“dying in your sleep” really could be among the worst possible deaths
in your sleep you can be having a nightmare
in a nightmare, “how bad an experience you can be having” is limited only by the bounds of your wildest imagination
dying in your sleep is basically dying in the Matrix if the Matrix machines hate you and want to torture you to death
(source: i have been having sleep apnea and woke up VERY badly just now. Argh)
are you prone to truly horrible nightmares?
for me, gruesome nightmares aren’t so bad. the mild nightmares like “oops i showed up to work naked” or “oh no big fall” are more likely to wake me up panicked than nightmares about anything worse than your average death.
i don’t have a strong preference. i think dying in my sleep would be kind of anticlimactic. going out like a fart in the wind. but ain’t that the perfect cherry to put on your life? just one last “fuck you know your place” from the universe.
I’m prone to nightmares where the relation between “what’s happening” and “what I feel in response to it” is utterly alien to how I react to things when awake.
So yeah, I could have a nightmare where I’m being basically dissected (and to some degree even feeling it) and it might not be as scary to me emotionally as a nightmare where I’m, like, walking through an abandoned attic full of vaguely creepy old furniture
And both those nightmares might have elements so ridiculous that trying to analyze them after I wake up just makes me burst out laughing (even though I can still remember that I was unbearably miserable and/or afraid in the dream)
So ….yeah, who even knows what I’d be experiencing, or how my emotions would be reacting to it, if I died during any of my nightmares. Could be meh, could be horrible. Doesn’t matter in the end, I guess.