What the hell is a dream? It’s a (for most of us) muddied and confused continuation of the consciousness that we at all points are, that we never lose even at the deepest and most (seemingly) unconscious levels of sleep. “Consciousness” is another one of those totally trampled words. Yet, like “heaven,” it’s a word we need. Everyone knows what it is to be conscious, but of course no one can define it. The Eastern traditions tell us (I’m generalizing of course) that consciousness is eternal and indestructible, that it is our ever-present connection with Divinity, the place where we overlap with God, Brahma, whatever you want to call it. The Western traditions say the same thing, though they tend to do so in a more underground fashion, and with a greater focus on the durability and reality of individual, personal consciousness. (More generalizing, of course.) NDEs are dreams, but so is physical life, and so is the life that waits beyond the death of the body, if we take “dream” to mean a situation of consciousness in which the experiencer is partially experiencing, and partially creating, what he or she experiences. Typically, when someone objects that NDEs are “just” dreams, what they are really saying is that dreams, like ordinary daily consciousness, are both (here’s another over-used word) epiphenomenal in nature. Waking and dreaming consciousness is just steam rising off the physical brain – something evanescent and basically unreal. But what if our inner conscious awareness is actually the real thing, and physical reality, that dull business we encounter when our eyes flutter open in the morning, is in essence no less “dream-like,” no less insubstantial, than the crazy stuff we were experiencing just before our eyes opened? I’m saying nothing new here. You could hear Alan Watts or Aldous Huxley rattle off that same basic argument. But I think it’s the best way to respond to the materialistically minded person who might choose to proclaim the fantastically vivid descriptions of higher (and lower) regions of existence brought back by NDE-ers as “just” dreams. It’s a non-argument.