Are NDEs simply vivid dreams?

Neuropsychiatrist Peter Fenwick writes: “We have seen that during dreaming, brain physiology is highly organized, and this makes it unlikely that NDEs occurring when the brain is damaged and malfunctioning are simply dreams. Can we also argue that even when the brain is functioning normally there are psychological aspects of the NDE that make dreaming an unlikely explanation?

“The first difficulty is that if the NDE is only a dream it is odd that so many people experience the same, or at any rate very similar dreams. Also, most dreams “do not have the sense of absolute reality which is such a hallmark of the NDE. Finally, I think we also have to accept that subjectively, the NDE does not feel like a dream. Everybody knows what a dream feels like; the people who descried these NDE experiences remain convinced that what happened to them was not a dream.”

“We set out to test the NDE for ‘reality’ in a scientific way,” he continues. “But there are aspects of the experience, which simply don’t fit into our scientific paradigm and which seem to be inconsistent with a physical or even a psychological phenomenon. There remains the possibility,” however, “that the NDE is a mystical experience, and that it originates in a transcendental reality.

“One way of testing this is to look at some experiences in which it seems very unlikely that there is either a physical or psychological mechanism at work. Mrs Frances Barnshey was one of the few people who described an experience, which seems to have arisen quite spontaneously.

I was in bed, recovering from ‘flu, reading. I began to feel very relaxed and peaceful. I’ve never felt like that either before or since that experience. I put down my book as I could hear my husband and two children moving about downstairs, getting tea ready, and I remember thinking, ‘Lovely, there’s going to be a cup of tea in a minute,’ and just at that point I felt myself shoot up out of my body, through the crown of my head of my head at the most terrific speed, like being fired from a rocket. I was out in space, no dark tunnel, and I thought, this is how the birds must feel, so free.

I was actually like a kite on an endless string, which I could feel attached between my shoulder blades. I couldn’t see any kind of body belonging to me, I seemed to be mind and emotions only, but I felt more vital, more myself than I’ve felt in my life at any time before or since. I found myself traveling towards this tremendous light, so bright that it would have blinded me if I’d looked at it here, but there it was different. I reached the light, which was all round me. I saw no one and heard no one, but I knew I wasn’t alone, and I felt this wonderful love enfolding me and understanding me. No matter what my faults, what I’d done or hadn’t done, the light loved me unconditionally.

I so wanted to stay there, but I was told that this couldn’t be, I had to go back, and then I felt this cord on my back—the biblical silver cord?—pulling me back and the next thing I knew was that I was back in my body and my son was coming into the bedroom with my cup of tea. The experience is as vivid in my mind as it was when it happened. I’ve always believed in life after death, though I no longer belong to any form of organized religion, preferring to find my own path, but if I needed anything to confirm my belief in another plane of existence, that experience certainly did. I feel so grateful to have had it.

 

Peter Fenwick and Elizabeth Fenwick, The Truth in the Light: An investigation of Over 300 Near-Death Experiences (Berkeley Books, 1997).

How are NDEs to be explained?

On the basis of current science, neuropsychiatrist Peter Fenwick concludes, NDEs are inexplicable. “Consciousness is maintained by a delicate global system which enables all the cortical model-building structures, including memory, to be excited and active. If this system goes down we lapse first of all into confusion and then into gradually deepening coma.

“This is the real paradox of the NDE. If someone is unconscious they cannot model-build. If they build an NDE model, they cannot be unconsciousness. If they are in a precomatose confusional state, any models they build should also be confused. Also, “memory does not function in unconsciousness. Even if someone who was unconscious could somehow build models, these models should not be remembered. So how is it that when an NDE occurs during unconsciousness it is remembered—and remembered so clearly—afterwards?

”From the point of view of both memory and model-building, it should be quite impossible to have an NDE when brain function is really very seriously disordered or the brain is seriously damaged. If science fails to provide an adequate explanation, then we shall be forced to consider another possibility: that in some way not yet understood, mind and brain are different, and mind can exist independently of brain.

