My idea of heaven - if there absolutely had to be an afterlife - would be a perpetual lucid dream. Some of my best and most memorable experiences in life have been in lucid dreams and I only wish they happened more.
But in a way this plays into my fears about death because I'm not entirely sure that the experience of death won't be something like that. It makes sense to me that when you die, your body and senses shut down and your experience retreats into your mind - into some sort of dream state. And since the experience of time is a construct of the mind I fear the possibility of time dilation effects. So even though someone may outwardly appear to die quickly I fear that the internal experience feels much longer. A lucid dream is whatever you want it to be but if it was just a normal dream - which could be good or bad and perhaps fed with imagery from religious expectations - which lasted or appeared to last for a long time, then you could experience heaven or hell in your mind as the process of death. That's what I fear that NDEs are.
But in a way this plays into my fears about death because I'm not entirely sure that the experience of death won't be something like that. It makes sense to me that when you die, your body and senses shut down and your experience retreats into your mind - into some sort of dream state. And since the experience of time is a construct of the mind I fear the possibility of time dilation effects. So even though someone may outwardly appear to die quickly I fear that the internal experience feels much longer. A lucid dream is whatever you want it to be but if it was just a normal dream - which could be good or bad and perhaps fed with imagery from religious expectations - which lasted or appeared to last for a long time, then you could experience heaven or hell in your mind as the process of death. That's what I fear that NDEs are.
