Near death experience of Howard Storm

[Excited Penguin]

Ok, so it might not have been a dream, who knows, but in any case I think it was something close to a dream. Whatever it was, subjective experiences like that don't prove a thing. Until a few decades ago everyone thought lucid dreams didn't even exist and were a mere curiosity reported by some dreamers until some people figured out a way to communicate with a lucid dreamer while he was dreaming and study his brain activity while he was doing different things in the dream. Incidentally, the same activity was reported as if they were doing those things while awake. But notice none of this demonstrates the reality of the dreams' worlds' beyond the dreamers' minds. The same will be for NDE's, I reckon, if they're ever explained.

I think there's a mechanism that lets us keep our dream life and waking life separate that might not be working in the case of NDEs. Although I usually have no trouble distinguishing dreams from reality, I've had particularly vivid dreams just before waking where I've had to engage my brain to sort things out for a few seconds. I don't think as a species we could have afforded to have had that as our experience every time we woke up.

Someone else made that argument earlier as well, but I'm not sure I know what you mean by that. Let me say this, to have lucid dreams you have to actually train to distinguish reality from dreams, because it's so hard to do that while you're dreaming that we rarely ever actually realise we dream while we dream(without training for it). There's a variety of things that become possible within a dream(anything you can imagine, really) but the same doesn't hold true for reality. So you can easily check, for example, if you can fly while awake, and if you can't, you're probably awake. Or you can keep track of what you're doing and notice your surroundings to check whether something is strange or not. And a lot of other stuff.