The immortals are admirable not only because they live forever, but because, as the word tells us, they are strictly free from mortality, free from mortal things. Pain, anger, evil impulses, revenge, all the rest of it: these are very mortal things. They have the taste of death, because they end in the annihilation of our vitality, our liveliness. Your dreams are part of you. They cannot free you from your own weakness. So long as you are mortal, your dreams will be too - they will belong to the landscape and the country of death, the same as all our life on earth.
Who would want to tarry within that country, war-torn between Heaven and Hell, covered with trenches and barbed wire, where our own good resolutions are undermined at every turn, when the other country is waiting, the Fair Country, thick with winged and fiery creatures, all blue like distant hills, but close enough to touch? The country where the present meets eternity, where the whole world of perishability and uncertainty will be laid out in front of us, as if we flew out of some Tudor maze and saw from above that what seemed on earth to be endless, tortuous and blind, alley after alley, was really part of some unthought, unheard of pattern of glorious comeliness and intricacy? For that is what our linear time looks like, standing in God’s eternal Now.
And who could wish to dive deeper into their own dreams, to be lonely and grow old, when the King and Bridegroom of our souls is hurrying to meet us, with peace shining in His face, His five dear wounds smelling sweetly of life and life-giving water? There is an ache in us - when we think of distant, unreachable mountains, or wide oceans, or happy times long ago, laughing family around a forgotten table - which can never be healed, which will make us restless forever until we rest in Him: the final, absolute Other, totally real, totally outside ourselves and our imagination, into Whom our souls, with all their odd, angular and rough parts, will fit as a key fits into a lock. With Him, at last, we will no longer be strangers in our own hearts, in our own homes, but we will find our place. You will be more comforted there than in your own best dreams.
And Heaven is better; infinitely better than this and infinitely better than any mortal words can tell or mortal hearts can know.
I have dreamed many times and many things. I have seen family and beloved friends die, sometimes after long suffering; and I trust that when the time comes for me, I’ll not wait around for a second. I’ll want to go home.
We can never know whether this is successful because the only people who will do this experiment will die before awakening from it.
i just had a thought. i know and have heard the brain remains active for 10mins or so after death. but what i do not know is this. do we actually enter rem during the death process? i dunno just a thought i had