Evidence of shared death experiences (SDEs)

Researchers Robert and Suzanne Mays write: "In shared death experiences (SDEs), the SDEr is healthy and awake. They may observe the dying person separate from the physical body at the time of death. Alternatively, they may themselves be drawn out-of-body with the deceased person’s spirit body. The SDEr may observe the life review of the deceased person, similar to the life review in NDEs. The SDEr may observe deceased relatives or friends come to welcome and escort the deceased person to a different realm.

"The SDErs are healthy, credible eyewitnesses of the objective facts they observe. If more than one person is present with the dying person, their individual accounts frequently corroborate each other. For example:

"Scott Taylor’s shared death experience: In 1981, Scott Taylor’s girlfriend Mary Frances and her seven-year-old son Nolan were involved in a horrific car accident. Mary Fran was killed outright and her son survived for an additional six days with a severe head wound. At the time of Nolan’s transition, Scott and a number of Mary Fran’s family were in the hospital room. Scott witnessed Mary Fran come 'across the veil,' approach Nolan, scoop him up out of his physical body, and hold him in a loving embrace. To his surprise, the two of them turned to Scott, embraced him and the three of them 'went to the light.' About 10 years later, Scott spoke with another family member who had the exact same experience at the time of Nolan’s death: When Nolan flatlined, she witnessed Mary Fran come 'across the veil' and scoop Nolan up out of his physical body. They embraced and she got to be part of that embrace. At some point they turned to her and the three of them 'went to the light.' She used the exact same words that Scott used to describe his experience.

"The SDEr observes the dying person’s transition to actual death in three ways: (1) Many of the elements observed by SDErs are identical with NDE elements but are observed from a third-person perspective. (2) We can infer from the SDEr’s descriptions many of the things the dying person experiences. These are the same phenomena as the first-person perspective in an NDE. Finally, (3) the SDEr directly experiences elements that commonly occur in NDEs:

"The SDEr observes that the dying person is out-of-body, meets deceased persons and a mystical being or presence. The SDEr observes that the dying person sees or is enveloped in a brilliant light and enters an unearthly or heavenly realm.

"We can infer from the SDEr’s description of the dying person’s reactions and behavior that the dying person experiences a life review. From the dying person’s expressions of happiness or joy and peace, we can infer they are free from pain, having shed their physical body.

"The SDEr themselves describes that their senses were more vivid and their sense of time changed. The SDEr receives veridical information from their experience which they later verify as accurate. The SDEr is told by the deceased person that they need to return to the body or the SDEr just finds themselves back in the body.

"The SDEr’s observations indicate that the dying person experiences the same things that NDErs experience in their NDE. If we could administer the NDE Scale to the deceased person, the experience would be counted as an NDE. The elements in the two processes are indistinguishable. The only difference is that the dying person does not return to the physical body but continues to exist after physical death.

Thus, the 'spirit body' of the deceased person observed by SDErs is the same as the mind entity that we propose is the essential aspect of the human being. The only difference between the deceased person and the NDEr is that the NDEr returns to physical embodiment whereas the deceased person moves on into a another realm. Thus the deceased person’s conscious Self survives physical death."

 

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.

Dr. Reggie Anderson's experiences of heaven

Dr. Reggie Anderson writes from the perspective of a firm Christian faith. He describes, however, his loss of faith as a young man and how the love he shared with the woman who became his wife—and having what he describes as a very powerful dream—renewed his childhood faith.

Anderson begins his book with his first experience as a resident caring for a dying patient. “Throughout medical school I had taken care of dying patients, but this was the first time that I, as the senior resident, would be the one in charge when a patient died. I didn’t know what to expect.

Dr. Anderson, the elderly woman began, her voice starting to fade. Will you hold my hand? I’m going to see Jesus, and I need an escort.

“That night, I experienced the veil parting—the veil that separates this life from the next. As I held the dying woman’s hands, I felt the warmth of her soul pass by my cheek when it left her body, swept up by an inexplicably cool breeze in an otherwise stagnant room. I smelled the familiar fragrance of lilac and citrus, and I knew the veil was parting to allow her soul to pass through.

“Since that first patient, I’ve walked with countless others to the doorstep of heaven and watched them enter paradise. On many occasions, as I held hands with the dying, God allowed me to peer into heaven’s entryway where I watched each patient slip into the next world.

“Sometimes I’ve even witnessed patients leave this world and come back. As they’ve shared their stories with me, I’ve often remembered the time early in my life when God allowed me to step into heaven’s foyer, even though I no longer believed he was real.

“The one thing these experiences have in common is the intensity of the sights, sounds, fragrances, and feelings that I sensed. Heaven is more real than anything we experience here, and the sense of peace, joy, and overwhelming love is beyond description.”

Reggie Anderson with Jennifer Schuchmann, Appointments with Heaven: The True Story of a Country Doctor’s Healing Encounters with the Hereafter (Tyndale Momentum, 2013), 4-5.

