Deathbed Visions: Ruickbie excerpt #18

Psychologist Leo Ruickbie writes in “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies:  “The dying person, precisely at the moment of death, and when the power of speech was lost, or nearly lost, seemed to see something; or rather, to speak more exactly, to become conscious of something present (for actual sight is out of question) of a very striking kind, which remained invisible to and unperceived by the assistants.”  

Frances Cobbe likened this experience to that “peak in Darien” (Panama) whereon Cortez and his men, expecting to see a continent, beheld instead the vast Pacific ocean stretching to the horizon. Writing in 1882, Cobbe found that almost every family could recall such a deathbed incident, the vision being of someone known to the dying who had pre-deceased them. 

Almost 150 years later, Dr. Christopher Kerr studied end-of-life experiences involving 1,400 interviews with dying patients. He found that “over 80% reported at least one pre-death dream or vision described as more real than real and distinct from normal dreaming,” and for 72% this was a dream/vision of the deceased (friends, family, and pets). He found a correlation between the frequency of dreaming of the deceased and the nearness of death that had predictive value. Although Kerr did not consider evidential aspects, his study proves that the experience itself is common and widespread.*

The typical case involves the familiar “receptio ad mortem,” to coin a phrase, a welcoming party composed of one or more deceased family members and sometimes friends. This in itself gives heart, that we should see in our final moments those most loved by us and that they are there to welcome us to the other side, even if only a delusion it is a comforting end; however, the delusional explanation is overthrown by the reporting of information that the dying should not ordinarily possess.

The most Scrooge-defying accounts of deathbed visions involve seeing people who are unknown to the dying person to have died. Cobbe recounted one such case, but since then many more have come to light. When A.T. Baird collected a hundred of the best cases, he concluded that deathbed visions of this sort gave “the strongest support to the theory of the survival of human personality after bodily death.”**

* Christopher Kerr, Death is But a Dream: Finding Meaning and Hope at Life's End (Avery, 2020 ) https://www.amazon.com/Death-But-Dream-Finding-Meaning/dp/0525542841. 

** A. T. Baird, One Hundred Cases for Survival After Death, (White Crow, 2018), https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/one-hundred-cases-for-survival-after-death-alexander-t-baird/1120039023.

Leo Ruickbie, “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies. Ruickbie teaches psychology at Kings College and the University of Northamptom in the United Kingdom. Footnotes have been deleted from these online excerpts from his essay. The entire essay may be downloaded at the Bigelow site https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.