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Can you die in your dreams?

09:10 / 28.04.06

I am trying to give up smoking. I've BEEN trying for a few years now with little success but I'm working my way through the options. I'm up to my second bout with patches, this time it's the 24 hour ones - which I always thought was a stupid idea, you don't smoke in your sleep but the lady at the chemist assured me it stopped waking up with a craving. She also warned me that a side effect was really weird dreams. Cool, I replied.

I'm standing with a large number of people waiting to cross a road. Just a small side street, not much traffic and no apparent reason for the wait until I see that there are police, in full riot gear, walking along the sides of the road, stopping everyone, inspecting us. The first looks you up and down, the second gets immediately to the point by aiming a rifle at your face. The third is there to... um dunno, clean up the mess? Just as the gun points into my nose I think "Thank God they're not looking for me" and then he shoots me. Dead. As I fell I actually felt a sensation buzzing in my neck as an electric spasm shot down my spine. I actually felt it. Then I was looking sideways across bricks at ground level.

"I can still see, I can't be dead... I'm still thinking so I must be alive... surely. Ah, I can't hear anything though, and things are going dark. It's dark and quiet. I don't feel anything... I'm still thinking...

"Um..."

09:22 / 28.04.06

Do you mean can you physically die as a result of your dreams? Or whether you can experience death in your dreams?

Our Lady Has Left the Building

09:28 / 28.04.06

Do you play video games by any chance?

09:33 / 28.04.06

I suppose the fact that you're (presumably) still alive would refute your hypothesis.

Kiltartan Cross

10:49 / 28.04.06

I think the suggestion is that people say "you can't dream about your own death". Although I'm sure people can die in dreams, I mean, plenty of people die in their sleep, odds are pretty good some of them are dreaming when it happens... bet that's a freaky experience!

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

16:51 / 28.04.06

I nearly learned an important lesson in my dreams last night. I dreamt I was trapped in the middle of a full-on Romero-esque zombie plague, and I remember thinking "shit, I'd always thought this would be so cool, but now it's actually happening I'm scared shitless". I was definitely very afraid of death.

Then I woke up, and thought "whoah, that was cool!" and spent the rest of the night trying to return to that dream. So, point missed then.

17:40 / 28.04.06

Timelord -

That sounds remarkably like a dream I had a number of years ago where I found myself mistaken for someone else in the middle of a drug deal gone bad. I have this very clear memory of a man holding a bouquet of flowers up to my face, and realizing that he had a gun in the bouquet the moment before he shot me.

When the gun went off, I flew backwards and slumped down against a door, and I had the same sort of "buzzing" sensation that you describe. I remember sitting there slumped as everyone else seemed to go on about their business, without really noticing me. But I was very definitely dead.

17:49 / 28.04.06

I've died in at least one dream, that of a car crash. Everything went white and I had the sense that I was disembodied, and knew I was dead.

I think there's an old urban legend that if you die in your sleep you'll die for real. Seven, eight, gonna stay up late. Nine, ten, never sleep again....

17:57 / 28.04.06

Yikes! Years ago I was sleeping on my couch, and I dreamt I was in a car that was falling off a huge Empire State like building. As soon as the car crashed I woke up, but I was suffering from sleep paralysis, and I remembered thinking, "Must will myself to move or I'll die!". It was the scariest dream and wake-up-from-a-dream ever.

Shiny: Well Over Thirty

18:23 / 28.04.06

I used to die in my dreams all the time a few years ago. It usually seemed to hurt like hell as well. On one particularly odd occasion I actually died and then spent the rest of the dream as one of a horde of Romero style zombies, and another time I was a ghost haunting all manner of people afterwards. Still I suppose even in dreams it doesn’t count as proper dying if one is not actually proper D.E.A.D dead after the event.

18:25 / 28.04.06

Damn, alot of people have Romero style zombie dreams (mine were vampires, but still very Romero zombie like). Makes you wonder what dreams like this were like before Romero? Several ghosts, or witches or something?

18:38 / 28.04.06

I was a mummy in a dream once. I walked down to the lake in the cover of night, ripped my heart out of my chest, and washed it in the water.

Kali, Queen of Kitteh

18:43 / 28.04.06

I hate sleep paralysis. It happens to me a couple of times a year and every time I still get freaked out.

I don't recall ever having dreaming I was dying, but I do have the recurring theme in my dreams of my teeth falling out. I forget what that's s'posed to mean.

All Acting Regiment

18:58 / 28.04.06

The other night, I couldn't get to sleep. I was lying in the dark facing the wall. Then, I felt this heaviness in the limbs and lungs, as if there was a kind of heavy liquid being pumped round the body. I was still 100% awake but the body was falling asleep without me.

I shook out of it once or twice- a feeling was growing that I needed to move quickly or put a light on- I rolled over to look the other way, towards the chair where I keep my clothes- and I saw the biggest, ugliest vulture-lizard head with a horrible, cheekless and angular grin, deep set eyes like tiny yellow marbles full of sinister. Staring right at me. It was right there. Fuck. I smacked the light on so hard I actually thumped the wall.

Funny thing was, though I'd obviously interpreted the pattern of cloth to make the image there was nothing on the chair that would obviously produce that one.

18:59 / 28.04.06

I nearly learned an important lesson in my dreams last night. I dreamt I was trapped in the middle of a full-on Romero-esque zombie plague, and I remember thinking "shit, I'd always thought this would be so cool, but now it's actually happening I'm scared shitless". I was definitely very afraid of death.

Damn, alot of people have Romero style zombie dreams (mine were vampires, but still very Romero zombie like). Makes you wonder what dreams like this were like before Romero? Several ghosts, or witches or something?

Yeah, I have those quite often too. Never got bitten by them stenchers, though. My therapist says the zombies represent the aspects of my subconscious I'm too afraid to deal with. Sounds like a sound theory.

All Acting Regiment

19:04 / 28.04.06

Damn, alot of people have Romero style zombie dreams (mine were vampires, but still very Romero zombie like). Makes you wonder what dreams like this were like before Romero? Several ghosts, or witches or something?

Well the old undead myth has always been a lot more about just groggly bodies digging their way out of graves and lunging around wild than it has been about aristocrats at balls etc, so there's a lot of cross-over. Romero's stuff- cool as it is- isn't that original a depiction, just a very fucking good one.

There's a Romanian vampire called a Murony (IFIRC) that does this- no sentience, just leaps around in the night, drags people back to it's grave and rolls around, pulling arms and legs off and filling it's grave with blood which it bathes in. Then there's the German one that's mad, one eye open, one shut, chews it's shroud and shrieks.