 

Resurrection is spiritual not physical

The New Testament gospels are anonymous. The shortest gospel is attributed to Mark, a colleague of Paul. The earliest version of this gospel reports that Mary Magdalene and Mary, the mother of Jesus, and Salome (another follower of Jesus), come to the tomb, find the stone rolled away, and are told by a young man in a white robe that Jesus "has been raised" and gone to Galilee, where he will meet them. The gospel ends by saying the women "fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid." (Mk. 16:1-8)

In the gospel attributed to the disciple Matthew, an earthquake opens the tomb and an angel delivers to the two Marys, who come to the tomb, the same message as in the gospel of Mark. When the two women run to tell the disciples, Jesus appears and speaks to them, and the gospel says: "they came to him, took hold of his feet, and worshipped him." After the women tell the disciples what they have witnessed, the eleven disciples go to Galilee, see Jesus, and worship him. But, the gospel adds, "some doubted." (Mt. 28:17)

The gospel attributed to Paul’s colleague Luke says two men in dazzling clothes tell the two Marys and Joanna (another follower of Jesus), that he has been raised from the dead. Jesus doesn't appear to the women, but does appear to two other followers and to Peter, before appearing to some of his disciples in Jerusalem. He says: "Look at my hands and my feet, see that it is I myself. Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have." (Lk. 24:39) This gospel says Jesus eats a piece of fish, tells his disciples to stay in Jerusalem, blesses them, and then is lifted up into heaven. (Lk. 24)

In the gospel attributed to the disciple John, Mary Magdalene comes alone to the tomb and finds the stone rolled away. Jesus appears to her and says, "Do not hold me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father." He gives her this message for his disciples: "I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God." The gospel of John also says the disciple Thomas doubts the resurrection, until Jesus appears to him by the Sea of Galilee and eats fish with him and several other disciples. (Jn. 20-21)

Paul’s resurrection account differs with all of the gospel stories. Paul tells the Christians at Corinth: "I handed on to you . . . what I in turn had received [from the disciples] that Christ appeared to Peter, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time. . . . Then he appeared to James [the brother of Jesus, who became the leader of the church in Jerusalem], then to all the apostles. Last of all . . . he appeared also to me." (1 Cor. 15:3-8)

As Paul is writing in the 50s and the gospel authors wrote after the Jewish revolt that begins in 66, Paul’s resurrection account is earlier. Moreover, Paul seems unaware of stories about Jesus appearing to women at an empty tomb or eating with his disciples.

Paul is, however, aware that some Christians doubt in the resurrection, for he writes to the Corinthians: "how can some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead?" Paul explains that resurrection is the fulfillment of God’s will for all creation, not merely the raising of Jesus from the dead. Christ is the beginning of the resurrection of the dead that will come for all those, he says, "who belong to Christ." (1 Cor. 15:20-23) And he argues that the resurrection of the Christians in Corinth will be the same as the resurrection of Christ.

It appears that some among the Christians in Corinth, have asked: “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?” Paul answers: “Fool! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies." And he explains: "There are both heavenly bodies and earthly bodies. . . . What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. . . . It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body." (1 Cor. 15: 40, 42, 44)

The authors of the New Testament gospels ignore the earlier resurrection account Paul received from the disciples and also his explanation that resurrection is not physical. We, too, may doubt the resurrection, but there is no doubt that Paul's spiritual experience of the risen Christ transformed his life and the course of history over the following two millennia. 

Grace and peace . . . Bob Traer

After-Death Communications (ADCs)

Hospice physician Pamela M. Kircher reports that: “While After-Death Communications (ADCs) are common during NDEs and in the last phase of life, these visitations occur under other circumstances as well. People are often ‘notified’ of a death by the deceased person. ADCs are quite common in the days or first few weeks after the death of a close relative. Most of these communications seem to have the purpose of reassuring the grieving relatives or friends.”

But sometimes a visit from a dead loved one communicates a warning. For example, “A warning from a dead mother saved another person from a car accident. As a man was driving his usual path to work, he distinctly ‘heard’ his mother (who had died two years before) tell him to take another route. Feeling a bit foolish, he did take another route. Later in the day, he heard on the news that there had been a ten-car pile-up in the fog right where he would have been that morning had he not taken the alternate route.”

“I honestly believe,” Kircher concludes, “that everything that happens in life is for a purpose that will ultimately serve our highest good and that I am responsible to look for ways to be in alignment with that highest good.”

Pamela M. Kircher, Love is the Link: A Hospice Doctor Shares Her Experience of Near-Death and Dying (Awakenings Press, 2013).

 

Living without fear of death

May the God of perseverance and encouragement give you a spirit of unity among yourselves following the example of Christ Jesus, so that with one heart and one voice you may glorify God. (Romans 15:1-6)

Paul struggles to achieve support for his teachings in Rome and elsewhere. Paul argues that diversity can exist within the body of Christ, but his teaching is also a cause of division. He blames the conflicts on those who oppose him, but Paul's opponents must have blamed Paul. And who are Paul's opponents? The former disciples of Jesus, the apostles in Jerusalem who, we learn in Galatians 2 and in the second half of Acts, are led by James, the brother of Jesus.

