Near death experience of Howard Storm

[Mister Agenda]

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.

I'm talking about having trouble telling the difference when you wake up.

As an aside, when I'm dreaming and become aware of the possibility that I'm dreaming, I jump up to make sure, trying to increase my 'hang time'. If I stay in the air longer than I should, I know I'm dreaming.

As another aside, I often have dreams where I demonstrate paranormal abilities and think something like, 'huh, I guess I was wrong about there being no such thing as psychokinesis'.