Do you fear death? You wouldn’t be considered unique or weak if you said yes.
I think that the fear of death is completely natural. Death is an unknowable state to the living. What we do not know, we fear. Simple as that.
I used to have a terrible phobia for death as a child. I had it all the way up to my teens. My phobia was so bad that I actually had frequent nightmares about dying.
In one of my earliest death nightmares, I was stabbed to death by a man who broke into my house. I ran desperately to escape him but I tripped and fell and he was upon me and stabbed me three times in my back.
I woke up panting raggedly, covered in sweat, and had three very distinct icy cold spots on my back where I felt the blade enter my body in my dream. But there was no pain. I remember noticing that.
I must have been ten years old.
I continued to have these death nightmares for years.
I think I have just about died in every way possible in my dreams. Drowning, gun shot, knife, strangulation, asphyxiation, car crash, falling from great height, air plane crash, poison, blunt force trauma to the skull…
I would frequently jolt up in the middle of the night covered in sweat, chest heaving, heart galloping from the throes of yet another death nightmare.
Then one day, it just changed. I still remember the dream very well, crystal clear in my mind.
It was a bright and clear sunny day. The air was comfortably cool. I was standing on an immensely long and narrow wooden suspension bridge stretched over a massive chasm. The ground was so far away that it was actually shrouded in cloud.
The bridge swayed dangerously in the wind. I took a step back to steady myself… but it was one step too far.
My heel plummeted through thin air and my whole body followed suit, flipping backwards violently as my body lost all balance and just slipped through ropes.
My breath caught in my throat for just an instant from the shocking sensation of falling but as my body sailed through the air backwards and I saw the bridge recede into the distance, thoughts drifted almost casually through my mind.
“I am going to hit the ground soon and die. Oh well, what a ride. Look… I’m flying…”
In that moment, my body relaxed and went limp with a sensation that I can only describe as sheer relief or bliss.
And I actually leant my head back, closed my eyes, spread my arms wide open to catch the air rushing past me, as I let my body melt into the moment of the experience.
I hit the ground with a soundless thud.
And I woke up naturally.
No shock. No fear. No heart thumping, no ragged breath dragging through my lungs, no tension, no sweat.
I just opened my eyes to a very naturally relaxed body and a feeling of peace permeating my body.
Some might say that it was just a dream, but what is a dream but just another self created experience no more ephemeral than our physical experience is?
A dream is no less and no more real than what we call physical life.
Lucid dreamers attest to the power of dreaming.
The power of my dreaming experience with death is such that I learnt that death was just another experience. Just like life and dreams are.
One experience in a long and never-ending line of experiences that I choose and create for myself to experience.
There is no end and there is no suffering, only a change of form.
Death is as simple as waking up from a dream.