The apostles in Jerusalem seem to believe that some if not all of the commandments of Jewish law must be kept by all following the Way of Jesus. As they knew Jesus during his lifetime, it is hard to believe that the historical Jesus set aside the Jewish law as Paul claims the risen Christ does. Paul never knew the historical Jesus, but he acknowledges that both he and the former disciples know the risen Lord. Why then do they differ?

Paul was a Greek-speaking Jew from a Roman city; the disciples of Jesus who were the first apostles were Aramaic-speaking Jews from Galilee. Perhaps their experience of the risen Christ was different, because their lives were so different. Yet, despite conflicting beliefs about Jesus, the first apostles and also Paul were transformed by their experience of the risen Christ.

In our time, thousands of survivors of near-death experiences have been transformed by the love and light that embraced them when they were unconscious and their brains were incapable of constructing perceptions, feelings, or memories. Nonetheless, these witnesses had striking perceptions, feelings, and memories. And now tell us that we all are going home. If you trust in their testimony, you too can live without fear of death.

Grace and peace . . . Bob Traer

 

After-death communication: Mays excerpt #22

The Mays write: Skeptics can still argue that despite the veridical information received by the SDEr and the corroboration from multiple SDEr witnesses, the evidence from SDEs of the transition of the dying person is still from a subjective experience. Is there any objective evidence that the dying person actually continues to exist or do they just disappear or merge into nothingness after their physical death?

After-death communication (ADC) is the experience of spontaneous direct communication from a deceased family member or friend with a living person. In spontaneous cases, the deceased loved one always initiates the communication.

The communication may be by sensing a presence, hearing a voice, feeling a touch, smelling a fragrance, or seeing the deceased person in partial or full appearance. The deceased person may appear completely solid or somewhat hazy, and is usually wearing their customary clothing.

ADCs are commonplace and occur in normal, healthy people. The communication may occur while the witness is completely awake, while asleep, or while falling asleep or waking up. Even during sleep, the witness experiences the encounter as more real than everyday reality.

The deceased person may provide veridical information about a lost insurance policy or hidden valuables. They may warn the witness to avoid an airplane crash. In other cases, the deceased person is not known to the witness but is later revealed to be a relative.

ADCs generally start within one year of the deceased person’s death but may occur many years later. They occur to both the bereaved and the non-bereaved. The witness may continue to sense the deceased person’s presence throughout their life.

Researchers estimate that one-third of the worldwide population has had one or more ADCs. ADCs provide objective evidence that the deceased person continues to exist after physical death.

Reports Lucille's case

Lucille was a 39-year-old hotel housekeeper in Florida. She had been adopted after birth. Her birth name was Mary but her adoptive parents had changed it to Lucille.

“A man came to the foot of my bed one night. I was scared because I didn’t recognize him. He said, ‘Mary, your mother loves you. ... Your mother is looking for you. Start looking for her. Find your mother! I love you.’ I remember asking him who he was just before I couldn’t see him anymore. And he said, ‘You’ll find out.’ The next thing I knew, he was gone. I was still scared, yet I had tears of happiness. I was glad to know that my birth mother was looking for me. This gave me the incentive to find my biological mother. I was always dreaming about finding her, but I didn’t want to hurt my adoptive parents. Then I went to a club for adoptees, and I found my mother with just one phone call! She asked, ‘How did you find me?’ I told her an elderly man came to the foot of my bed. I described what he looked like, and she said, ‘That’s your grandfather!’ I learned when Grandpa was dying, he told my mother, ‘Find your daughter. Find your baby.’ He wanted to rest in peace knowing we would be together again. ... When we met [the next day], [my mother] showed me a picture of my grandfather, and that was the man who had been standing at the foot of my bed. Grandpa had the same suit on in the photograph that he wore when he came to me. Then I knew my experience was real!”

In this case, Lucille sees an unknown deceased man who gives her a message about her birth mother, addressing her with her birth name. Lucille confirms that the person she saw was her deceased biological grandfather from the photograph of him her mother showed her. This case is similar to the NDEr seeing an unknown deceased man and later finding out he was his biological father. Lucille’s perception of her deceased grandfather was accurate, that is, veridical. The information her father told her, that her mother was looking for her, was also veridical.

In another example, the deceased person can be seen by two or more people independently and their individual accounts corroborate each other.

Blair was a business executive, age 45. Her father had died from a series of strokes. She and her five-year-old son were together in a hotel room the night before the funeral. Blair was sitting in a chair and her son was in bed. As she was praying for her father:

“The lights in the room seemed to grow dim, and all of a sudden, there was my father! He seemed very, very solid. Though he was in his eighties when he died, now he appeared to be more like a man in his sixties. ... He stood there and told me, ‘Be strong and take care of your mother. Remember, I love you. Good-bye.’ Dad’s facial expression softened considerably when he said, ‘Remember, I love you.’ It lasted only a few seconds, and then he left. My little boy, who was in bed, got up. I thought he had been asleep. He ran to me and said, ‘My granddaddy! My granddaddy!’ I said, ‘Your granddaddy is gone.’ And he said, ‘No! My granddaddy was right here!’ So my son saw him too!”

In this case, the agreement of two living people simultaneously witnessing the same ADC event provides objective corroboration of the event. To Blair, her father seemed “very, very solid” rather than ethereal and about 20 years younger. It is not unusual for the deceased person in an NDE, SDE or ADC to appear younger than they looked at the time of their death.

