Thank you, Ela Özcan, for such a mind-boggling question.
In my first Armchair Opinion, I said that whenever wondering whether something is possible, a good place to start is with experience; for if it has ever manifested in experience, then of course it must be possible. I stand by this principle. So, when wondering whether it is possible to die in a dream, we may start by asking: Has anyone ever died in a dream?
I have had some funky dreams over the years, but I don’t think I have ever died in one. But just because something hasn’t happened to me, doesn’t mean that it couldn’t have happened to someone. So, I asked around. My friend Alex was convinced that on one occasion she did indeed die in a dream:
‘I was blown up. I felt like I was being thrown backwards in slow motion, but it didn’t hurt. Then it all went black. I couldn’t control my limbs, but there was a feeling of not having any limbs to control. The scariest part was the awareness that I couldn’t feel my heart beating or the force of gravity, which I didn’t realise until I woke up.’
Alex did not so much die in a dream as dreamt of dying (in nightmarish detail) and then, at the point of death, woke up. This is how people usually think of dying in a dream. It might be possible to die in a dream and for the dream to continue, perhaps if you were dreaming of yourself from a third-person perspective. But this is an unusual and questionable case. I think that for most people, in most cases, to die in a dream is to dream of dying and then to wake up. So, to return to our question: Can you die in a dream? Yes, you can, but only if an awakening can count as a death.
The answer to our question thus depends on the answer to another question, namely: Can an awakening count as a death? Philosophy often proceeds in this fashion: it is not so much about answering questions as it is about discovering the connections between them. We discovered the first connection, here, by thinking about what it means to die in a dream. Now, by defining the terms in question, we may discover two more connections…
Death is defined as the end of a person’s life. So, an awakening can count as a death only if a dream can count as a life. A dream is defined as a series of thoughts, images and sensations occurring in person’s mind during sleep. So, a dream can count as a life only if a life can be lived in a person’s mind. Two connections later, and we have wandered deep into philosophical territory: Can a life be lived in a person’s mind? – that is the ultimate question, the answer to which will be determined by your metaphysics, by what you think about the most general features of reality. I will outline three general ideas.
First, materialism, the idea that reality consists of just matter. I doubt that a materialist would ever think that a life could be lived in a person’s mind, simply because the matter that makes up their mind is just one part of the matter that makes up their life, and so the latter could never consist solely in the former.
Next, dualism, the idea that reality consists of not just matter, but also minds. A dualist is unlikely to think that a life could be lived in a person’s mind, but it would ultimately depend on how they conceived the relationship between minds and matter.
Finally, idealism, the idea that reality consists of just minds. An idealist may think that a life could be lived in a mind, simply because life is just one aspect of reality. But they may also think that life is such a boundless aspect of reality that it could be lived only in God’s mind, in which case you could die only in God’s dreams.
What do you think? Can you die in a dream? Let us know in the comments.
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Image: Dante’s Dream at the Time of the Death of Beatrice, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1871)
I did a BA in Mathematics and Philosophy at Lancaster University, followed by an MPhil in Philosophy at the University of Warwick. I spent a lot of time studying Kant (his first Critique), the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. My favourite philosophical idea is Quine's idea that the common-sense theory about physical objects and the gods of Homer are both just posits; the only difference is that the theory of physical objects turned out to be more efficient – that was the last idea to truly blow my mind.