Hey Wolffe!

Great question... really got me thinking. I must say that if you equate the dream world (or even the 4th spacial dimension) to the matrix, the similarities are uncanny! And then there are dozens of lines from the movie that make perfect sense to lucid dreamers. Quite a mind-bender.

But as to your question of what would happen if you died in your dream when you thought you were sure you weren't dreaming; my opinion is that you might then experience a sudden scene shift in your dream, possibly thinking you've entered the after-life or something, but I reckon you'd still be 'conscious' in your dream, even if you assumed you were now dead. Eventually you'd either slip into delta wave sleep again and return to REM sleep in a new dream, or your sleep would lighten to the point of waking up. But yeah, that again can be part of some circular logic pattern... How can you be sure it's reality?!

That does raise the question of people in coma's. Even though brain activity is at a minimum, what if you actually had some perception of a dream, while in a coma, that was so real it became your reality. And then you're stuck in it for months, even years... would there be a chance of someone like that getting killed in their dream, believing it to be reality, consequently dying, and the doctor telling the family that the patient unfortunately didn't pull through. How would you ever know what really happened, hmm?