In another example, a deceased son was seen and touched by his father who was fully awake; there was an energetic interaction between father and son.

Twenty-five-year-old Eric Zimmerman was killed in an automobile accident and appeared to his father, Fred, forty-five days later. That morning, Fred had been up for half-an-hour and was stepping toward the bathroom.

“I felt a tremendous squeeze and hug on both sides of my body that stopped me in my tracks. Eric appeared right in front of my face, smiling, and the whole room was full of energy. It’s like the molecules, atoms, and air are all moving at a tremendous speed. It was forceful, explosive, loving, highly energized— the most exhilarating experience that I have ever had! I hugged Eric. I was hugging an energy force, not a real physical body. I kissed him on his right cheek and felt his beard/whiskers on my lips. He was moving so fast ... as though he was flying through the house.

“My mind was ecstatic, lucid, fully awake and aware of what was happening. I could see the tremendous love in the complete environment that Eric brought with him. I knew this was real, on purpose, planned by Eric as I could never have written or wished the events in this spontaneous experience. The force field, aura, and energy surrounding Eric was so strong and charged that it pushed me back onto the bed. ... As I had my arms around Eric, his image and I were falling toward the bed. He told me telepathically, ‘I love you Dad. I love you Mom.’ ... As we fell, he rolled over the top of me and I could see his whole body.”

In this case, Fred was fully awake and lucid. The entire encounter lasted only about ten seconds. Eric’s presence was instantly evident through Eric’s face and the touch of his beard, through the power of his personality, through the wrestling with his dad onto the bed, and through his message to his parents, “I love you Dad. I love you Mom.” The entire atmosphere was suffused with his love for them.

Fred’s interaction with his son included an energetic force that was strong enough to hold Fred and to push him physically backwards onto the bed. Eric’s “body” was not material but an “energy force” that Fred could touch, kiss and hug. Fred could feel the whiskers on Eric’s face.

This ADC encounter provides additional evidence suggesting that the nonmaterial mind entity can exert a measurable force on physical matter. 

 

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.

Crisis apparitions: Taylor excerpt #10

Greg Taylor writes: Anomalous experiences at the time of death are not restricted to the dying or those in the room with them: many people have reported having ominous feelings, seeing apparitions, and dreaming of the dead at the time of their passing, despite being removed from them by some distance. Over the years literally thousands of these experiences have been reported and investigated.

One astounding account is that of a mother who dreamt that her son had drowned:

I saw my twenty-two-year-old son walking toward me, his clothes dripping wet. He was talking to me, telling me that he was dead but that I was not to worry or be upset because he was all right... When I woke I was very disturbed and tried to contact my son. I found out later that day that he had drowned the previous night. I am convinced that he did contact me... I have drawn great comfort from his visit to me over the years.

Respected psychologist Dr. Stanley Krippner has told how he, at the age of 12 – while awake – “had a sudden premonition that my uncle had died. And, I was in my room, and heard downstairs the phone ring, and then I heard sobbing and crying, and indeed my cousin had just told my mother, saying that her father – my uncle – had just died. That was quite an alarming experience, I didn’t tell anybody about that for years.”

A major investigation of cases of this type was undertaken in the late 19th century by the British Society for Psychical Research (S.P.R.), an organization blessed with a membership consisting of some of the most respected intellectuals of the time, who nevertheless were committed to scientific investigation of strange phenomena suggestive of the survival of consciousness beyond death. The S.P.R. invested much time and effort collecting testimony from the public about such phenomena, even publishing advertisements in major newspapers and periodicals. The response to their enquiries was overwhelming, and one experience that was reported often was that in which a dying person was ‘seen’ by family at a remote location as they passed away (labeled ‘crisis apparitions’ by the S.P.R.). 

 

The Society’s researchers quickly realized that crisis apparitions differed substantially from the more commonly known ghost stories, not least due to their lack of ‘spook factor’: such tales, were – apart from the extraordinary nature of what they implied – overtly ordinary. Witnesses simply saw someone they knew, who would then disappear from view – there was no fright involved, only confusion as to what was just seen. It was only after some time had passed (remembering that in this era, communication took some time) they would they find out that the individuals who had appeared to them had died around the same time as the vision.

 

In 1886 the S.P.R. published their detailed report on such accounts as a book, under the title Phantasms of the Living. More than 1300 pages long and consisting of over 700 cases, the work involved in compiling the two-volume report was meticulous: researchers would follow up each case reported to them, interviewing the witness and verifying the account with testimony from third parties, contemporary written reports, and so on.

 

One ‘textbook’ case presented in Phantasms of the Living was that of Lieutenant-General Albert Fytche, who served as the Chief Commissioner of the British colony of Burma during the 1860s. Arising from bed one morning, Fytche was please to find an old friend had come to visit him. He greeted him warmly and suggested to the friend that they meet on the veranda for a cup of tea, though the man didn’t seem to respond in any way. When Fytche went to join him a few minutes later, the friend was nowhere to be found. Fytche was shocked to later read in the newspaper that this friend had died at the time he had seen him, some 600 miles distant.

