The Afterlife is Just A Dream

I have this theory

There are studies that show that when a person’s body dies there is up to seven minutes of very strong brain activity still going… I believe that the brain is conjuring enough energy to create a dream that seems like a eternity.

If you think about your dreams for a instance… have you ever woken up at say 9am fell back asleep, and had this very extensive dream that seemed like it spanned for days. You wake back up, and its only 9:15…

So in actuality it is pretty possible for the afterlife to be made by the last seven minutes of brain activity

I also have this theory…

You watched “Waking Life” :confused:

-Szpak

That was rude…

Do you also have a theory that for someone to have such an idea they have to have watched Waking Life? Well… maybe he wrote almost word for word what one of the characters said, and I just don’t remember all the dialogue well enough. If that’s the case, and you are sure it isn’t actually his theory (and he is passing it as such), then excuse me, he had your comment coming.

As for luckyj’s theory… it is an interesting thought. Perhaps with those last few minutes the body senses death and so, in a very small amount of time, the brain brings up all of its memories, interpretting them with a mind finding itself at an imminent conclusion, in desperation for some solution on what to do in the situation (based on past experiences).

Most NDE’s experiences of going to heaven can possibly just be a dream, and they usually describe reviewing their life in absolute detail, down to every thought they had experienced (and some reporting they knew every thought of those with them in the memories as well), all in one felt like a single moment, which suggest a strange case of automatic knowledge… knowledge that is either being implanted into the brain, or having always existed, but only at that moment being allowed into consciousness. It’s hard to make sense of processing so much information in such a small amount of time.

When you say it is a theory, do you mean that you theorize that what different religions call the afterlife is this experience with one’s last minutesof brain activity?

Can you suggest some similarities between religious beliefs of the afterlife and what may be happening in the brain to cause these experiences?

Well if something “seems” like an eternity, then to the one experiencing it, they would never reach the end of it. Thus, it would still be an “afterlife.”

However, this subject shouldn’t be brushed aside too quickly. Every society has had some concept of the afterlife, and we do not know what exactly had been revealed to them. To brush them off as “less advanced” or “primative” would be a mistake, for it would not take into account the fact that even complete belief in science may be one day viewed as primative.

i did watch waking life, but ive thought that before… that just proved to me that it is a logical thesis…

nd i actually wrote an extensive summary on waking life in the review section…

If the afterlife was a dream as presented in the opening post of this thread, considering that those who “dream” it don’t live to tell the tale of it, we would be left with only those “near-death” who “returned”, and, considering that they, thereby, never died, their experience was most certainly an idiosyncratic dream.

Our experience of the plausibility of the afterlife, however, is really derived from a number of related factors that we experience while fully awake.

At it’s foundation, the afterlife is a fantasy concocted to cope with the egoistically difficult if not impossible to face reality of the finality of our ultimate demise.

And, if we are reminded constantly of our imminent death when we are very young, we will be quite prone to anything that relieves us of the psychological pain of that constant fear, even fantasy.

Add to that the fact that our brains are still developing with respect to emotions. At one time, our ancestors had a difficult time grieving, mourning the loss of a loved one, due to inadequately developed emotional brains compared with ours today. It was a lot easy to say “she’s gone elsewhere” than to face the emotional finality that she would never be again and simply, respecting Occam’s razor, say “she’s dead”, appealing to the common reality that dead simply means "no longer alive, period, and that the condition of being dead is just that: “permanently no longer alive”. So denial of reality continues to contribute to the delusion of afterlife, complete with traditional tales of the fantasy handed down for millenia.

And because even though our loved-one may have died, we still have memories of that person within us, and having those visions of that person within us gives the illusion that she is “still alive” (within us), and such adds a bit of fuel to the afterlife fantasy fire.

Add all that up, and the illusion of afterlife is quite the waking phenomenon concoction.

Any near-death dreams about the afterlife are most certainly, therefore, linked to those components that cause us to fantasize the afterlife while we’re awake, and thus they are understandably topically apropos to what one is experiencing at the moment near to before we nearly die, thereby accounting for this particular dream.