What if feels like to die

The credits roll. Most of us will die in somewhat different circumstances. What will it feel like? Can we extrapolate this to how dying feels? Probably not. Or they might represent memories created to fill amnestic gaps. His spinal cord was severed. The gate was really tall, and it was white. It will get cold, turn a light bluish gray, and might even show signs of mottling.

Mottling is one of those things where you know it when you see it: the skin is marbled with red and purple and feel cold to the touch, because the heart is no longer able to pump blood effectively to the extremities.

When your body finally lets go, what little brain function you had left rapidly fades away. Now, that all might sound terribly uncomfortable and frightening, but your brain has a few tricks up its sleeve. Right when your body starts to flat line, your brain does its best to prepare your consciousness for the jump to the great beyond.

In their final moments, many people have out of body experiences, a rendezvous with relatives in a peaceful place, a feeling of greater connection with the universe and of course, see the classic bright light at the end of the tunnel.

One study , from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, compared the mental states of terminally ill patients and inmates on death row with those of people told to imagine they were dying. Their findings suggest the closer you get to death, the more positive of an outlook you have on it.

In a study conducted at a hospice center in Buffalo, New York, researchers found that dying people have a lot more dream activity than normal. Most people dreamed about reuniting with people they knew who had already died, others said they dreamed about preparing to travel somewhere, and some re-witnessed meaningful experiences from their past. In many cases, researchers were also asking people to recollect events that happened decades earlier, the details of which may have been changed, or lost in the mists of time.

Then medical researcher Sam Parnia and his colleagues decided to take a more objective approach. Of the 63, seven could recall thoughts from the time they were unconscious. They included coming to a point or border of no return, feelings of peace and, in one case, jumping off a mountain. So, while only a minority could remember being close to death, what could be recalled was generally positive. Surprisingly, the patients able to recall their experiences actually had the highest blood-oxygen levels — feelings such as heightened sensual awareness had previously been thought to result from brain-oxygen starvation.

Yet better brain oxygenation would allow for improved cognitive function during the resuscitation, explaining more vivid experiences and the ability to commit them to memory. As part of the experiment, suspended boards with painted writing and figures on their upper sides were hung from ceilings throughout the hospital. Any patients reporting an out-of-body experience could then reasonably be asked to describe what they saw on the upper sides of the boards.

This would have been very troublesome for prevailing scientific understanding — certainly, a rethink of human consciousness as something entirely dependent upon the billions-strong network of neurons in our brains. They anesthetized eight rats, then stopped their hearts. In fact, that was the case. This half-dreaming, half-waking state is common in dying people. Most of the patients interviewed—88 percent—had at least one dream or vision.

And those dreams usually felt different to them from normal dreams. For one thing, the dreams seemed clearer, more real. Seventy-two percent of the patients dreamed about reuniting with people who had already died. Fifty-nine percent said they dreamed about getting ready to travel somewhere. Twenty-eight percent dreamed about meaningful experiences in the past.

Patients were interviewed every day, so the same people often reported dreams about multiple subjects. For most of the patients, the dreams were comforting and positive.

The researchers say the dreams often helped decrease the fear of death. My impression is that this is not a coma, a state of unconsciousness, as many families and clinicians think, but something like a dream state.