I heard somewhere that weeks to months before you die, you start getting dreams of "packing up for a trip" or something, preparing for death. These dreams often include loved ones and pets, sometimes deceased ones. I've also heard of Terminal Lucidity, which occurs right before you die, making your brain work really well, enough to have conversations, get memory back, and have great mental clarity.

Hey it’s been long I know so today is 2^nd of march 2026 life’s been a little rude to me I guess but I guess I’ve overcome that factor cause there’s nothing and maybe I can’t see the good part nowadays. The last good thing that has happened to me was me getting selected in an IIT and maybe that accomplishment have become my half personality I don’t know if that’s okay but surely its not good cause I can’t be an IITian only I need to be somewhat bigger and I’m not able to identify that right now I try to find my good parts but usually fall in my own delusion that whatever im doing is right but ive also that feeling that im a fool and in reality im nothing . I don’t know that if im good or im wrong but im in a constant state of confusion of my thoughts and action.

I don’t know why but ive recently thinking a lot about afterlife. I have felt what is dying. From my perspective ive felt that when we die the world ends for us but in realty the world goes on and theres no way that someone can hear you or see you again and you also are not going to feel anything else except eternal silence because for you the world has ended. I can feel that silence for a milli second whenever I close my eyes with hope that it’s the end of me.  The black sea of thought fades aways and for a moment it feels that nothing had mattered at all.

I fear death, but more than that I fear dying without achieving something or someone. I fear all that one day I’ll do everything for the last time, few things I’ll know are last time ,but I fear most about not knowing doing things without knowing they are last time I’m gonna do. I fear that I’m going to miss a lot of things in my life and there will be always a regret of not having or at least not trying to get that thing.

I’m glad I talked to Vedika but I’m extremely sad that I never get to be with her. And there comes things that I cannot control. I fear being the one who’s not the one so many times that one day I began to fear trying. I never what to settle for less but this feeling of missing out makes me settle for less. I fear not knowing what I want.

I'm so tired. Every night is the same. I try to go to sleep, I start think about the fact that some day I won't be here anymore, that freaks me out, at some point I just can't take it anymore, then I go on tiktok or play games to distract me. Last night I was up until 4.30AM. I can't bring myself to try to sleep again, because I know i'll just think abiut death again. Does anyone have any advice so I can atleast sleep?

Hey everyone,

I'm currently working on a "game," if you even want to call it that, centered entirely around thanatophobia.

This is a personal passion project of mine because I've been dealing with thanatophobia myself every single day for years now. Honestly, I've lost track of how long it's been. It's something that's had a huge impact on my life, and I want to turn those feelings and experiences into something meaningful.

My goal isn't necessarily to make a traditional horror game. I want to create an experience that puts other people in our shoes, something that allows people who have never experienced thanatophobia to understand, even just a little, what it's like to live with this fear constantly hanging over you.

If any of you have played Silent Hill 2, you probably have an idea of the direction I'm trying to take this. Not necessarily in terms of gameplay or story, but in how the game uses psychological horror, symbolism, and its overall atmosphere to represent deeply personal struggles.

I'd also really love to hear any ideas or inspiration you might have for creature designs. I want the creatures in this game to actually mean something rather than just exist to scare the player. Ideally, each one would symbolize a different aspect of thanatophobia, whether that's the inevitability of death, the fear of nonexistence, the passage of time, losing consciousness, or anything else connected to what we experience.

If you've ever imagined your fear taking some kind of physical form, what would it look like? It doesn't even have to be a traditional monster. It could be something abstract, unsettling, or difficult to explain. I'm interested in how other people would visualize this fear.

I'd love to hear about any thoughts, feelings, experiences, imagery, environments, or concepts that you think could help represent what living with thanatophobia is really like. Especially things you wish people who don't experience it could understand.

I don't want to reveal too much about the project itself just yet, but I genuinely want to create something that feels personal, authentic, and meaningful to those of us who struggle with this.

Of course, only share whatever you're comfortable with. I know this can be an incredibly difficult subject to talk about.

Thank you guys. I really appreciate any thoughts or ideas you're willing to share.

(15M) I don't know what to do i'm scared i feel like every day is worst i'm having panic attacks every day sometimes multiple times a day everything make me feel bad i'm struggling to sleep, to eat, to clean myself,... I want to be ok but i don't know how help... Please...

It irritates me a lot. Living irritates me a lot.

