Probably is. If they gave you a little too much anesthesia so you didn't wake up, you would probably drift off the same, and then just not wake up.

It's not sleeping I'm worried about, it's not waking up.

I've also been dead for 13.8 billion years before I was born, and I didn't mind it then.

For me when I had anesthesia I quickly closed my eyes with the surgeon talking, when I opened my eyes the surgeon was still talking so I was wondering when the surgery would start.

Of course when I opened my eyes it was 5 hours later and after the surgery but it took me a while to realized that.

Except the agonizing pain which precedes death

I’ve had general anesthesia, it was just like falling into a deep, dreamless sleep.

What if anesthesia actually just blocks your memories and physical reactions, but you actually experience everything that happens to you in absolute terror?

I think that most people aren't afraid of death itself. It's more the suffering to get there.

What’s hard for me to accept is the idea of never waking up. It seems like it has to end sometime.

I'm genuinely surprised that the idea that something bad might happen to you when you're dead or that it could be painful etc is anywhere near as prevalent as it is. To me, that makes absolutely no sense. Of course dying might be painful... But death? Once you brain no longer works? Feels obvious to me that you won't feel, well, anything. The thing that frightens me about death wouldn't be the experience of being dead, but rather not being able to do any more things and not existing anymore.

But isn't there a fear anyway? Because its forever. Also not seeing loved ones ever again. Not enjoying the nice things ever again.

Right? I've met so many of those people.

But it is life.

It wasn't dreamless, you just weren't remembering your dreams. If your sleep was truly dreamless for a lengthy period of time you'd be dead.

Often simply changing your sleeping habits in any significant way is enough to get you to start remembering dreams. That's because you need to wake up "unexpectedly" in the middle of a REM sleep phase to have a chance to form memories of them. Normally your brain has its memory-forming mechanism disengaged during REM sleep because there's no good reason to remember that stuff - it's just a side effect of a mental housekeeping routine.

You can also "train" yourself to remember dreams more often, to some degree, by trying to record a dream journal or otherwise forcing your brain to lay down some memories of those dreams the moment you wake up and they're still present in your short-term memory.

it’s just disconnected from motor control.

It's way more than just that, though. You're also disconnected from your sensory inputs, and furthermore, your conscious experience is interrupted. It's not like you're just in a sensory deprivation tank, because there you'd still experience conscious thought, and the passage of time. It just seems to turn off for a while.

Not even that sometimes. I'm told I can do some pretty mean kicks while I sleep.

I mean, without defining what the self is and consciousness, it's difficult to even define what death is from a consciousness point of view. A living meat bag doesn't require brain activity either. There's a whole range of things. So even assuming we have a good meaning of "death" is oversimplifying things.

Creating and destroying perfectly identical copies of the information that corresponds to a person neither creates nor destroys people unless the very last copy of that information is destroyed, in which case the person is killed.

Small divergences aren't a big deal. For example, if a person spends an hour under the effect of an anesthetic (or alcohol) which prevents the formation of new long-term memories, this person isn't dying when he goes to sleep and wakes up without any memories of that last hour.

Larger divergences are a big deal - losing a year of memories is pretty bad, losing a decade is even worse, and having one's mind returned to the blank slate of an infant is very close to the same thing as dying.

So what I'm saying is that the two copies start out as the same person and then gradually become different people.