He acknowledges: “There is some evidence to support the view that endorphins may be involved in the NDE” but concludes “even if we accept endorphins as a partial explanation, we have to argue that very special brain states are required if they are to lead to the bliss of the NDE, or, alternatively, that only some personality types respond to endorphins by experiencing bliss. And this seems like special pleading.” Fenwick also notes there are “clues which point in the direction of right-hemisphere involvement” in NDEs but he concludes: “this gives us nothing like a complete answer.”

“Change the way the brain works and you change the way you see the world. Disorders of mood can actually change the way the brain works; if you are very depressed, for example, you will tend to select sad memories and notice sad events all around you. And unhappiness seems to be quite a common trigger for the near-death experience.

Constance Cawthorne: My NDE occurred forty years ago and arose because of a strong overpowering urge to get to the other dimension. I was twenty-eight years old at the time, with two children. I had been in a state of despair through seeking a meaning to life and not getting any answers. I prayed to die—and one day I did!

I traveled at terrific speed down the tunnel with a tiny light ahead, which got bigger as I approached it. I felt utter joy as I knew when I reached it I would find what I had been seeking. However, before I ‘passed over’ I seemed to be in the presence of formless (but not faceless) spiritual beings who transferred to me the thought that I must go back—my family needed me, and I had not finished what I needed to do.

“We can’t,” Fenwick says, explain experiences like this “by suggesting the cause may be drugs or brain damage, too little oxygen or too much carbon dioxide. All that we are left with is an overpowering, life-numbing sadness. These brains are certainly capable of making models. But why should the models they make be almost identical to the NDE?"

 

Peter Fenwick and Elizabeth Fenwick, The Truth in the Light: An investigation of Over 300 Near-Death Experiences (Berkeley Books, 1997).

NDEs often cause a spiritual awakening

“For a few people,” UK neuropsychiatrist Peter Fenwick notes, the NDE confirms the religious faith they have. “But for many, perhaps most, it is a spiritual awakening that may have very little to do with religion in the narrowest sense, and nothing to do with dogma. It certainly tends to confirm belief in some form of afterlife. But when the presence of some higher ‘being’ is felt, this is only seldom defined as, for example, a Catholic or a Jewish God. And Christian icons such as Jesus and Mary are notably absent except in very rare cases. The experiences have a universal quality.” If an NDE were simply a psychological experience, “one would expect it to be much more culturally influenced than it seems to be.”

Mrs Joan Hensley wrote: Certainly my life changed. I am less frightened of dying personally, and I do believe there is life after death. But it hasn’t particularly made me more ‘religious;’ what I do feel is that there are so many religions in the world, why should our God be the only one or indeed the correct one? I feel my experience proved there is a God—before that I don’t think I really believed in anything, just accepted what my parents believed in.

“Almost everyone who has studied near-death experiences has found that at least some of the people have become more sensitive or intuitive. After his NDE, Dennis Stone of Coventry began to foresee future events. In August 1938 my first premonition of impending disaster occurred. I saw a vision of the Second World War. I found myself standing about a hundred yards or so from my home, watching Coventry burning and hearing the bombs whistling down and bullets spanging off brickwork. I looked down the London road and watched a bomb set fire to a fuel dump close to the local cemetery.

All this I told my family and I became agitated because they did not believe me. That is until it actually happened in precise detail—with one exception: I was not quite in the precise spot on that fateful night. I was ducking the machine-gun bullets from German planes, which, I might add, killed nine of my neighbors close to me.

“One of the most fascinating and detailed letters we received was from a man who suffered two cardiac arrests after a coronary thrombosis, and had several experiences during this time. Most were positive, but he also had an experience of ‘Hell.’ It was really like all the images I had ever had of Hell. I was being barbecued. I was wrapped in tinfoil, basted and roasted. Occasionally I was basted by people (devils) sticking their basting syringe with great needles into my flesh with the red-hot fat. I was also rolled from side to side with the long forks that the ‘devils’ used to make sure that I was being truly roasted. I wanted to call out but no sound would come; it felt as if my brain or consciousness was buried deep within me and was too deeply embedded for either them to hear or for me even to make it work. I was overcome with the feeling of utter doom and helplessness.

He explains away this experience, however, as being due to the treatment he received in hospital. I was wrapped in a tinfoil blanket, an electric heat cage was put over me and during that time I was turned several times and innumerable injections were given.