Death is the ultimate cosmic joke. If there is no afterlife and when you die you cease to exist completely then what was the point to even living?
At some time in the far distant future the universe will die a cold energyless death. A hundred billion years of pointlessness.
I'm not even that scared of death, l'm more afraid of losing the individual consciousness I have now; the consciousness I have built over the years, my personality, my likes and dislikes, my hobbies, my very essence. Religion will not even bring me any form of comfort because I don't believe I would retain my personal consciousness if there was some afterlife, and even the concept of reincarnation means I would have to start life from scratch and be a new person, or will my soul interact with my new body and inform it of my new existence? Will I retain thoughts and memories?
It also doesn't help that things such as memories and thoughts are electrochemical, meaning they rely on a combination of electrical impulses and chemical signals inside the brain in order to be activated. Souls aren't anything physical, so are they capable of retaining these memories and thoughts? And why can I not feel my soul as I am alive now, why can I not interact with it? If I was to go to an afterlife, am I allowed the luxury of retaining my individual current consciousness?
Because if I am not, then what was the point of ever existing in the first place? Just as I didn't exist before I was born, I won't exist after. Or is it that my human mind and body cannot interact with my divine, meaning I need to stop worrying because there's no definite answer I can get while on earth?
Another thing that scares me in the inevitability of it. And anything that has to do with dates remind me of it, including older people; such as my parents, elderly lecturers or even elderly people on the street. There's no secret way out, there's no exceptions or requirements to be met or a waiting list for immortality, not like immortality is any better because I fear the concept of
"eternity", making me question why I exist at all, but that's another subject entirely.
I like to comfort myself by saying "Life is long" but then the never ending flow of time scares me, just a forever running unending river... meaning I would be looking back at this by the time I'm done writing and the very first sentence to the last would be something I had done in the past, it scares me that a measurement as little as half a millisecond is the past. Just as I was young sometime ago, I will be old sometime in the future and then rotten, a forgotten nobody 200 years later.
A lot of religions like Pantheism believe that we are part of the universe and when we die, we go back to a universal consciousness, but that doesn't really help because I'm selfish and want to retain my own consciousness. I do not want to be "energy" or rid of my human autonomy and essence.
Right now I'm trying not to ruin the life I have left by remaining a prisoner of these thoughts and live life to the fullest, but I'll always be horrified by the fact that in as little time as 100 years, I will no longer exist, just as people who were born in 1926.

Im f20, I dont know how much of this is related to my autism but I have autism, anxiety and depression, I keep having panic attacks about dying regularly, the process of slowly fading out of existence, seeing my body from 3rd person, being nothing, and like the thought of being nothing while my body decomposes, and I never exist again, and then when the universe ends, and like what happens then, I can't believe that this is eternal, and that life is so short, I wish I was never born so I didn't have to expirence this, what if reincarnation is real and I transport to another decade or something and it's like a loop, I'm just scared of all of the possibilities, I lost my best friend 2 years ago and it broke me so bad, I can't understand where he is, I can't imagine what he felt, I can't understand that Trying to improve, I know the mixing is a little buns in kinda bad at mixing, looking 4 feedback not really alive, I don't know how to explain it, everything just stresses me out so bad, I've barely done anything with my life

Ever get those thoughts from time to time... That one day you won't be here on this little blue planet of ours... That whichever way you go... Burial... Cremation... Or other(if there's another way) that you will cease to exist... That maybe one day... Someone will speak your name for the final time.... Does it scare you? Or empower you? Make you want to do more with your life?

‼️ Slight warning ‼️

this is my first ever post on reddit and my last resort about this issue.

for about 2-3 years, i've been in constant terror that i am about to die in some way or another. it's become a constant thought of mine no matter what i'm doing. i've never had anyone in my family die brutally in front of me or even had a traumatic near-death experience.

even when i'm in my room, doing nothing, i have the feeling something is out to kill me. like my house will explode out of nowhere or a killer might break in and kill me.

when i'm out, i'm constantly in fear someone is going to stab or shoot me.

every slight pain anywhere in my body is immediately registered as a deadly disease and i end up panicking for hours, sitting in front of a screen, researching every health/medical website for HOURS on end.

i have sleepless nights of just crying and having panic attacks, scared i won't wake up in the morning. i find myself struggling to imagine a future where i'm not dead. every time i try to, i immediately think of all the different ways i'll die instead. i can't think of a future i'm alive and/or happy in.

i just want to live my life, enjoy things, love someone, have friends, even insignificant things like eating food without panicking about choking or being poisoned, but these constant fears prevent me from doing even the littlest tasks.

please, if you know any way you can help, let me know. i am miserable.

randomly it hit me that I’m turning 18 soon. Realised how quick time flew by. It’s been more than 10 years of this phobia lingering in my life, some times leaving a more pronounced effect than others.
I try to ignore it by feeding my brain fog with excess dopamine from consuming content, but I can’t deny that I feel something looming over me.
I feel like I’ve lost a bit of myself to this fear, and I sometimes struggle to stay level headed.
My coping mechanisms can’t really pull through when I’m asleep, when I get dreams about death and existence.
I don’t know anymore. I look back on my childhood and I get sad over all my bad choices, then I look forward to realise that those bad choices don’t mean anything anyway which just makes me sadder.

