View into eternity at bedside death

Psychiatrist Raymond Moody in his 2010 book Glimpses of Eternity documents “shared death experiences” involving physicians, nurses, and hospice workers. A hospice psychologist in North Carolina writes of her experiences: 

The deathbed scene is not fully in this world. And although I am not religious, hospice work has awakened me to a spiritual dimension of life.

In my opinion, everyone who works with the dying long enough must have some awareness of these experiences. I believe the spiritual experiences of dying people somehow leak out and pervade the area around them. If you step into that area with the right temperament, you will receive, I feel, a sense of the sacred in the presence of the dying.

I have experienced the room taking on a different configuration a number of times. The only way that I can describe it is that moving energy pulses through the room. I often feel something that I can’t name.

The bedside of the dying offers a view into eternity. Like looking through a window into elsewhere, from time to time I see lights and twice have had clear views of what appear to be structures. On both occasions I saw patients leave their bodies in a cloud form. I saw them rise out of their bodies and head toward these structures.

I would describe these clouds as a sort of mist that forms around the head or chest. There seems to be some kind of electricity to it, like an electrical disturbance. I don’t know if I see it with my physical eyes, but it’s there all the same. There is no doubt in my mind that you can sometimes see people depart for the other side.

Shared death experiences may confirm communication between the living, dying, and dead. A sergeant at Fort Dix in New Jersey sharing his experience, which was verified by his physicians:

I was terribly ill and near death with heart problems at the same time that my sister was near death with a diabetic coma in another part of the same hospital. I left my body and went into the corner of the room, where I watched them work on me down below. Suddenly, I found myself in conversation with my sister, who was up there with me. I was very attached to her, and we were having a great conversation about what was going on down there when she began to move away from me.

I tried to go with her but she kept telling me to stay where I was. “It’s not your time,” she said. Then she just began to recede off into the distance through a tunnel while I was left there alone.  When I awoke, I told the doctor that my sister had died. He denied it, but at my insistence, he had a nurse check on it. She had in fact died, just as I knew she did. (90-91)

Raymond A. Moody with Paul Perry, Glimpses of Eternity: An Investigation into Shared Death Experiences  (London: Rider, 2010), 102-03. 90-91.