Thread: Choosing the 'wake up'?

I was sleeping and dreaming. I knew this while I was dreaming. A murderer was trying to kill me, everytime he tried I ran away. I wanted to wake up, and thought If I let him kill me maybe I'll wake up. He killed me, and I woke up.
Why?

There's two possibilities in that case. First, if you knew you were in a dream, or in a "lucid" state, you could have just willed to wake up, and you would. But, by associating waking up with being killed, you fulfilled that and since you expected it to happen, it did. Just like how if you try superpowers in a dream, they will work like you expect they would. Also, a different possibility would be that after you died, your brain knew that there would be nothing else to dream about, and you simply woke up.

It happens in normal dreams, too, or in nightmares. Maybe we can't imagine what happens after death, or we become too stressed and excited so we wake up.

Originally Posted by Arutad

Maybe we can't imagine what happens after death

I think that's it. The concept of what happens after death is too unclear.

I think it's common to wake up when something you have never experienced is supposed to happen.

For example at first in lucid dreams I couldn't really "fly" (super hero style), all I could do was swim in the air, which was my brain using the known experience of swimming for flying. Everytime I tried to actually experience a new and unique feeling of "flying" I'd wake up. Eventually I managed to do it, and after I experienced it once it never made me wake up again.

Being dead is not being alive, and living is basically all we do. So if you die in a dream, the dream goes "does not compute" and crashes. x)

(Curiously many times when I die in dreams I slip into sleep paralysis.)