Evolution of love

NEAR DEATH EXPERIENCE BEGINS AS DREAM

NEAR DEATH EXPERIENCE BEGINS AS DREAM

'It is not my purpose to convince skeptics..'

The experience began as a dream. My dreams had always been vivid and some had been lucid. I had been having lucid dreams before my near-death experience, though at the time I didn't know what they were called. (It's also worth mentioning that I had no idea what a near-death experience was. I had never heard of them and had never heard of the term ‘out of body experience’ either. I was eleven years old and had grown up with no exposure to these subjects.)
As for ‘lucid’ dreams, I simply knew that I would occasionally ‘wake up’ in my dream and, while still in the dream, do whatever I wanted. (This, perhaps, gives me a unique perspective in being able to judge whether a near-death experience is just a kind of dream, as some skeptics claim.) It's also important to mention that my grandfather had just died (three days before my birthday) and that during the weeks that followed, I had often found myself actively imagining my own death. I was not suicidal, but perhaps, at the age of eleven, it was the first time death had seemed real to me, and I was curious. So curious, perhaps, that I wanted to know for myself what it was. Or maybe I missed my grandfather and wanted to find him.

Here is how my experience begins:

I was dreaming that I was on a grassy hillside. The rise of the hill was on my right and it descended to my left. Then my dream became lucid. I chose to lie down in the grass and start saying that I wanted to die. I lay there and kept repeating it to myself: ‘I just want to die. I just want to die.’ Figures appeared and began surrounding me, looking down at me. They kept saying to me, ‘No, you don't.’ and I kept saying, ‘Yes, I do. I just want to die.’

The dream stopped being lucid and continued on. I was looking at one of the local gas stations. Then I saw a circle. As I watched, a small line appeared at the top of the circle and began to cut into the circle, traveling down through the center of it, bisecting it. The instant that the line completely divided the circle into two halves, everything changed.

Everything.

My whole consciousness shifted and I knew was no longer dreaming.

A few words here about varieties of experiences other than that our ordinary waking lives:

1. Ordinary dreams: During an ordinary dream, I don't control the imagery. For example, I don't know why I dreamed about the local gas station, but this sort of unpredictability seems normal in dreams.

2. Lucid dreams: During a lucid dream, I know that I'm dreaming and can often control the imagery, but there is still sometimes an element of consciousness that is asleep in a way. For example, if I saw a friend during a lucid dream, I would sometimes tell them to remember the dream so we could talk about it the next day. I wouldn't realize that the friend isn't really there, and they are just part of a dream.

3. The near-death experience consciousness: The near-death experience consciousness is separate from both ordinary dreaming consciousness and lucid dreaming consciousness. I experienced that change of consciousness acutely during this experience. The change of consciousness that occurred when I shifted from the gas-station dream to the near-death experience was as qualitatively different from the human dream state (both ordinary and lucid), as the dream-state is from the daily awake-consciousness. I realize that there's no way that I can convincingly communicate what this shift was like and how I knew it was quite different from an ordinary dream.

No skeptic would have any reason to be convinced by what I say, but that's not my purpose in writing this. I am writing this simply to share.