Willing Myself to Die (Can Curiosity Kill the Cat?)

Curiosity Killed the Cat

I have previously written about an experiment that I conducted a number of years ago to see if I could end up seeing a ghost. But there was another “experiment” that I conducted in around a similar time period that I have not previously written about:

I had learned of a person who, at a very old age, willed himself to die, and it apparently caused him to die. Now, there may have been other more biological factors involved in this, as he was already at an age far greater than most of us will ever reach – I believe he was about 100 years old. However, I wondered if this might possibly have been a case of “mind over matter”.

Is it really possible for someone to will themselves to die? I became curious about it, so I decided to try it. All I had  to lose was my life, which we all end up losing, sooner or later…

Late at night, when I got into bed, I said to myself, “I will myself to die in my sleep.” And I tried to consciously muster up all the “intent” and “sincerity” to that end that I could.

However, I woke up the next morning, and so I thought to myself – “Hmmm, it didn’t work, this time.”

So, after going through the normal activities of another day in the life, that night, I repeated the “experiment”.

They say that repeating experiments and getting consistent results gives more conclusive proof to support the hypothesis than just doing it once, but I realized that if the experiment were to work just once, I would not be able to live to evaluate the results…

So I simply approached it with a sense of detachment, sort of like how an astronaut accepts the possibility of dying during their mission.

When I opened my eyes the next morning, I thought to myself- “Well, it didn’t work again…”

And so I repeated the experiment a few more times in the course of the following nights, and the results were always the same – willing myself to die in my sleep did not cause me to do so.

Can I draw any definitive conclusions from the results of these “experiments”? Maybe not, but they certainly cast doubt in my mind as to whether doing such a thing could really work. They also increased my doubts as to whether the idea of “mind over matter” is really that effective. (Actually, I was never into those kinds of things anyway, but I was just curious…)

Would I encourage others to try such “experiments”, seeing the kind of results that I got from them? Actually, no; for then I might end up being called a “bad psychological influence on people’s minds”!

I will part with these words – Remember: Curiosity Killed the Cat… although I lived to tell about it!

Curiosity Killed the Cat

BTW: The image in this post was adapted from this image to fit into this context.