(January 29, 2016 at 12:53 pm)Mister Agenda Wrote:Excited Penguin Wrote: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.
I have a sleeping disorder called sleep paralysis which results in night terrors, which are different than nightmares, because your eyes are open, but your body is paralyzed. It usually happens when I'm just about to fall alseep, and I'll usually hear a buzzing, and it feels like my soul is leaving my body, which is the best way I can describe it. I'll see some seriously crazy stuff, but realize (or hope haha) it's all in my brain. I'd describe it further if you want but those are some seriously weird experiences. There's a great documentary about it called The nightmare http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3317522/
Point is I've had these experiences but I understand them to be in my brain. I realize the brain can do a lot more than what we think since we only use a small percent of our brain.
Another story is sleepwalking, and lucid dreaming. My cousin does both. One time I was staying at my cousins house when we were kids, and my cousin Eric and I heard some banging coming from my other cousins room in the middle of the night so we went to investigate. We found him in his underwear pulling cloths out of his closet and packing a suit case, while mumbling nonsense haha. The next morning we told him about and it and he had no memory what so ever. Supposedly it happens to him a lot according to his now wife.