While in the middle of Leo's post, I was thinking the same thing you just said, Jay. lol.

I find it a pretty positive note that, while ready to die, he was in a state with an appreciation for comedy. That goes a long long way.

Anyway, back to the death issue. I've had many different experiences with death in my dreams. I've been cut up by a chainsaw in a dream when I was a kid, which I still remember pretty vividly, and saw my dying body from the outside. (I've only left my body twice in my life, in dreams, and they were both after dream-death. After all other deaths, except the last situation I'll talk about, I woke up.)
The second time I left my dead body, I had to watch my parents come into my room and find my body on the bed, having died in my dream-sleep, and see them mourn and hold my body while I could only watch from right beside them as a spirit. In the dream directly before that one, I was on a plane and the person next to me told me that I was on a plane to heaven, everyone around me was dead, and I had died in my sleep...which I felt So ripped off for (I mean who wants to die in their sleep in the healthiest shape they've ever been in?........THEN....I had the false awakening, where I woke up in my room, only to look beside me and see...ME laying on my pillow, dead in my sleep.
..A dream char telling you you're dead, and having it confirmed by a false awakening in which you saw your dead body.. Talk about Traumatizing. O.o! I was shaking when I finally woke up after it was all over.

However, I've had a much more....entertaining experience with dream-death not long ago.
Some friends and I found ourselves in a hub connecting a bunch of chamber/dungeon rooms. Making our way through one room, we found it was boobytrapped. Various razors, spikes and solid surfaces protruded out of the walls while the walls came in, themselves, slowly crushing and impaling every one of us. Yeah, that sucked too, but there is a twist to this one. When we died, we all manifsted in the hub-corridor again, looking around at each other like...."Huh?" It turns out the doors to each of these rooms led to different dream scenes, like teleporting to different deadly scenarios, where the object was simply to die and rematerialize in the hub-corridor! lol. So over and over we all ran around this area like cracked-out kids at Six Flags dying in God knows how many ways, just to get brought back to the central hub like we were playing Unreal Tournament. Lol. The only one of those deaths I can really remember was one where stepping through a door dropped me on the top of the front of a speeding train, and there was another train coming toward us on the parallel track. So, when the second train got close enough, I leapt forward off of the train I was on, just a little to the side, and smacked head first into the oncoming train.

Unscathed, I just rematerialized in the corridor and swapped death-stories with my friends. Rofl. Good Times.