Perception at a distance: Mays excerpt #4

A skeptic can object that Dr. Rudy’s patient was in the same room as the two surgeons and may have had some perceptions from residual brain function, even after 20 minutes. However, there are numerous cases in which the NDEr perceives unusual objects and events at a distance from the physical body—in an adjacent room, down the hallway, on another floor of the building, or hundreds of miles away.

Critical care physician Laurin Bellg’s patient, Howard, suffered a cardiac arrest while recovering from surgery in the ICU. Bellg was the physician in charge during the resuscitation. Howard was completely unconscious but was resuscitated by several defibrillation shocks and was put on a ventilator.

Howard related that he shot out of the top of his head, “I’m looking down on my body and it feels like I’m bobbing and bouncing against the ceiling.” With the thought that maybe he was to go somewhere, “I felt myself rising up through the ceiling and it was like I was going through the structure of the building. I could feel the different densities of passing through insulation. I saw wiring, some pipes and then I was in this other room. It looked like a hospital but ... it was very quiet ... like there was no one there. There were [people in beds that] looked like mannequins and they had IVs hooked up to them but they didn’t look real. In the center was an open area that looked like a collection of workstations with computers.”

Right above his ICU room is a nurse-training center with simulated hospital rooms, with medical mannequins on some of the beds, and in the center, a collection of workspaces with computers. Dr. Bellg and the attending nurse were astonished at the accuracy of Howard’s description and because the presence of the nurse-training center was not generally known, even by non-nursing staff.

Howard continued, “I wasn’t there long before I got jerked back to my body with a jolt and then floated up again. As I floated up this time, I heard someone say, ‘Turn up the juice’ and then ‘Okay, charge.’ ... Then I saw the things they put on your chest to shock you like you see on TV, and I saw my body jump right after someone said, “Everybody clear.” These perceptions were all completely accurate. Howard was jerked back on the first defibrillation shock. As Bellg recounted, the first shock had not worked and “right away I said, ‘Let’s turn up the juice. ... Okay, charge.’”

Howard’s heart was finally brought back in normal rhythm. He was intubated and remained under sedation for several days after the resuscitation. When he was finally weaned off the ventilator, he was able to talk and related a number of additional veridical details of the resuscitation, for example, Bellg’s specific comments when putting the intubation tube in.

Howard’s numerous veridical visual and auditory perceptions occurred during cardiac arrest and resuscitation while his heart was still stopped. They were verified immediately after his ventilator was removed, in his first telling, including accurate details of unusual objects—in the training center on the floor above the ICU—which were clearly out of his physical line of sight. Notably, Howard reports feeling “the different densities of passing through insulation.” NDErs frequently report easily floating above their physical body, bobbing against the ceiling, and easily moving through solid objects such as walls and ceilings, sometimes feeling a slight resistance or a change in density in the process

 

Robert G. Mays, BSc and Suzanne B. Mays, AA,  “There is no death: Near-death experience evidence for survival after permanent bodily death.” An essay written for the 2021 Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies addressing the question: “What Is The Best Available Evidence For The Survival Of Human Consciousness After Permanent Bodily Death?” Footnotes are omitted from these excerpts but are in the full text available from the Bigelow website at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.