In between life and death...

What happens between life and death? Specifically, what happens in that moment of transition as a person's bodily functions shut down one by one, either over the period of several minutes or several seconds? I'm more interested in what happens in the mind. This is something that I have not had the memory to actually research, and undoubtedly someone out there has looked into this. I am to understand that there is residual energy in our brains for at least a split second after the rest of our body fails, assuming that one isn't going "brain-dead" first.

Our individual realities are based on what our minds perceive and how it is perceived. What we see, hear, feel, and smell are processed and based on what we have contained in the immense library of memories determine what reality is within a single moment, or within the moment that those things are perceived. Is it any wonder that our minds can play tricks on us causing us to see or hear things that aren't there or to not see or hear those that are? "I could have sworn..." we've each said in one way or another at some point.

That conscious mind is constantly working to make sense of things that don't. We end up seeing things that aren't what they are. A witness to a crime describes a suspect one way, but security footage shows someone else. Someone turns to see who's calling out his or her name from behind only to find that it was a dog or bird. We run on assumptions, our expectations drawing upon a cache of stored files to help load up that web page more quickly. It's convenient and for its own purpose it works.

However, the unconscious mind keeps track of all of that information. It looks out on a field of flowers spanning on for miles and miles and sees an order that we can only imagine to understand. If our mind is suddenly flooded with memory, so many sounds and images demanding to be perceived, recognized, and validated at one time would clog the filter of our consious mind into stasis. We stare off in a daze at nothing until someone shakes us out of it, "What? Oh! I was just zoning out, there..."

We know that our waking mind works more slowly than our other mind, but it can reason. It decides what is real and what is not. Consider the silly things people do when hypnotized. With inhibitions and reason fully intact, a hypnotized man probably wouldn't run up to a sixty year old gentleman, convinced that this man is actually the young woman starring in any number of pick and choose dating reality shows, desperately trying to woo him to be his future bride. "Obviously, that is not her. She's taller."

In the absence of a waking mind, the mind of memories and dreams is still functioning and responding to cues that it would normally receive from the consciousness. Does it simply stop functioning on its own? Is it not aware of its own existence seperate of the consciousness? People are always having dreams that reveal inner turmoil or make more explicit distresses in a person's life that demand attention usually involving dissatisfaction with some aspect of daily life. When a person sees his or her life "flash" before his or her eyes, what's really happenning in that instant?

Isn't it possible for that part of our mind to try and recreate perception, recreate reality by its own understanding? Could it not have its own "waking life?" (There are several films that have explored these possibilities, though far too few a number have actually understood their ponderings...) Isn't that what dreams ARE?

In that moment just before all that activity ceases, before all of the remaining energy is spent, it wouldn't be too unreasonable to think that the dreaming mind would not attempt to make sense of it all by its own volition and by its own terms. It would create its own reality, a reality that could last a virtual eternity.

We also define fantasy as a result of imagination, a mentally constructed conception, and imagination is the ability to draw on memories, perceptions, and ideas to recreate something more tangible, so to speak, or makes more sense to us. Is that not what reality is within our minds? We might never know directly the world around us, only what we perceive. Creation is the primary function of the waking mind, its tool the imagination, and its product the best representation of our world.

How long does that moment between life and death last?

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