NDE, OBE & Dreaming

[DrmDoc]

Hello All,

I'm going to open a can of worms here with what the science suggests about the dreaming brain and how it might relate to near-death (NDE) and out-of-body (OBE) experiences.  If I recall correctly, it was Michel Jouvet's decerebration experiments in the late 1960s that suggested no activity occurs cortically without a  subcortical neural connection.  Although the goal of his experiments were to determine the neurophysiological mechanisms of dreaming, the lack of spontaneous neural activity in the cortex without a subcortical neural link was significant in that it suggests all brain activity is a result of subcortical stimuli, which appears to confirm and conform to the suggested hierarchal nature of brain evolution, wherein, the functionality of relatively recent brain and neural developments are dependent on the function of earlier developments in our brain's evolution.  Now, if I've laid the proper foundation for this speculation correctly, Jouvet's experiments appear to suggest that, at the very least, cortical activity is a response to subcortical stimuli, which suggests the possibility that hallucinatory aberrations such as NDE and OBE are indeed responses to stimuli. 

As I understand the dreaming brain, dreams are how our waking brain interprets what it believes it experienced during its sleep process and amid those occurrences of cognition and perception arising from our brain's metabolic activities and processes in sleep.  Both NDE and OBE occur amid an unconscious state we might equate with dreaming and, if true, then both NDE and OBE are interpretations of what our unconscious brain believes it is experiencing.  Consider, could NDE, for example, be how our dying brain interprets subcortical stimuli suggesting that it's experiencing death...as proceeding to a place or state where other deceased individuals have gone or, possibly, reside?  

Edited December 16, 2018 by DrmDoc