In the paper here we have an example of an alleged "scientific consensus" that is completely contrary to my own experience. We read this:
"There is a relatively broad consensus, based on results from both survey and laboratory studies, that the capacity to recall dreams decreases with age (for reviews see Funkhouser et al., 1999; Guenole et al., 2010). One early study of 17- to 70-year-old college-educated participants (n = 295) found that dream recall frequency (DRF) was at its highest level (9.8 dreams/month) in the late teens, progressively lower at ages 30–39 (6.1/month), 40–49 (4.2/month), and 50–59 (3.7/month) and then somewhat higher again at ages 60–69 (4.5/month; Herman and Shows, 1983)."
Such factoids are quite contrary to my own experience, because although I am in one of these older age groups, I have been able to recall and log an average of about 100 dreams per month (to make a very rough estimate). My almost-daily-updated post "I Keep Dreaming About Danger, Death and Life After Death" is by now one of the largest dream journals that can be found anywhere online. Dream journals in chronological order tend to be very hard-to-read because of all the dream-to-dream variation. My dream log has avoided such a problem by avoiding chronological order, and organizing all the dreams into five categories:
(1) Dreams I had of danger.
(2) Dreams I had with an explicit death reference (such as someone dying or some mention of death).
(3) Dreams I had in which death seemed to be symbolized.
(4) Dreams I had that seemed to refer to life-after-death, often in an indirect or symbolic way.
(5) Dreams I had in which some deceased person appeared or was mentioned.
The dreams of danger are not terribly noteworthy, as danger is a common theme in dreams. What is very noteworthy is the very high repetition of themes of life-after-death in my dreams. Since starting to log my dreams in November 2020, I have had more than 270 dreams that seemed to refer to life after death. This is not counting more than 400 dreams I have had referring to or involving deceased people. Counting both dreams that seemed to refer to life after death and dreams in which a deceased person appeared or was mentioned, I have had more than 670 dreams in the past two years that either seemed to refer to life after death or referred to (or had in them) a deceased person. Interestingly, famous deceased people appear far more often in my dreams than famous living people.
Such dreams may support a belief in life after death, but I can imagine a skeptical objection. A skeptic might say something like this:
"Your frequent dreams of life after death are just wish fulfillment produced by brain activity. You want to believe in life after death, so that is what you dream about."
I will now list several reasons why such an explanation is not credible.
(1) Wish-fulfillment dreams tend to be rare in the general public, and I had few wish-fulfillment type dreams prior to the time I started to record my dreams.
A rather frustrating feature of dreams for the average person is how infrequently a person will have a wish fulfillment dream. The average male would very much like to have a dream in which he has sex with a movie star or hits the home run that wins a World Series game, or buys a lottery ticket that makes him a millionaire. Dreams like that rarely occur to the average person. It is very much more common for dreams to involve some danger, or a person being in an uncomfortable situation. That's why there exists a word in English language referring to bad dreams ("nightmare"), but why there does not exist in the English language a word referring to good dreams in which a wish is fulfilled.
Before I started logging my dreams about a year ago, I would almost never get dreams that seemed like wish-fulfillment dreams. Before I started logging my dreams, the only recurring dreams I ever had were uncomfortable dreams in which I found myself either working at the lowest-paying job I ever long worked at or at a company I formerly worked at that was pretty much the last company I would ever want to return to. Such dreams were the opposite of wish-fulfillment dreams.
(2) Under materialist assumptions, there is no reason why anyone would have frequently repeating wish fulfillment dreams involving life after death.
If we assume the type of things a materialist skeptic would assume, there is no reason at all why a person would tend to have repeated wish-fulfillment dreams, particularly those involving life after death. Having such dreams would serve no evolutionary purpose and no survival-of-the-fittest purpose. The same objection can be made to those who claim that near-death experiences or reports of apparitions of the dead are caused by some built-in brain "comfort" mechanism. Such "comfort" mechanisms would have no purpose for reasons pertaining to survival of the fittest.
In fact, under Darwinist assumptions we would expect that an increase in fear of death would tend to produce more survival. A person more afraid of being killed by predators would be more likely to protect himself against predators. So under the assumptions favored by materialist skeptics, we simply cannot account for why a person would keep having dreams suggesting life after death. A person having abundant dreams about life after death would tend to be a little less likely to avoid danger, so there would be a slightly negative effect in regard to "survival of the fittest."
(3) My dreams about life after death are too often cleverly and elaborately symbolic to be credibly explained as the result of random brain processes.
It is not correct to describe my dreams about life after death as a recurring dream. Such dreams are better described as a set of dreams that are each unique but seem to share an underlying theme. Many dozens of the dreams seem to involve clever and elaborate symbolism. Very often there will seem to be two or three symbolic elements in the same dream. Below are some examples:
- I had a dream in which a moth was trapped in my bathroom, and I opened up the bathroom window and turned off the light, so that the moth could be attracted to the moonlight or light from outside, and leave my bathroom. The moth trapped in the bathroom may symbolize the soul trapped in a body. The turning off of the light may symbolize death. The idea of the moth leaving the bathroom and heading towards the greater light outdoors may symbolize the soul leaving the body and heading toward some greater light like that in some heavenly realm often described as a place of dazzling light.
- I dreamed that as I looked from a high balcony, I looked down and saw a big table in which about 24 people were seated. There was a single empty chair which I recognized as where I would have sat. The empty chair may symbolize death, and the high balcony a position in some afterlife realm.
- I dreamed that two women came into my apartment, and some paranormal things started to happen. At least once the lights turned off and then on; the face on a helium balloon changed its expression; and I found a little rag doll where no one would have put it: on top of a table lamp, near its glowing light bulb. The turning off and turning on of the light is something I have got repeatedly in my dreams (and, most mysteriously, in real life when no human action was involved). The turning off may symbolize physical death, and the turning on may symbolize life after death. The rise of the rag doll to the top of the lamp may symbolize the ascent of the soul to heaven (people having near-death experiences often report rising up towards some heavenly light).
- I had a dream I was in the lobby of a tall building, in front of its elevators. I was dressed in a business suit, but wearing no shoes. My attire in this dream may symbolize death, because people who have open-coffin funerals often have fancy clothes on their top half, but no shoes (their bottom half being unseen by funeral attendees). The elevators in front of me may symbolize an ascent to some higher plane of existence after death.
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