Heaven is real...

... insomuch as a dream is a real occurrence that we undergo during REM sleep. In fact I would hypothesize it is exactly that.

I've wanted to articulate this for some time. There are a lot of books my mom has been reading about how "heaven is real, because a little boy died, came back, and said so. And dogs really do go to heaven, too!" If ever religion has tread unprepared into scientific territory, this would be it.

I think we've all experienced the phenomenon in which you fall asleep thinking deeply about a particular subject, only to dream of that very subject. Dreams don't always make sense, and a lot of interpretation happens - perhaps primitive humans even took this to be something quite mystical (and perhaps some modern humans, too). The point is, what is on our minds can stay on our minds when falling into deeper levels of consciousness, be that sleep, or the moments when your heart ceases to function but enough blood remains in the brain to keep it active.

Having never been declared dead, just getting pretty damn close, I can't speak to the exact experience. However, I imagine there is disorientation as the brain struggles to interpret the obvious problems occurring in the body. Likely, if whatever killed you happened slowly enough for you to ponder in your final moments what may be coming next, depending on your beliefs, it is very likely that your brain will expand upon that in an effort to make sense of it all. What that means in simpler terms is: "Oh shit, I'm dying. I guess it's time to meet my maker and ascend to heaven..." *synapses begin to break, shut down, fire randomly in confusion* (enter stage left: your own personal interpretation of what heaven must be like - or hell if you're really down on yourself...)

"But hang on a minute," you might say, "these people are dead for a few minutes before being brought back, but so much seems to happen to them; so much detail!"

Haven't you ever taken a short nap and had what seemed like a several-hour dream? Time is a conscious device, it has no meaning to our subconscious. In retrospect we evaluate dreams and super-impose them on a time-line in order to make sense of the imagery and emotions experienced during the dream. This is probably why the budding research on translating dreams into video is largely garbled, nonsensical static. The dream itself is gibberish. We put the pieces together upon waking. It gets harder to recall a dream by the minute as we quickly realign ourselves with reality. The abstract begins to be sloughed off, regarded as nothing more than sensory white noise.

At the risk of sounding like a religious apologist (since I'm arguing for the absence of mythical things), heaven is simply a dream away. If you want to go there badly enough, fixate on it at the time of your death (assuming your brain remains in tact - sorry, head injury death-ers). Sure, it will all fade to black as your brain slowly dies, but you won't know what's happening. And since time means nothing in a dream, who's to say that moment can't last... forever? Well, that's all relative, anyways.