Doom2147 – I believe what you experienced was an old view of what death looks like.
You had obviously been raised in a culture in which death was regarded as horrific – the buried alive theme is an awful image, as is the rotting skeletal version. It was a belief system or paradigm that in its simplest form, the paradigm mentioned can be described as having arisen from the mechanistic ideas of Newtonian physics, in which the universe was seen as a huge mechanical device. As Newtonian physics developed, the fundamental particle of the universe was defined as the atom. Nothing in scientific research at the time could prove that anything existed beyond the atom, and the atom is a physical object. Therefore, nothing other than physical substance was ‘real’. This, so it appeared, disproved the possibility of personal awareness being anything other than some trick of chemicals, molecules and atoms in the brain and body. There could be no spirit or life after death because, after all, we are only atoms! Nothing in our consciousness can exist unless it is produced by the physical brain.
This old view of the world has been changed by quantum physics. In the past it was thought light was as the fastest one could achieve; but the sub-atomic-particles were seen to be everywhere at once, so in a sense subatomic particles are beyond time. Also it was seen that a human observer could change the sub-atomic-particles, suggesting that we in some way create the world around us. Also the term quantum ghosts was defined, because quantum phenomena can pass through any solid object – just as we can do when experiencing a so called out of body experience.
Many modern physicists, working with the information arising in experiments with quantum theory, tell us that our view of the world is based upon our blindness, and is very limited, and through its limitation, unreal. Yet this view we take to be the REAL universe.
In dreams we tend to mirror what our feelings and beliefs are – so your dream mirrored your awful beliefs. See
http://dreamhawk.com/interesting-people/edgar-cayce-and-the-cosmic-mind-superminds/