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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, such as 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 described to see whether any such shoe could be found. The shoe was there as Maria had described it, except that from the window through which Clark was able to see it, the details of its appearance 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 .
In one such case, also involving a shoe, a resuscitated patient recounted a 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 a sceptical resident this story, 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 they met by chance, whereupon the patient immediately recognised her as the nurse wearing the plaid shoelaces on the day before. Though undetectable for 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 same 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 this 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 woman who underwent a biopsy in connection with a possible cancerous chest tumour. Due to an undetected mistake during surgery, the severing of her superior vena cava, she was rushed from the recovery room in a gurney in order 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 below 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, because the respirator on her face during the accident 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
Another case that would constitute proof of the NDE's 'supernatural' nature according to the materialist view would be one in which a blind person correctly reported visual impressions during the experience, which could be corroborated. The argument being 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 more or less identical experiences as those who can see. On the other hand, if the NDE is merely a constructed illusion of the dying mind assimilating residue information from the dying person's 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 NDE's 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, the latter not only being unable to see but being completely unfamiliar with the concept of vision itself. Yet they generally provide as clear visual recollections as everyone else when describing the out-of-body experience, the tunnel, the beings of light and the other visual aspects of the experience.
One such experience was 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 build 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." She recognised the wedding ring due to it having "orange blossoms on the corners of it". Eventually she found herself going up through the ceilings of the hospital until she was above the roof of the building, where 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 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 such case is that of Brad, also blind from birth, which took place in 1968 when he was eight years old at the Boston Center for Blind Children. 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, as well as being able to give the authors a very detailed description of the way the snow looked. He also recognised a playground used by the children of his school as well as a particular hill he used to climb nearby.
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 also 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, which is the reason that the authors named the book "mindsight", and that is that 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, by information on our retinas being conveyed to the sight centre of our brain and there constructed into an image. We are seeing (if we are seeing at all) with our minds, experiencing the physical world (and possibly a fraction of the afterlife) in a state of disembodied consciousness.