End-of-life experiences: Taylor excerpt #7

Greg Taylor writes: On their own, near-death experiences – especially veridical NDEs – provide compelling evidence that during brushes with death our consciousness can separate from the body and continue on in some form. However, there are a number of other anomalistic experiences regularly reported as occurring at the actual end of someone’s life – often grouped under the umbrella term ‘end of life experiences’ (ELEs) – that add to that body of evidence and provide even more support for the hypothesis. These include: 

• death-bed visions or dreams in which the dying person encounters and often communicates with deceased loved ones, and transitions to and from afterlife-like realms which feature feelings of love and light
  
• strange phenomena experienced by family and carers attending to the dying
  
• death-bed coincidences or ‘crisis apparitions’, in which someone emotionally close to the dying person becomes aware of them at the moment of their death
  
• ‘terminal lucidity’, in which patients with severe impairment suddenly and unexpectedly become aware of their environment and interact with family and carers.

Like NDEs, these experiences are not rare occurrences – in fact, ELEs are exceedingly common, and have been reported in the deaths of well-known figures including George Harrison, Thomas Edison and Steve Jobs. 

In a 2010 study lead by neuropsychiatrist Dr. Peter Fenwick, researchers found that almost two-thirds of doctors, nurses and hospice carers reported witnessing ELEs with dying patients. The survey confirmed the findings of previous studies: an Irish study of carers in 2009 also found that around two-thirds of respondents witnessed end-of-life experiences in their patients, while another study in the U.S. in 2007 had found that more than half of the 525 surveyed carers reported instances of a dying person having a death-bed vision. It is worth remembering that all these surveys are only of carers and family reporting ELEs – the number is likely to be much larger as they don’t include data from the people actually going through the dying process.

Just as we saw with NDEs, ELEs do not seem to be an hallucinatory by-product of a malfunctioning brain: the vast majority of the carers interviewed in Fenwick’s study “agreed that ELEs were not due to confusional states resulting from either medication or the toxic processes involved in dying,” and “usually occurred in clear consciousness.” In fact, research has found that dying patients were less likely to have ELEs if they were medicated with drugs, or suffering from an illness which affected their normal state of consciousness.

What’s more, carers consider these end-of-life experiences “to be profoundly subjective and meaningful events” that often “helped the individual to let go of life and lessened the fear of dying.” Rather than being confusing hallucinations, ELEs were seen as important ‘spiritual’ events, imbued with personal meaning, which helped ease the distress of dying. 

Greg Taylor, “What is the Best Available Evidence for the Survival of Human Consciousness after Permanent Bodily Death?” An essay written for the Bigelow contest addressing this question. I am presenting excerpts without references, but this essay is available with footnotes and a bibliography at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.