Dreamscape

Walking Dead

December 16, 2010 Comments (1)

Not the zombies though.    Although AMC has a great series on its hands.   If you haven’t caught the debut season, you should definitely check it out.

 

No, the walking dead I speak of is in reference to a guy in my dream last night.    Let’s just say that we were dating…

Well the story of this guy goes that he was in some kind of accident, and died.   Doctors were able to get his brain functioning again.    While he’s definitely functional, and not handicapped in anyway, he’s not altogether there either.

A combination of what other characters in the dream told me, and my own sense of him, is that his body is very much alive… but the soul of the man who once owned it has moved on.     I remember remarking to myself how well his brain was doing at autonomous functions.    He could talk, had access to memories, full range of body motion.   By all appearances, a normal guy.      

But he wasn’t.   The real ‘he’ checked out in that accident and what’s left is simply biology carrying on.     Never met someone without a soul before.    Kind of odd.

I had the distinct feeling that my involvement with him was somehow using someone’s body without that someone’s permission…    because the real him was dead and unable to tell me his wishes in that regard.

All in all, it reminds me much of an episode from Stargate Universe.   (And not just because people on that show swap bodies on occasion.)    Back in the first season there was this episode called Faith.    Destiny encounters what the crew concludes is an artificially created solar system.    An away team heads down to the planet to get some supplies, and decide they want to remain there.

Second season just had an episode where they mysteriously reappear next to the Destiny.   They come aboard, and everyone initially checks out, but the rest of the crew is uneasy about them.    Something they can’t quite put their finger on…    turns out they all died on that planet.     Somehow their bodies were repaired and reanimated, and brought to Destiny.     Unfortunately the repairs weren’t complete, or something.    They start succumbing to whatever killed them originally, and one by one they die again.

In the end we’re left with the last guy of this group standing, and he is a man of deep faith.    He originally believed God had made him reborn, saving them from the harsh conditions of the planet and bringing them back to Destiny.     But as the rest of his group dies off again, and the reality of his situation became apparent… he came to the realization that he was simply a shadow of the real him… that the real one, his soul, had moved on and was looking down on him even now.     That’s what made everyone so uneasy.    The bodies were repaired, but the mysterious aliens could not build a new soul.   Intuitively the rest of the crew felt this and were inexplicably repulsed by their one-time colleagues.

 

So similar theme I guess with this guy in my dream.    Makes me wonder though… as medicine advances, and the ability to restore brain function, repair damage, and otherwise resuscitate someone who has died improves… the day may come where someone could be dead for hours, maybe even a full day or week…    and we can ‘bring them back’ without any physical side-effects.

Already we can keep the body alive and functioning even if the brain inside isn’t running the show anymore.   Saw this rather chilling new piece of technology that keeps a heart beating, so as to improve the ability to get it into a transplant recipient by expanding the amount of time they have to complete the transfer.       (What they allow on television these days is amusing, particularly compared with what they won’t allow.)

In the rhetorical, philosophical questioning mindset…     what’s that going to mean?    With the right kind of imaging devices, we’ve actually seen something (soul perhaps?) leave a body at the time of death.   We don’t know what it is, but its something we can observe if we’re in the right place, at the right time, with the right equipment.

What if this is the soul… what if it does ‘move on’ and the body itself remains on life support?   What then if nano-bots or something are introduced and repair the damage… returning the body to self-sustaining-operation?       Will medicine one day yield us someone like the boy in my dream?    Will we even know one when we meet them?

I’ll have to rethink my DNR orders when that day arrives.

1 thought on “Walking Dead”

  1. I can share my experienced with my wife who’s had multiple death experiences of different types. The first ones were a few years back. Her heart stopped beating after particularly bad seizures. This happened at least twice. She didn’t have any real ill effects psychologically, but it’s been a while so I don’t recall the small details. However, she did return to her body, which is a normal death experience when a person isn’t ready to go. (I’ll explain that in a bit.) In the latest experiences it was a very different situation. In that case she was away from her body in the astral and had a seizure. This isn’t a problem when she’s centered, but when her center is lost it can be catastrophic. In that case, with her soul cut off from her body, it quickly started to give up. Within minutes her body started to shut down. When she did return it was very challenging. Her experience was that she was lost and wandering for almost a year in the astral, all alone. When she returned, even though it was her same body, it felt new. She had to learn to use it again as well as get over the trauma of isolation for a year. This was challenging for me since in my time she was only gone for a few minutes. I think the difference is where the time is spent when the soul is out of the body. This brings me to my beliefs and understanding of the afterlife. They are based primarily on the book Home With God in a Life that Never Ends by Neale Donald Walsch (I have a pdf version if you’re interested.)
    When we die, whether temporary or more “permanent” our soul goes somewhere and is asked whether we have completed enough for this physical timeline or if we want to return to continue it. It is always a choice, as is anything with the soul. I don’t know if there is always a life review, but it seems to happen some of the time. If we choose to return we will return. If we were in a car accident we may find us miraculously avoiding a major obstacle. Or awakening from being unconscious. Perhaps returning from a coma. It all depends on what the soul desires to experience. The same goes for whether or not a person remembers the near death experience. For some, remembering is crucial to moving forward. For others it isn’t and they continue through life never knowing they could have died then. I believe this experience is far more common than remembering. And of course, if you choose to not return and simply call it a day on the current timeline you continue on reintegrating into life back Home.
    This is the normal process of death for us. However, if this process doesn’t occur and instead a person is separate from their body and is stuck somewhere else (the astral is a rather large space after all) then if they return it can be very traumatic. And it is possible for the body to be taken over by another spirit if left unattended. I think it requires quite a bit of power and energy to do so, which typically involves old spirits. They would be less human and result in a person that was not only different, but less than human.
    I believe a body has to have a consciousness to survive – or external life support. I don’t think I believe that there are people without souls. The soul is the consciousness. Instead I think when a person appears to not have a soul it is just so dark that it feels like there is no spark left. There are those people. Most likely they are people that have been recycled in previous lives (skipped the trip Home due to their actions, such as suicides meant to hurt others.) They can still be redeemed, but not by the average mortal (or even spirit.)
    Wow, looks like that touched on a few topics and is still only touching on it. Anyway, I hope that gives you some ideas. I like Neale’s take because it doesn’t get super specific about things like Sylvia Browne does – though she is right about some things. Also, our experiences have not conflicted with any of his teachings. And since my wife hasn’t read that book I know it isn’t a situation of her simply creating an experienced based on her expectation (yet another topic.) I know we only see a fraction of the larger Universe, but it’s more than most have so it’s provided a different perspective on life and death – though I’d prefer she not have to go through that. 😉

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