 

The S.P.R.’s investigation revealed the huge volume of accounts of this nature occurring to everyday people. And in the modern day, Dr Peter Fenwick’s survey of palliative carers shows that they continue unabated: a full half of respondents said that they were aware of “coincidences, usually reported by friends or family...who say the dying person has visited them at the time of death.”

 

Could it be, as many skeptics might argue, that the prosaic explanation for such ‘coincidences’ is that we should in fact expect them as random, mundane occurrences in any survey of a large number of people? The S.P.R. investigated this by surveying more than 5000 individuals and extrapolating the results; they found that chance could not explain the number of well-attested crisis apparitions in their collection. And S.P.R. researcher Edmund Gurney was scathing on the question of whether accounts may have been made-up, noting that they had been collected from well-regarded members of the public, and the S.P.R.’s investigators had done much work to corroborate stories before including them. “When we submit the theory of deliberate falsification to the cumulative test...there comes a point where the reason rebels,” he wrote.

 

Furthermore, like cases at the bedside of the dying, some reports also featured multiple witnesses. For example, in one case a man and his son simultaneously saw his father’s face above them, although his wife did not (though she did acknowledge witnessing their reaction and comments at the time), only later learning that the man’s father had died at this time.

 

In the mid-20th century, researcher G.N.M. Tyrell identified 130 cases in which crisis apparitions were perceived by two or more people. Furthermore, he remarked that he had “no doubt that this list is not exhaustive.”

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.

Visions of the dying: Taylor excerpt #8

Death-bed visions are experiences in which a dying person sees already-departed loved ones – and also on some occasions, what appear to be otherworldly entities such as ‘angels’ – visiting their bedside in the hours, days, and sometimes weeks leading up to their passing. These incorporeal visitors are said to have come to greet the dying individual and guide them into the afterlife. For example, a recent account from a palliative carer told how a woman...

...about an hour before she died said, "they’re all in the room; they’re all in the room.” The room was full of people she knew and I can remember feeling quite spooked really and looking over my shoulder and not seeing a thing but she could definitely see the room full of people that she knew.

They are extremely common experiences, found across cultures worldwide, and have remained remarkably consistent across time. As the writer Frances Cobbe explained in The Peak in Darien – her 1882 book that discussed strange phenomena reported by the dying – over and over again death-bed visions are described “almost in the same words by persons who have never heard of similar occurrences, and who suppose their own experience to be unique.” Dying patients recount these visions calmly and rationally to others at the bedside such as family or carers; so much so that they are often observed to be almost living in two worlds, swapping nonchalantly between chatting to those in the here-and-now, and then with already-dead loved ones, or being immersed in an alternate reality full of love and light.

Sir William Barrett

One account related a century ago by the British physicist Sir William Barrett offers a fine example. Hattie Pratt was a schoolgirl who passed away from diphtheria in the early 1900s. As her family gathered around during her final hours, another family member –already deceased – appeared to greet young Hattie and guide her onwards. Hattie’s brother recounted that while Hattie’s throat “was so choked up” it required close attention to catch all of her words, “her mind seemed unusually clear and rational”:

She knew she was passing away, and was telling our mother how to dispose of her little personal belongings among her close friends and playmates, when she suddenly raised her eyes as though gazing at the ceiling toward the farther side of the room, and after looking steadily and apparently listening for a short time, slightly bowed her head, and said, “Yes, Grandma, I am coming, only wait just a little while, please.” Our father asked her, “Hattie, do you see your grandma?” Seemingly surprised at the question she promptly answered, “Yes, Papa, can't you see her? She is right there waiting for me.” At the same time she pointed toward the ceiling in the direction in which she had been gazing. Again addressing the vision she evidently had of her grandmother, she scowled a little impatiently and said, “Yes, Grandma, I'm coming, but wait a minute, please.” She then turned once more to her mother, and finished telling her what of her personal treasures to give to different ones of her acquaintances. At last giving her attention once more to her grandma, who was apparently urging her to come at once, she bade each of us good- bye. Her voice was very feeble and faint, but the look in her eyes as she glanced briefly at each one of us was as lifelike and intelligent as it could be. She then fixed her eyes steadily on her vision but so faintly that we could but just catch her words, said, “Yes, Grandma, I'm coming now.”

Hattie’s brother remarked that her clear-headedness during her final minutes, and alternation of attention between her dead grandmother and the rest of her still-living family (what Barrett calls ‘double consciousness’), “were so distinctly photographed upon the camera of my brain that I have never since been able to question the evidence of the continuance of distinct recognizable life after death.”

Hattie Pratt’s experience is just one of many cases discussed by Barrett in his seminal 1926 book Death-bed Visions. In researching the phenomenon, Barrett was particularly impressed by the commonalities related by those of a younger age, who would likely not have had a cultural expectation of the visions they saw. In fact, in several cases, the dying visions of children categorically did not agree with what their Christian upbringing had primed them to expect. For instance, 10-year-old Daisy Irene Dryden exclaimed during a death-bed vision in the final days of her illness, “We always thought the angels had wings! But it is a mistake; they don't have any.”