before i start this, i know that i need therapy and i’m going to get it very soon.

i had never thought about death this deeply until around last year, may 6th 2025, i had went to the hospital because i was suffering from shortness of breath to the point i couldn’t walk up 12 steps of stairs without being on the ground for 10-15 minutes with my heart racing and chest tightening. all within the first hour, they had taken my ecg, blood, x-ray test done which is very unusual for emergency because they usually take hours to get things done so i texted my mom (since i went alone and had to update her) that they were doing everything so fast and to “say goodbye to me because your daughter may be dying” as a joke, i really do wish i never made that joke.

the doctor had pulled me aside maybe 2 hours later telling me that they need to prep me for a CT scan because they suspect i may have bloodclots in my chest which automatically freaked me out because usually i go to emergency and it’s depression/anxiety related or some sort of lung infection from being sick but this was actually serious this time, all i remember is that they got someone to put an IV in me and i just started crying all by myself in the waiting room across from this mother and daughter that i had been talking to. i remember the daughter being scared and the mother asking me if everything was okay, i couldn’t even put the words together so all i said is that i was okay and overreacting.. they confirmed i had two large bloodclots, one in each lung that could dislodge even with the slightest movement, they had put me on oxygen and put another iv in me so they could start giving me fluids and blood thinners.

they transferred me to a different hospital where they put in the PICU and put another iv in me so that they could grab blood whenever they wanted, i had a total of 3 ivs in me now. they didn’t know whether or not i needed surgery which they thankfully didn’t have to do and after a day they sent me up to the oncology floor because that is where they deal with patients suffering from bloodclots where i stayed for maybe 4-5 days before being discharged, after awhile in the hospital they had taken me off the iv blood thinners and started doing injections that i had to learn how to do at home which eventually just turned into pills. i was on blood thinners till august, it was caused by estrogen based birth control.

i actually was relieved at first that i had went through this experience because it had made me less afraid of death since it became so close to me, a few months later a girl i knew who i didn’t like a lot had died from an overdose on MDMA mixed with fentanyl meth. it was the strangest thing i had ever experienced because i had just seen her with her boyfriend 4 days before she passed, i hadn’t seen her in months nor did i want to see her, i remember texting my other friend who was “friends” with her and mentioned that i saw her and she mentioned that the girl had asked her to hangout and smoke sometime. we had spoken about this girl too not that long ago saying how she started losing weight really quickly and thought she maybe on something because there was no way she was able to lose weight in a healthy way, i think her dying really shocked me somehow and started taking a toll on me.

it wasn’t because that specific girl had died, i wouldn’t have even thought about her if I didn’t see her, it was the fact that death was so close to me without even realizing it.

all the old people you see in movies and shows from 20 years ago , are dead. people you don’t even know at this very second that you’re reading , are dead.

this year may to august, i was walking up and down the stairs at night, rechecking locks and alarms making sure that nobody is here because for the longest time I was convinced that someone was out to get me and kill me.. it was driving me nuts, i was sleeping beside a knife because i was so scared. it eventually stopped since i had gone on a trip to grenada but when i got back, i’m rechecking celebrities and if they have died or not, finding the cause for why they died and almost hyper-fixating on it. i can’t even think about what happens after death because i’m scared it’s just absolutely pitch black, like from before you were born and if i think about it too much, i feel like i’m suffocating. it’s like the thought of after death and trying to think about it is running through my head over each other, talking over each other screaming at me to the point that it’s causing me to literally have to try and tell myself out loud for it to stop.

there’s not a single day i don’t check if someone has died, if my mom is out too long, i think that she is dead. i’m checking if she’s breathing, if my animals are breathing, absolutely everyone. i don’t know what to do anymore.

I'm not sure if I'm even posting on the right sub because I'm really not afraid of dying at all. Even if being dead meant staring at a black void for all of eternity, I'd be okay with that. In fact, if I was told that I was gonna become "something", like a thread of energy or some other abstract concept after death, and that I wouldn't be able to actually "experience" anything, just exist, I'd also be okay with that.

What terrifies me and keeps me awake at night is the fact that there probably won't even be a black void to look at, nor will there be an eternity to spend staring at said void. It's the absence of time that scares me, the fact that I won't "exist". Not that I won't see, hear, think, remember or even be aware of my own existence, but the fact that there won't be existence at all.

Had to call Suicide Prevention today for the first time because I felt the line between "all of this is pointless" and "might as well end it now" become blurry. I can't go on like this. Just do you do with these thoughts?