Dreams of Death

This should be implied in the title, however I'll say it anyway. Anyone with a highly suggestive mind and just about to go to sleep I'd recommend not to read too closely into this.

Myself, I am interested in any fellows dreamers, lucid or not, who have experienced a 'dream of death'. I think a discussion could constructive, I often feel there are many personal experiences and intuitions that are not shared for various reasons, so I can't be the only one. Obviously this is a sensitive subject and one I doubt any human-being does not struggle with. Life for us inherently involves the certainty of death. What it fully entails cannot be known, for if one was to go fully through the process of death he, of course, would no longer be around to talk about it. Death can be a lifelong lesson and learning, or something to turn our backs on until the bell starts to toll. Our willingness to look at and accept the cruel face of death is not an easy one and is the root of many of our fears. Perhaps we feel there is no reason to contemplate such a thing, and least of all attempt to accept. Now, however, I'd like to see how dreams open up up this doors.

The dream-state of mind appears to be capable of simulating the situation of death and the emotions that follow. I have never intentionally tried to have these dreams, but I see no reason not to learn from them and discover if there is a way that death and it's fear can be be overcome and reconciled as a reward instead of a punishment. Instead of the throes of a terrible and irreversible nightmare, can it be a reason for forgiveness, release, and liberation?

I've always had a very creative visualization and imagination and throughout my life I have infrequently had lucid and vivid dreams of the death 'persuasion' that leave an impression. I'd like to share one of my latest and most poignant ones and would even more so like to hear from all ya'll.
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After concluding a series of dreams I have returned to an elevator that seems to connect me to each other one. There is a keen sense of the widely different scenes I have just experienced and observed. I was aware of my dreams as if I was choosing between different movies. However there was a sad regret for recognition of a cry for help, the need for healing. The actors of the dreams did not know that they were acting and were confused by their sufferings and pains in different names. I feel a need to travel to another location deeper in my mind and have entered this unusual non-mechanical elevator. I am sucked downward amongst a plethora of papers by a vacuum and lose my bearings. Fear begins to arise from the violent movement and as I lose sight of where I am. I make an attempt to reach upwards back towards the top levels of the elevator and reverse my journey downwards into darkness but in attempting to do so I am hit by an onrush of paper stacks that knock me through an unknown exit. I have now left the elevator and have been flung into a dark abyss with strips of paper flying alongside me to a black destination. There are puppet-strings wrapped around my body as I make my descent and they become fewer and less secure as I leave all familiar setting, memory, or hope into a grim darkness that seems to welcome and attract my terror. I feel pulled along by a strange force simultaneously downwards on a web of strings and forwards as if attached to a tram by the top of my head. A deathly static silence pervades the air. The pieces of paper flying around me become fewer and I begin to come to a stop as I reach the full realization of where I am. I shoot out my arm to grab the very last piece of paper that flies by and it reads:

"I am death. I am a furnace."

A terrible fire rises in my heart and with my torso and arms still raised mid-air by strings I look at my surroundings into a obsidian blackness that speaks of devastation. The empty and terrifying landscape that I am forced to witness and suffer invites me to consent to the crippling weakness and agonizing loss of death's arms. Helplessness and morbid horror penetrate my entire being, for now death is my idle master and God has forsaken me to ruin and nothingness.
And then a miracle gently ushers a thought into my mind.

"This is not real. No, I will overcome this."

And I wake up

I dream of death pretty often. I've had dreams of what happens to souls after they die. The transport that takes them to the afterlife. The kind of things that keep dead spirits in this world and the influence of the dead on the living. Rarely are these dreams scary or existential or anything like that. They say something about how things might happen in the "real" world, how things work when we can't witness the system, and that I am witnessing it in dreams.I never really experienced anything that I could describe as something scary for me personally. Even when I explore the "hell" place where dead souls may wind up, I don't really feel afraid. I guess I just have no fear of death.

Very interesting. I haven't had any dreams involving transmigration of souls from one life to another. It would probably manage to offset some of my fears however. One of my main fears is a state of 'perdition' where you're just aware of a static nothingness characterized by damnation (as my previous post probably expressed) until the end of the universe. Like remaining as the body inside the buried coffin, only worse.

I've also heard Buddhists speak of an in-between period after death where-- this is a few steps into a process of various stages-- a person can still be walking and transporting around the earth with a quasi-body for 40+ days or so before taking on their next life.