Like NDErs, the dying describe the realm they will soon move to as being bathed in love, light and peace. For example, in Italy a wife ran to her dying husband’s side only to be told by him that her mother – who had died 3 years previously – was “helping me to break out of this disgusting body. There is so much light...so much peace.” Furthermore, Dr Peter Fenwick points out, those having death-bed visions also sometimes experience other elements of the archetypal NDE, such as a life review and a border that must be crossed to transition to the afterlife realm. The similarities between NDEs and ELEs, Fenwick says, “suggest that both could be experiences of the same after-death reality.”

Frances Cobbe

And there is a category of death-bed vision that is similar in evidential value to the veridical NDE, offering even further support that what these people are seeing is real. In The Peak in Darien, Frances Cobbe wrote of an incident “of a very striking character”: a dying lady suddenly became joyful, and told those at her bedside that, one after another, three of her dead brothers had appeared in the room. Then, strangely, a fourth brother appeared alongside the others, despite being believed by all present to be alive and well at his residence in India. As this occurred in the late 19th century, there was no way of instantly checking on the brother, but letters were subsequently received informing the family of his death – at a time before his dying sister saw him in her vision.

Though Cobbe’s book covered a variety of strange phenomena, its title has become the unofficial name for this specific type of death-bed account, in which the dying are visited by an individual who was believed by them to be alive, but were actually deceased at the time of the vision: Peak-in-Darien experiences. Sir William Barrett believed such experiences provided “one of the most cogent arguments for survival after death, as the evidential value and veridical (truth-telling) character of these Visions of the Dying is greatly enhanced when the fact is undeniably established that the dying person was wholly ignorant of the decease of the person he or she so vividly sees.” Barrett’s contemporary Professor Charles Richet, who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1913, noted that “among all the facts adduced to prove survival, these seem to me to be the most disquieting, that is, from a materialistic point of view.”

Like veridical NDEs, there are a surprisingly large number of Peak in Darien experiences recorded in the literature. Sir William Barrett devoted an entire chapter of his book Death-Bed Visions to cases of this type. One well-documented example was a woman named 'Mrs. B' (also referred to as 'Doris'), who had just given birth to a baby, but died shortly after from heart failure. Lady Florence Barrett was present as the attending obstetrician, and after she told her husband what happened, he investigated further and gathered testimony from others present during the incident.

As she began to slip away, Mrs. B had gripped Lady Barrett’s hand tightly and asked her not to leave, saying “It’s getting so dark...darker and darker.” Mrs. B’s husband and mother were sent for, but her desperation suddenly turned to rapture. Looking across the room, a radiant smile lit up her face. “Oh, lovely, lovely,” she cried. When asked what she was seeing, Mrs. B replied “Lovely brightness, wonderful beings.” Lady Barrett was shaken by the conviction with which she said this, noting it was difficult “to describe the sense of reality conveyed by her intense absorption in the vision.”

Mrs. B then focused on a particular point in the air and cried joyously when a deceased loved one appeared to her: “Why, it’s Father! Oh, he’s so glad I’m coming.” Mrs. B spoke to her father, saying, “I am coming,” before turning to her mother at the bedside to tell her, “Oh, he is so near.” On looking back to the vision of her deceased father, she then said, with a puzzled expression, “He has Vida with him.” Vida was Mrs. B’s sister, whose death three weeks previously she had not been informed about, so as not to cause any aggravation to her own health. Mrs. B died within the hour.

A similar example from more modern times is that of a Chinese lady, terminally ill with cancer, reported by hospice nurses Maggie Callanan and Patricia Kelley in their 1993 book Final Gifts. The dying lady had been having recurrent visions of her deceased husband, who was calling her to join him:

One day, much to her puzzlement, she saw her sister with her husband, and both were calling her to join them. She told the hospice nurse that her sister was still alive in China, and that she hadn’t seen her for many years. When the hospice nurse later reported this conversation to the woman’s daughter, the daughter stated that the patient’s sister had in fact died two days earlier of the same kind of cancer, but that the family had decided not to tell the patient to avoid upsetting or frightening her.

As with veridical NDEs, the sheer number of Peak-in-Darien cases provides evidence that cannot be brushed away simply as chance occurrences.

 

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.

 

ELDVs of the dying: Kerr excerpt #22

ELDVs testify to our greatest needs--to love and be loved, to be nurtured and feel connected, to be remembered and forgiven. They are centered on self-understanding, concrete relationships, personal histories and singular events. They are made of images and vignettes that emanate from each person’s life experiences rather than from abstract preoccupations with the great beyond: a walk in the woods relived alongside a loving parent, car rides or fishing trips taken with close family members. Long-lost loved ones come back to reassure; past wounds are healed; loose ends are tied; lifelong conflicts are revisited; forgiveness is achieved. And based on the content of these dreams, it’s obvious that the forgiveness and love that count the most come from family. For thirteen-year-old Jessica, who was nearing death, her greatest fear was being alone in an afterlife without her mother, that is until Jessica’s ELDV conjured up her mother’s best friend Mary who predeceased her. In her own words, Jessica knew with certainty that she was “not going to be alone” after death, and that she would be “loved.” Jessica’s profound and enduring feelings of being loved and secured didn’t emerge from a distant dream. Jessica was clear: she observed Mary in wakefulness. Jessica also had dreams of her deceased dog Shadow who reaffirmed that she was “ok,” secured in love.

