Near Death Experiences (NDE's) were first brought to the public's attention, as well as to that of the medical community, by Raymond Moody through his book Life After Death. Though most medical staff who began to study the phenomenon were sceptical they soon discovered that the experience was fairly common among those patients that had been "dead" for a brief period of time. Interestingly enough it rarely, if ever, occurred in patients that had similar stressful and traumatic experiences, yet who were never actually dead in the medical sense.
The Near Death Experience has become the most researched area of anecdotal evidence related to post-mortem survival, and today several cases ave been uncovered which defy traditional explanation.
From Chapter 7:
A Birds-Eye for Details
While gathering information for her book, Susan Blackmore was unable to find any case that could convincingly validate the claim that the NDE has paranormal aspects. Naturally, stories abound of people seeing and hearing things they could not possibly have become aware of by use of natural senses, but stories need to be validated if they are to serve as evidence of anything other than humankind's proficient imagination. Fortunately, there are several interesting stories that have been validated, the most famous of which is probably the case of Maria's tennis shoe, a firsthand account of which was published in 1995,2 and which is worth recounting here.
In this case, Maria, a migrant worker, experienced a partial NDE in Harborview Hospital in Seattle after suffering a cardiac arrest. Kimberly Clark, a critical care social worker, visited her the following day at which point Maria described having had an out-of-body experience in which she found herself floating above the hospital. Among other things, she remembered having seen a tennis shoe on a ledge outside one of the hospital windows. Maria not only was able to indicate the whereabouts of this oddly situated object, but was able to provide precise details concerning its appearance, including that its little toe was worn and one of its laces was stuck underneath its heel. Upon hearing Maria's story, Clark went to the location to see whether any such shoe could be found. The shoe was there as Maria had described it, except that, from the window, the details that Maria had specified could not be discerned. Upon its retrieval these features were confirmed. Clark concluded: "The only way she could have had such a perspective was if she had been floating right outside and at very close range to the tennis shoe."
This is not the only case of its kind. Dr. Kenneth Ring and Madeleine Lawrence have studied several cases where witnesses have corroborated information gathered during the out-of-body experience. The following cases are from Kenneth Ring's paper published in the Journal of Near-Death Studies.3
In one of these cases, also involving a shoe, a resuscitated patient recounted an NDE to Kathy Milne, a nurse at Hartford Hospital with an interest in such experiences. The patient described floating out of her body, briefly viewing the resuscitation effort and then felt herself being pulled up through several floors of the hospital, ending up above the roof. Here she recognised the skyline of Hartford and also saw a red object on the roof which she identified as a shoe. The out-of-body experience then proceeded into a fairly typical NDE. Milne later told this story to a sceptical resident, who later got a janitor to let him out onto the roof where he indeed found a red shoe.
A second case was reported by Joyce Harmon, a surgical intensive care unit (ICU) nurse at Hartford Hospital. Upon returning to work after a vacation, during which she had purchased a pair of plaid shoelaces that she happened to be wearing that day, she was involved in the successful resuscitation of a patient. The following day she met the patient by chance, whereupon the patient immediately recognised her as the nurse wearing the plaid shoelaces on the day before. Though undetectable by someone lying in bed, the patient had apparently seen them while out of body and looking down from above.
In a third case Sue Saunders, a respiratory therapist at the Hartford Hospital, was helping to resuscitate a man in the emergency room whose electrocardiogram had gone flat. Medics were administering repeated shocks with no results, while Saunders attempted to give him oxygen. In the middle of the resuscitation, someone else took over for her and she left. A couple of days later, she encountered the patient in the Intensive Care Unit where he spontaneously commented: "You looked so much better in your yellow top." The man recognised her, was correct about her wearing a yellow smock as well as a mask while trying to give him oxygen, despite the fact that he was unconscious and without a heartbeat during her entire presence.
Another relevant case concerns a 41-year-old woman4 who underwent a biopsy in connection with a possible cancerous chest tumour. Due to a mistake during surgery, her superior vena cava had been severed. She was rushed from the recovery room on a gurney to have an angiogram. Unfortunately the attendants slammed her gurney into a closed elevator door at which point the woman had an out-of-body experience. Apart from being able to see her own body beneath her, she could see down the hall where two men she knew were both standing, looking shocked. Though one of these men was unable to recall the incident (some years had passed when the facts of this case were gathered), the other was able to independently confirm all the essential facts of this event. This case is interesting for two reasons. Firstly, the respirator on her face obscured her field of vision, preventing the kind of lateral vision necessary for her to view these men down the hall. Secondly, the inadvertent cutting of her superior vena cava caused a variety of medical catastrophes, including blindness. In other words, she was in all likelihood already completely blind when this event occurred. This leads us to another promising area of research, near-death experiences of the blind.
