Apparitions during NDEs: Rawlette excerpt #11

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette writes in her essay, Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness - "Further evidence for the reality of expanded perception during NDEs comes from cases in which NDErs had the experience of perceiving events at a location other than that of their body and someone at that location also perceived an apparition of the NDEr. Rivas, Dirven, and Smit catalog four such cases.

In one of these, reported by critical care physician Dr. Laurin Bellg, a young man was so estranged from his dying mother that she refused to allow him into her hospital room. He was hanging out in a nearby bar when he was amazed to see her walk in. He started to go to her, but other people passed between them, and afterward she was gone. Around the same time, the woman (whose body was actually still lying in her hospital bed) woke up and told her daughter, 'I had the strangest dream. I dreamed that I was in a bar and I saw my son sitting at a table crying, and he got up to start coming to me. And I got scared and I woke up.'

"In another case cataloged by Rivas, Dirven, and Smit, this one investigated by Dr. Melvin Morse and Paul Perry, Olga Gearhardt of San Diego, California, was receiving a heart transplant. Her whole family had gathered at the hospital during her surgery, except for her son-in-law, who had a phobia of hospitals. At 2:15am, the new heart would not beat properly and then stopped completely. The resuscitation process took hours, but finally her new heart was persuaded to function properly. Meanwhile, the son-in-law, at home, woke up at 2:15am to see Olga standing at the foot of his bed. She was so lifelike that he thought it was actually her, that her plans must have changed and, instead of getting surgery, she had come to his house. He asked her how she was doing, and she told him, 'I am fine, I’m going to be all right. There is nothing for any of you to worry about.' When she disappeared, he got up and wrote down the time and what she had said. The next morning, when Olga came out of surgery, she mentioned 'the strange dream' she’d had, which appears to have been a near-death experience. She not only had the experience of being out of her body watching the doctors operate, but she went to her family in the waiting room and tried to communicate with them. Unable to get through, she then decided to go to her son-in-law at his home, where 'she was sure she had stood at the foot of her son-in-law’s bed and told him that everything was going to be all right.'

"These cases of reciprocal apparitions don’t just provide evidence for the reality of the near-death experience but also give us further evidence with regard to apparitions of the dead. The fact that apparitions of those near death are experienced in much the same way as apparitions of the deceased and that NDErs have been able to report back on their subjective experience of being at the location in question makes it even more plausible that apparitions of the deceased (some of which occur long after death) also reflect their conscious presence."

 

Sharon Hewitt Rawlette has a PhD in philosophy from New York University and writes about consciousness, parapsychology, and spirituality for both academic and popular audiences. She lives in rural Virginia. She received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for her essay “Beyond Death: The Best Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness,” available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes in the essay are not included in these excerpts.