Although ELDVs, like Near Death Experiences (NDEs), entail the same paradox of a vibrant mind in a declining body, there are critical qualitative differences between NDEs and ELDVs. Characteristics of NDEs include impressions of being outside one’s physical body, awareness of being dead, a “tunnel” experience, movement toward and/or being immersed in “light”, life review and entering another realm of existence. These characteristics are not typically described in patients experiencing ELDVs. ELDVs are reported with much less abstraction or complexity. NDEs are commonly associated with a dramatic and lasting change in personality and outlook on life, whereas ELDVs leave the dying restored rather than changed.

ELDVs are felt and aligned with the life led – personal and core to self and one’s relationship to others. Unlike the person experiencing NDEs who is often motivated to analyze and share their experiences, the patient experiencing ELDV is not. A critical distinction between NDEs and ELDVs are that NDEs are often explained or dismissed in terms of changes in physiological function as part and parcel of the biological changes occurring as a result of “clinical” or nearing dying. The same criticism cannot be used to dismiss or refute ELDVs. Patients in our studies were not just interviewed in the last minutes and hours before death but longitudinally, in the days and weeks before death. All our study patients were screened for confusion, and many were high functioning and living independently when their ELDVs began. In other words, the experience of NDE occurs within clinical death whereas the ELDV experience occurs irrespective of how strong or tenuous the link between body and mind is or has become.

The results of our studies clearly reveal ELDVs as a state of consciousness that is different from other states of mind we may experience in health. For example, we have shown that ELDVs are distinct from dreams in several ways. Regular dreams are often defined as projections of latent psychodynamic processes and are rich in symbolism. By contrast, pre-death dreams and visions rarely contain the abstraction, behind-the-scene or metaphorical meanings we have come to expect from typical dreams. We have yet to have a patient emerge from an ELDV and ask for interpretation, analysis, or input. The time for introspection and therapy has passed. In fact, this is what patients tell us loud and clear: these dreams are different and unlike other dreams, because they are lived, virtual, experienced, and “more real than real.” They are a form of communication and connectivity that exit on a different plane which might be called transcendental and in which there is no distance between the dreamer and their dream experience. They often offer blueprints for a peaceful, visionary, and certainly revisionary end of life, and the meaning transcends the relation to the self to emanate from and in our relationship with loved ones. The following video is of a dying patient named Horace. In the video you will notice how Horace struggles to find language to describe what he is experiencing when his eyes are closed. He is overwhelmed just trying to describe his feelings of “happiness”, comfort, reunion, and love. He describes his deceased wife as even more beautiful than he remembered and felt “everywhere was “happiness” (Link to Horace Interview Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ssfw-sRiNuo).

ELDVs are also most commonly defined by unique communication between the dying patient and those individuals featured within the ELDV. They entail reframing the communication they stage as something that transcends language: participants typically report very little verbal exchange with those who pre-deceased them. The smile of the long-deceased child or the wave of a departed wife doesn’t require language or explanation. The exchange resides in a dimension of consciousness that is simply felt, understood and shared.

As the data revealed, End-of-Life Dreams and Visions also challenge the parameters of typical recollection or memory. Recollecting implies retrieving a prior time from the vantage point of the present, and ELDVs go beyond what we consider re-accessed or rekindled memories. The dying do not remember a person as in a picture, but rather, they are themselves immersed in a larger experience that is lived, rich and sense filled rather than simply conjured from memory. There is a qualitative change in perception or state of awareness, of something within oneself. Simply put, patients are not looking back; they are ensconced within the experience, sometimes communicating with someone whose recent death they had not been informed of, or resurrecting smells, sounds, and details that go well beyond our usual cognitive interpretations. 

The following video is of Jennifer who is describing the inner experiences of her dying partner Patrick. In it, Patrick relives eating his family’s “secret” spaghetti sauce with his deceased grandmother. His consciousness is immersed and responding to unseen surroundings that exist in a shared mental space, and Patrick now relays an awareness of feelings, perceptions and senses that may not be shared with the living but is shared with the dead, including the sensation of being full after having shared a meal. Patrick’s ELDVs even include new “memories”: just before death, Patrick now remembers the long-forgotten and missing ingredient in the secret sauce (Link to Jennifer Interview Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InncrCm_O18).

ELDVs are inherent to our human existence and are evident in dying patients regardless of age or cognitive ability. As noted in our case study, ELDVs challenge our limited understanding of cognition and mental ability: patients who experience ELDVs aren’t confused but rather display heightened acuity, insight and consciousness, and such experiences occur in patients who are cognitively different such as those with dementia or Downs Syndrome. Past events that may not have previously been recalled with such vividness and detail prior to their terminal decline now return to resurrect a life rich in emotional tones, meaning and history. More than recalled, these experiences are relived and felt with a renewed sense of existence. Such patients often re- experience the best parts of having lived beyond even their conscious control. Based on their compromised cognitive status, such patients were not included in our formal studies, but we did document, and even videotape, family reports of their loved ones’ end-of-life experiences. An elderly woman named Irene, who suffered with advanced dementia, kept re-experiencing the presence and love of her long-departed husband Gary. 