Dying to See
According to the materialist view a case that would constitute proof of the NDE's "supernatural" nature would be one in which a blind person correctly reported verifiable visual impressions during the experience. The argument behind this is that if our soul indeed leaves our bodies at death, gathering information by senses other than those provided by the body, blind people should have experiences more or less identical as those who can see. On the other hand, if the NDE is merely a constructed illusion of the dying mind as it assimilates residual information from the surroundings by "natural" means, visual data should not be a part of this experience. Presumably, any out-of-body elements to the experience should be auditory rather than visual.
The book, Mindsight, by researchers Kenneth Ring and Sharon Cooper, deals exclusively with the near-death experiences of blind people. More than 30 people were interviewed at length during a two-year study of near-death and out-of-body experiences in the blind, and the stories they tell make a convincing case for sight in the blind. In fact, the NDEs of blind people seem, on the whole, indiscernible from those of people who have no problem whatsoever with their sight. This includes both those who became blind later on in life as well as those blind from birth. Yet they generally provide visual recollections as clear as does everyone else when describing the out-of-body experience: the tunnel, the beings of light and so forth.
One such experience is that of Vicki, a 45-year-old woman who had been born blind. Following an automobile accident, she found herself floating above her body in the emergency room of a hospital watching a male doctor and a female nurse working on her body. She did not recognise herself at first, but identified the body as her own due to its design and the fact that she was wearing a "plain gold band on my right ring finger and my father's wedding ring next to it." Eventually she found herself going up through the ceilings of the hospital rooms until she was above the roof of the building. There she experienced a brief panoramic view of her surroundings. From this point she was sucked head first into a dark tube, yet she was aware that she was moving toward light. Upon exiting this tube, she found herself lying on grass, surrounded by trees and flowers and a vast number of people. Everything seemed to be made of light, not only a light one could see, but a light one could actually feel. Before returning, Vicki also experienced a complete panoramic review of her life, accompanied by an understanding of the significance of her actions and their repercussions.
Another case is that of Brad, also blind from birth, who had an NDE at the Boston Center for Blind Children in 1968 when he was eight years old. Brad's heart stopped for at least four minutes during a case of pneumonia leading to severe breathing difficulties, and CPR had been required to bring him back. During the experience, he saw his own body as well as his roommate who got up from his bed and left the room to get help. Brad experienced going through the ceilings of the building until he was above the roof, where he realised that he could see clearly. Here he identified the sky as cloudy and dark and saw snow everywhere except for the streets which had been ploughed (there had been a snowstorm the day before). He was able to describe the snow banks the ploughs had created, and gave a detailed description of the way the snow looked. He also recognised a playground used by the children of his school as well as a nearby hill he used to climb. As the experience progressed, he found himself in a tunnel and eventually emerged into a field illuminated by a tremendous light. Here he walked on a path surrounded by tall grass, and reported seeing tall trees with immense leaves.
Apparently, visual perception of the physical world can, at first, be both disorienting and disturbing to the blind. Vicki, for instance, had a hard time relating to it initially, as she had never experienced anything like it. Eventually, though, it became perfectly natural. But there is another important aspect here: the authors named the book Mindsight because the visual experience is not quite like seeing in the ordinary sense. Rather, it was described as a more tactile experience, as if seeing with the mind, rather than with the eyes. Brad described it as "feeling with the finger of his mind". He felt that he became aware of images in a way he did not really understand. This is interesting as visual impressions during the out-of-body experience should be expected to be different if these experiences indeed represent dislocated consciousness. After all, we are not seeing by normal means, whereby information on our retinas is conveyed to the sight centre of our brain and there constructed into an image. We see (if we see at all) with our minds, experiencing the physical world (and possibly a fraction of the afterlife) in a state of disembodied consciousness.
Nor is the use of "new" senses restricted to the blind as deaf people also report being able to hear during NDEs.5 Dr. Melvin Morse has interviewed dozens of deaf children and adults who report hearing "in their minds." Many of these deaf children have some rudimentary hearing and report that the "hearing" during the NDE is very different than ordinary hearing. Dr. Morse argues that "sight" in the blind and "hearing" in the deaf is only to be expected, as the near-death experience is mediated through the right temporal lobe, and all the "seeing" and "hearing" is done through remote viewing and telepathy. It is the right temporal lobe that makes sense of "ordinary" input (be it visual, auditory, tactile or through some other normally available sense), so why should it not make sense of "extraordinary" input in the same manner? One child Dr. Morse spoke with described it "sort of like floating out of his body, but sort of like walking into his mind."6