Fenwick comments: “In those organized religions in which Hell figures, suicide is a sin and might well be considered an entrance qualification. And yet none of the people who wrote to us about a near-death experience during a suicide attempt reported a hellish or even an unpleasant experience. On the contrary, what they experienced seemed to provide a reason for continuing to live.

Anne Thomson wrote: I could cope no longer with three small children and one dreadful husband (whom I later divorced). I took a massive overdose of sleeping tablets and was not found for four hours. I was rushed to the nearest hospital by ambulance from the RAF base in Wales, where we lived at the time. I very nearly died and was unconscious for four days. On the fourth day I was slipping away. I had a cardiac arrest and the doctors and sister were working on me.

I left my body. I went up very slowly, not looking back at myself in the bed. The peace was beyond what I can explain; it was so beautiful, I felt so light in weight and I saw I was going towards a white light—not the white like this notepaper I wrote on, but a spiritual white. I almost reached this light, when suddenly I was pulled downwards and did not stop till I was back in my body. I was heavy, everything seemed so dark and then I came to and slowly came to realize I could not be taken, as three children needed their mother.

I always did believe in God but only because it was bred into me. But since that experience I have a lot of faith towards God and towards life beyond our lives on Earth. I firmly believe God made me well and helped me through all my time of rearing three children alone in the years that followed.”

 

Peter Fenwick and Elizabeth Fenwick, The Truth in the Light: An investigation of Over 300 Near-Death Experiences (Berkeley Books, 1997).

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A "life review" during a near-death experience

Allan Pring’s account of his life review, Peter Fenwick reports in The Truth in the Light (1997), was the most detailed testimony in their initial NDE research project.

Allan recalls: "In 1979 I had no knowledge whatsoever of NDEs. I did not believe in life after death, I was not religious; I did not believe in God but I did believe that there was a scientific explanation for every mystery, though it could well take quite a few million years for man to figure it all out. Basically my views have not changed a great deal, except that now I believe it is impossible to die, which is not necessarily good news. The events of 1979 are as fresh and vivid in my memory as if they happened yesterday.

"The preparation for surgery was routine and I lost consciousness within seconds of being injected with an anesthetic. All perfectly normal. But the manner in which I regained consciousness was anything but normal. Instead of slowly coming round in a drowsy and somewhat befuddled state in a hospital ward I awoke as if from a deep and refreshing sleep and was instantly and acutely aware of my situation. Without any anxiety or distress I knew that I was dead, or rather that I had gone through the process of dying and was now in a different state of reality. The place that I was in cannot be described because it was a state of nothingness. There was nothing to see because there was no light; there was nothing to feel because there was no substance. Although I no longer considered that I had a physical body, nevertheless I felt as if I were floating in a vast empty space, very relaxed and waiting.

"Then I experienced the review of my life, which extended from early childhood and included many occurrences that I had completely forgotten. My life passed before me in a momentary flash but it was entire, even my thoughts were included. Some of the contents caused me to be ashamed but there were one or two I had forgotten about of which I felt quite pleased. All in all I knew that I could have lived a much better life but it could have been a lot worse. Be that as it may, I knew that it was all over now and there was no going back. There was one most peculiar feature of this life review and it is very difficult to describe, let along explain. Although it took but a moment to complete, literally a flash, there was still time to stop and wonder over separate incidents. This was the first instance of distortion of time that I experienced but it was the beginning of my belief that the answers to many of the questions that are posed by NDEs lie in a better understanding of the nature of time and what we term reality.

"After the life review I spent some time resting and considering the implications of what had happened. I did not feel that I had been judged expect by myself. There was no denying the facts because they were all there, including my innermost thoughts, emotions and motives. I knew that my life was over and whatever came next would be a direct consequence of not only what I had done in my life, but also what I had thought and what had been my true feeling at the time.

"Then I moved to a different place. It is very difficult to describe but I knew that I no longer had a physical existence. I was not conscious of having a body and the only senses that I was aware of were sight and sound but even these were very different. I felt that everything existed inside my non-existent head. Nevertheless, I had no doubt that everything I was experiencing was real.

