Neuropsychiatrist Peter Fenwick writes: “We have seen that during dreaming, brain physiology is highly organized, and this makes it unlikely that NDEs occurring when the brain is damaged and malfunctioning are simply dreams. Can we also argue that even when the brain is functioning normally there are psychological aspects of the NDE that make dreaming an unlikely explanation?
“The first difficulty is that if the NDE is only a dream it is odd that so many people experience the same, or at any rate very similar dreams. Also, most dreams “do not have the sense of absolute reality which is such a hallmark of the NDE. Finally, I think we also have to accept that subjectively, the NDE does not feel like a dream. Everybody knows what a dream feels like; the people who descried these NDE experiences remain convinced that what happened to them was not a dream.”
“We set out to test the NDE for ‘reality’ in a scientific way,” he continues. “But there are aspects of the experience, which simply don’t fit into our scientific paradigm and which seem to be inconsistent with a physical or even a psychological phenomenon. There remains the possibility,” however, “that the NDE is a mystical experience, and that it originates in a transcendental reality.
“One way of testing this is to look at some experiences in which it seems very unlikely that there is either a physical or psychological mechanism at work. Mrs Frances Barnshey was one of the few people who described an experience, which seems to have arisen quite spontaneously.
I was in bed, recovering from ‘flu, reading. I began to feel very relaxed and peaceful. I’ve never felt like that either before or since that experience. I put down my book as I could hear my husband and two children moving about downstairs, getting tea ready, and I remember thinking, ‘Lovely, there’s going to be a cup of tea in a minute,’ and just at that point I felt myself shoot up out of my body, through the crown of my head of my head at the most terrific speed, like being fired from a rocket. I was out in space, no dark tunnel, and I thought, this is how the birds must feel, so free.
I was actually like a kite on an endless string, which I could feel attached between my shoulder blades. I couldn’t see any kind of body belonging to me, I seemed to be mind and emotions only, but I felt more vital, more myself than I’ve felt in my life at any time before or since. I found myself traveling towards this tremendous light, so bright that it would have blinded me if I’d looked at it here, but there it was different. I reached the light, which was all round me. I saw no one and heard no one, but I knew I wasn’t alone, and I felt this wonderful love enfolding me and understanding me. No matter what my faults, what I’d done or hadn’t done, the light loved me unconditionally.
I so wanted to stay there, but I was told that this couldn’t be, I had to go back, and then I felt this cord on my back—the biblical silver cord?—pulling me back and the next thing I knew was that I was back in my body and my son was coming into the bedroom with my cup of tea. The experience is as vivid in my mind as it was when it happened. I’ve always believed in life after death, though I no longer belong to any form of organized religion, preferring to find my own path, but if I needed anything to confirm my belief in another plane of existence, that experience certainly did. I feel so grateful to have had it.
Peter Fenwick and Elizabeth Fenwick, The Truth in the Light: An investigation of Over 300 Near-Death Experiences (Berkeley Books, 1997).
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