Complex Numbers

Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On

I sometimes find SyFy articles to be interesting. I started following them so I could keep up with Phil Plait, whose Bad Astronomy feature is always educational. But they have other science articles, and this is one of them.

Yes, it turns out if you die in a dream, you could die in real life. No one tell Freddy.  

If you die in a dream, you'll die in real life.

Me: Oh, I guess I'm actually dead and this is the afterlife.

*looks around at all this*

Me: Wow, I must have been truly evil.

It’s one of those urban legends most of us have heard, the sort of knowledge that gets passed around the playground without being questioned. It was a meme before memes, like the knowledge that Marilyn Manson scooped his eye out with a spoon. Or that Marilyn Manson played Paul in The Wonder Years. Or that Marilyn Manson removed one of his ribs for... reasons. Holy hell, we liked to tell rumors about Marilyn Manson.

Does this guy also write for Cracked?

The "dying in your dreams" rumor persists for similar reasons, not because there’s no internet, but because it’s nearly impossible to fact check. Dreams are nebulous and fleeting and, after all, if someone did die as a result of dying in their dream, how could we know?

Fact: since we became recognizably "human," something on the order of 100 billion humans   have died.

Fact: Some percentage of people who die do so in their sleep. I'm unable to find a good figure for this. I suspect it's changed over time, anyway. Even if it's only 1%, though, that's 1 billion deaths during sleep over the last 50,000 years or so.

Fact: We don't dream during the entire sleep cycle.

Still, out of the assumed 1 billion, I wouldn't be a bit surprised if at least some people just happened to die during an REM phase that featured a dream about death. But that says nothing about causation.

The legend, as I originally heard it, was definitive. If ever you die in a dream, you will absolutely die for real. It wasn’t a suggestion or a could-be, it was presented as irrefutable fact.

Like I said, if it's fact, then I'm actually dead right now. So let's dismiss that legend like all the others.

However, if we reframe the question to whether or not it’s possible for you to die in real life if you die in a dream or, even more loosely, whether it’s possible for a dream or nightmare to kill you, the answer seems to be a qualified... yes?

Finally, an answer! Oh, wait.

First, it is possible (though unlikely) for a person to be scared to death. When we’re frightened, the body flings itself into fight or flight mode, which is triggered by a flood of adrenaline. The heart beats faster and blood flow is rerouted to major muscle groups. Particularly in those who are already predisposed, the influx of adrenaline can cause a cardiac event, which could lead to death: An ironic result from a process that is meant to keep us alive when sensing danger.

From what little I understand, rabbits apparently react badly to being cornered by a predator. If they can't fight or flee, sometimes their heart just gives out, presumably so they won't have to actually feel the teeth sinking into their little fluffy bellies. As a friend of mine once pointed out, "Worst superpower ever."

It’s unclear, and in fact unknowable, if reported SUNDS cases were the result of dreams in which an individual died, but there is some correlation between parasomnias (sleep disorders) like night terrors, and the sudden onset of death during sleep.

One of these days, it's possible that we might have the technology to record one's dreams. I wouldn't want to be the one writing the grant proposal for a study on dream-death, though. "Yes, we're going to hook sleepers up to these electrodes and study if they die when they dream about dying." Even absent such technology, though, I suspect we could have the technology to be able to tell if someone died in their sleep while experiencing the symptoms of fear:

We also know that the mechanisms exist for the heart to be catastrophically impacted by overwhelming emotions, like fear. All of which is to say, while dreaming of death is not in and of itself a death sentence, it probably doesn’t help.

It's been suggested, though I can't be arsed to look it up, that one of the purposes -- or at least one of the results -- of dreaming in humans is a kind of emotional rehearsal. Dreams are not real in the sense that the clown standing behind you right now is real, but they can certainly provoke emotions -- which are, at base, electrochemical cascades in the body. So I could certainly imagine it happening that a sufficiently scary dream about death could elicit a surge of adrenaline that might stop your heart.

I just wouldn't lie awake at night worrying about it. That clown, though... you might want to duck right about now.