"I was in a room, without windows or doors, but having four corners in each of which ‘sat’ a ‘person.’ ‘They’ began to question me in a friendly way, rather like being de-briefed after a wartime operational flight. At first the questions were simple to answer but the next questions followed on logically and became progressively more difficult. However, I knew the answers. Eventually the questions were becoming impossible to answer; they concerned existence, the meaning and purpose of life and the universe itself. I could not possibly know the answers but I did! The questions came faster and faster and I knew with the most intense feeling of joy that no matter what ‘they’ asked me I would knew the answer.”

The Truth in the Light: An investigation of Over 300 Near-Death Experiences (Berkeley Books, 1997).

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Peter Fenwick's initial NDE research project

A UK neurophysiologist and neuropsychiatrist, Peter Fenwick explains that: “The experiences described in The Truth in the Light: An Investigation of Over 300 Near-Death Experiences are all first-hand accounts from people who wrote to me or to David Lorimer, chairman of the International Association of Near Death Studies (UK), after a television program, radio broadcast or magazine or newspaper article made them aware of our interest in near-death experiences.

“We asked 500 of those who wrote to answer a detailed questionnaire about their experiences. Our aim was to gather in a standardized format as much detail as we could about the NDE, the people who have experienced it, and the effect that the experience has had on their lives.

“Over 350 people replied. Of these 78 per cent were women and 22 per cent men. Eighty per cent were adults (over 18) at the time of their experience; 9% were ten or younger. About half described themselves as Church of England, 12 per cent as Roman Catholic, 19 per cent as other Christian denominations and 1 per cent were Jewish. Eight per cent described themselves as agnostic and 2 percent as atheist. But few were regular churchgoers—only 16 per cent went to church every week, though just over a third had been to church in the previous month. Asked whether religion was important to them, 39 per cent said it was, 41 per cent that it wasn’t, and 20 percent replied ‘Maybe.’

“We asked those who replied about the effects of their NDEs. Although the great majority (82 per cent) said they have less fear of death, less than half (48 per cent) believed in any life after death. 42 per cent reported they were more spiritual as a result, 22 per cent claimed to be a ‘better person,’ and 40 per cent said they were more socially conscious. 47 per cent of our sample said they felt the experience had made them more psychically sensitive. Only 2 percent said they had been aware of NDEs before their own experience.”

“The first question people ask about near-death experiences is always ‘Are they real?’ Sometimes what they really mean is, are people making it up? The answer to that is definitely no. If the experiencers had simply made it up, why would they have been (as most of them were) so reluctant to tell anyone else about it? For most people the experience is something they talk about only diffidently, and only to people they trust. They fear ridicule—why would they court it by inventing the whole thing? They are describing exactly what happened to them as they remember it. Also implicit in the question is, are they mad? And again the answer is no. They were quite sane before it and just as sane after it.

“In March 1987 Dawn Gillot was admitted to Northampton General Hospital, seriously ill with microplasma pneumonia. She was put into intensive care, and doctors eventually decided to remove the ventilation tubes and do a tracheotomy because she could not breathe. The next thing was I was above myself, Dawn says, near the ceiling looking down. One of the nurses was saying in what seemed a frantic voice, ‘Breathe, Dawn, breathe.’ A doctor was pressing my chest, drips were being disconnected, and everyone was rushing round. I couldn’t understand the panic. I wasn’t in pain. Then they pushed my body out of the room to the theatre. I followed my body out of the ICU and then left on what I can only describe as a journey of a lifetime.

I went down what seemed like a cylindrical tunnel with a bright warm inviting light at the end. I seemed to be travelling at quite a speed, but I was happy, no pain, just peace. At the end was a beautiful open field, a wonderful summery smell of flowers. There was a bench seat on the right where my Grampi sat (he had been dead seven years). I sat next to him. He asked me how I was and the family. I said I was happy and content and all my family were fine.

He said he was worried about my son; my son needed his mother, he was too young to be left. I told Grampi I didn’t want to go back, I wanted to stay with him. But Grampi insisted I go back for my children’s sake. I then asked him if he would come for me when my time came. He started to answer, ‘Yes, I will be back in four—’ then my whole body seemed to jump. I looked round and saw I was back in the ICU. I honestly believe in what happened, and that there is life after death.”