The following video is of Irene’s daughter, Sue, describing her mother’s experiences at life’s end. Irene was joyful and complete in her final days. Days before death, Irene attempted to leave the nursing home: she was reexperiencing the best day of her life, her wedding day, and needed to get to the service (Link to: Sue Interview Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozNGcExMqa8).

It has been noted--by our research team and others--that patients rarely report religious content in their end-of-life experiences (15, 41). Still, while this may be surprising, it is also not the point. While there are relatively few references to the symbols of faith, the tenets of faith, love and forgiveness, are common themes within pre-death dreams and visions. 

This is an insight that is beautifully expressed in the writings of Kerry Egan, a hospice chaplain in Massachusetts.* In her short but powerful piece “My Faith: What people talk about before they die,” Ms. Egan explains that she is routinely called to the bedside of dying patients who want to talk, not about God but about their families and “the love they felt, and the love they gave .... people talk to the chaplain about their families because that is how we talk about God”. To Ms. Egan, not mentioning God directly does not create conflict with her own religious faith or role as chaplain because it is in the love felt by family members for each other that she recognizes God and the teachings of her religion: “If God is love, and we believe that to be true, then we learn about God when we learn about love. The first, and usually the last classroom of love is the family... We don’t have to use words of theology to talk about God; people who are close to death almost never do. We should learn from those who are dying that the best way to teach our children about God is by loving each other wholly and forgiving each other fully - just as each of us longs to be loved and forgiven by our mothers and fathers, sons and daughters.” At the hour of our death, spiritual transformation is no longer external to the self. It happens in the innermost recesses of our being. As we progress toward acceptance, illness and death place us on a spiritual path that that reunites us with consciousnesses that were never gone and ultimately re-affirm who we are through their returned love.

We have lost our way with dying and with death. It has become easier to live longer, but harder to die well. I had been trained to view dying as medical failure when I began working at Hospice in 1999. Sadly, the acceleration of the science of medicine has obscured its art, and medicine, less comfortable with the subjective, has been more concerned with disproving the unseen than revering its meaning. Amid the current madness of medical excess, there is a need for spiritual and cultural renewal that medicine alone cannot address. It is when medicine can no longer defy death that nature assumes its rightful role, and the process of dying becomes what it has always been: a human experience with physical and spiritual dimensions, seen and unseen. From this vantage point, the dying process, which includes transformative subjective or inner experiences such as end-of-life dreams and visions, becomes less about finality than about life’s resilience.

As Hospice work demonstrates again and again, when the patient is kept comfortable and otherwise left to follow the natural course of things, death becomes more enlightening than a simple pulling down of the shades. This enlightenment is one that encompasses altered forms of consciousnesses, a double consciousness as it were, those of the departed as well as the patients. Whereas traditionally, consciousness is defined as an awareness of self and of the world around, ELDVs include alternative forms and beings that include not just dreams and visions of them but the lucid consciousness of others as constitutive of the self. The departed loved one’s consciousness exists as an extension of one’s own and their surroundings become indistinguishable from the patient’s as inner and outer worlds collide and become one. What observers may view as a sudden change in perception is lived, in other words, as an expanded consciousness rather than as a change by the patient. It is not that an alternate reality supplants theirs, but rather that their reality grows to include what is an “other world” only to outsiders. To the patient, the distinction does not exist, and their loved one’s world is merely an expansion of their immediate surroundings. As such, the tragedy of human existence is not the fact of death or suffering or the inability to defeat these but our inability to think dying as anything other than the “diming of the light.” By exploring the nonphysical and subjective experiences of dying in an objective fashion, through both research and film, we have worked to reframe and humanize dying from an irredeemably grim reality to an experience that contains richness and continuity of meaning and relationships for patients and loved ones alike.

At life’s end, dying patients summon up comforting processes at life’s end are beset by symptoms of a failing body over which they have limited control. They are at their most frail and vulnerable, existing within suffering states of aching bones and air hunger. Catheters, IV’s and pills may now be part of their everyday, sometimes literally functioning as extensions of their bodies under the daily medical management that is their new and irreversible lot. They may experience various degrees of cognitive, psychological and spiritual dissonance. Yet even as the inexorable march of time is taking its toll on their bodies and minds, many also display remarkable awareness and mental sharpness in the context of their inner experience, an awareness that resides in their consciousness, a consciousness that transcends death and its limitations.

*Kery Egan, "What People Talk About Before They Die," https://www.cnn.com/2016/12/20/health/what-people-talk-about-before-dying-kerry-egan/index.html.

Christopher Kerr, “Experiences of the Dying: Evidence of Survival of Human Consciousness,” an essay written for the 2021 Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies in response to the question: “What is the best evidence for survival of consciousness after bodily death?” Dr. Kerr, MD, PhD, is the Chief Medical Officer and Chief Executive Officer for Hospice & Palliative Care Buffalo. The full text with notes is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.