Matthew 17:9
Matthew 17:99As they were coming down the mountain, Jesus commanded them, “Do not tell anyone about this vision until the Son of Man has been raised from the dead.”
is the load-bearing JW verse against any conscious-post-mortem reading of the Transfiguration. Because Jesus calls the Mountain experience a horama ("vision"), the Watchtower argues that the appearance of Moses and Elijah was not real — it was a symbolic display, not a real encounter with conscious individuals. Soul-sleep doctrine is preserved by treating the entire scene as fiction.
Press on the word horama. Visions in the New Testament are not fiction; they are revelatory disclosures of real heavenly realities. Stephen's vision in showed Jesus actually standing at God's right hand — no one argues Jesus was not really there. Peter's vision in Acts 10 conveyed a real divine command. Paul's vision of the Lord Jesus on the Damascus road (Acts 9, 22, 26) was a genuine encounter with the risen Christ. If the Transfiguration was a horama, it was a horama OF something — and the something is Moses and Elijah, conscious, conversing with Jesus about his coming exodos at Jerusalem (). The Watchtower's "vision" defence collapses against the consistent biblical pattern: even in visions, God depicts the dead as conscious, never as non-existent.