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I’ve only had one proper lucid dream where I was completely aware and able to manipulate the content of the dream at will.

More often, I’ve experienced elements of lucidity, dancing with the edges of consciousness without quite fully waking up to it. I’ve had sleep paralysis, talked in my sleep, and dreamed of dead people. My conscious mind has even left my body. And then there are the times I’ve touched upon something beyond common dreams and lucid dreams, something that could be called astral travel, though I don’t claim to understand what that really means, yet.

Eight years ago, when I returned to Texas—still in denial that I might be staying here for awhile—I had a dream. I was jumping on the bed in the basement of my sister’s place, shouting “I’m ready to die! I’m ready to die!” But not in the way you might think. Not physical death, but the death of the old self, the one shackled by fear, by comfort. In front of me loomed death itself. A cloaked, skeletal form floated in front of me, and the best way I can describe my perception of it was that it looked like a hologram.

Death looked at me jumping, desperate for change. Telepathically, it only said two words to me: “Take responsibility.”

Fast forward to today. I’m browsing a man’s YouTube channel that I used to frequent in the past, when I come across a title that stops me cold: Last Transmission. I listen. The man speaking is dead—this is his farewell, his final choice. He has cancer. He’s dying. Treatment options presented to him by his team of doctors didn’t feel right—he’s decided not to fight for life. Instead, he has chosen to end it on his own terms. Two days after the recording, this man legally euthanizes himself.

There was no dramatic farewell, no feelings of injustice. Just acceptance and the decision to not needlessly prolong life, and thus, suffering, for a year or two more. For some reason I was shocked that this man was dead. As I listened to his last words, I was overcome with fear, starkly contrasting his final moments facing death with nothing but courage, nothing but peace—it couldn’t be me, I thought.

I’ve always been a bit of a hypochondriac—always on edge about my health, even though the worst I've faced are a stubborn cold and some psychosomatic digestive issues. But the fear, the deep, gnawing fear, has always been there: the terror of dying from some disease or some painful decline. Since childhood, I’ve had dramatic phobias about blood, hospital procedures, manipulation of the body, and pain. As I grow older, and my mother inches toward her final years, that fear has evolved into something more visceral, more real—the looming shadow of her death, and the deaths of other aging loved ones. The closeness of my own.

Lately, death has been on my mind more than ever. I find myself lost in the silence of unanswered existential questions—about life, about what comes after, about the true nature of this world, and even about what I believe anymore. My dream teacher once said that a fear of death is what holds us back from reaching lucidity in dreams, because, as he put it, dreaming is a lot like dying. So, as I return to my dreaming practice, I’m left grappling with something far deeper than simply exploring my subconscious mind: I’m trying to figure out how to confront that primal fear of death and the uncertainty that trails behind it.

So here I am, on the cusp of a new year, with a singular resolution: I want to conquer my fear of death. I want to be ready. Ready to die, should it come. Ready to welcome it with open arms, like in the dream I had years ago, as if death is nothing but a change of scenery.

I’ve only seen two people slip away, and that was back when I was in my teens: my great-grandfather and his daughter, my grandmother.

My great-grandfather didn’t die from a stroke or a bad fall awhile later. He died because he wanted to. A man of immense independence, he’d survived well into his 90's, still doing ridiculous and dangerous things like climbing up trees to cut limbs, someone as self-reliant as an old man could be. But when his hand accidentally missed the screen door handle to his home, and he fell backwards and broke his hip, the sobering truth of losing his independence made him let go of his grip on life. He stopped fighting. I was there when he died. His body was present, but his spirit had already checked out. His eyes weren’t looking at us all crowded around his hospital bed, they were seeing something far beyond.

Moments before he left, his hand kept reaching up to the ceiling for something, someone. I was sad, yes, but it was beautiful. It was magical. And I’ll never forget it. It truly felt like I was witnessing something supernatural.

My grandmother died of colon cancer at 70. By the time it was diagnosed, it was already too late, and her decline was swift and heartbreaking. I never really knew her. None of us did. She had abandoned most of her seven children, leaving only two to be raised by her neglect. Her reasons for it were never explained, and no answers were ever given. She was a riddle, a mystery that no one could solve.

When death came for her, it was just as enigmatic. She faced it with an eerie fearlessness, accepting it quietly, without resistance. There were no tears, no struggle, no signs of fear. It was as though she was oblivious to the fact that she was dying, or perhaps she simply didn’t care. Her death was cold, distant. But in that coldness, there was something undeniably powerful. She showed me a courage I never expected, a detachment I envied—a way of facing the inevitable that I, too, secretly longed for.

My fear of death isn’t about the inevitable. It’s about losing control. That’s what the mind can’t stand—losing its grip. The body, though, the body isn’t afraid. It knows the way. So maybe I should learn to trust it. Surrender my conscious mind to the unconscious realms inside me and around me. Let go.

It might be twisted, but I’m actually excited about this resolution To face death, to stare it down until it loses its power over me. Ready to die? Maybe. But more than that—ready to live without fear of the unknown.
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Sincerely, ​