“Mrs Nita McCallum had her experience at a time when she was very ill and in excruciating pain.  At the time of my NDE I was a practicing Roman Catholic. Had I died I would most certainly have expected that any visions I had would have related to my faith; and that if I were to see a being of light I would have related it to Jesus or Mary or an angel. As it was, when I suddenly found myself in this gentle glowing light and standing a little below the three beings above me; they appeared to me as young Indian men, and, though they were dressed alike in high-necked silver-colored tunics with silver turbans on their heads, I felt they were young Indian princes, or rajas. Two were facing each other and the third facing me. And from a jewel in the center of each forehead or turban three ‘laser’ beams emitted, meeting in the center. My whole lifestyle was changed as a result—much reading about various religions and philosophies.

Peter and Elizabeth Fenwick, The Truth in the Light (Berkeley Books, 1997).

Teaching about "extraordinary knowing"

Psychology professor Kathleen D. Noble writes: “In 1975 at the age of 25, I suffered an anaphylactic reaction that precipitated three cardiac arrests and three near-death experiences that completely changed my life. Prior to these events I had studied yoga and meditation for several years and I’d had many incidences of “extraordinary knowing” and “synchronicity” as described, respectively, by Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer (Extraordinary Knowing: Science, Skepticism, and the Inexplicable Powers of the Human Mind, 2007) and Carl Jung (“Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle,” Collected Works, 1952), all of which had led me to wonder about the nature, range, and scope of consciousness. But none of these incidents prepared me for the vast, sentient, multidimensional, compassionate, and purposeful reality that I encountered during my excursions into death.”

After earning a Ph.D. and teaching for several years Noble created a course on consciousness for university students that also involved reading Raymond Moody (Life After Life, 1975) and an essay by Pim van Lommel (“Near-death Experience, Consciousness, and the Brain,” World Futures , 2006).

A study of students who completed the course “was transformation for most students,” Noble writes, as by “the end of the course they recognized that there is much more to consciousness and to reality than the materialist mindset admits. For most, this was an  earth shaking realization. Yet as their core beliefs began to change, students reported an accompanying sense of excitement and curiosity that most said they rarely experienced in their academic or personal lives. Studying consciousness enabled them to explore aspects of themselves and of life that were otherwise neglected in higher education and elsewhere.”

As students talked with “friends, family, partners, and professors” about the course, “many returned to class shocked by the negative and ill-informed reactions that they encountered.

On the basis of student evaluations of the course, Noble writes: “Undergraduates who had largely and unconsciously absorbed contemporary materialist biases toward consciousness were able, in a short period of time, to open their minds to a wealth of information that reveals these assumptions to be wrong. They left the course feeling more empowered, optimistic, and hopeful about their individual lives because they saw new possibilities for helping to create a healthier and saner world.”

Kathleen D. Noble, John Joseph Crotty, Aarshin Karande, Alexa Lavides, Andrezej Montaño, “Why Consciousness? Teaching and Learning at the Leading Edge of Mind Science,” NeuroQuantology, June 2016, Vol. 14, Issue 2, 175-192.

Democracy depends on pursuing our calling

James Hillman writes: “In our nation the distinction between truth and opinion has solidified into the wall between church and state, between revealed truth and polls of popular opinion. Yet the Declaration of Independence asserts that the American democratic state is founded upon a transcendent ‘Truth’: ‘All Men are created equal.'

“What is the basis of this claim? Inequalities are there before the first breath. Any nurse in the birthing section of a hospital can confirm that inequality exists from the beginning. Infants differ from one another. Genetic studies show innate differences of skills, temperaments, intensities. As for the circumstances into which we descend, what could be more unequal than our environments? Some are disadvantaged, other privileged by nurture and nature both—and from the beginning.

“Since neither nurture nor nature gives equality, where do we even get the idea? It cannot be induced from the facts of life; nor can equality be reduced to a factor common to all human beings, such as erect posture, symbolic language, or manipulation of fire, because individual differences elaborate the common factor in billions of ways. Equality can only be deduced from uniqueness, from what the Scholastic philosophers called the ‘principle of individuality.’ I am imagining this uniqueness as the genius, the formative factor given with each person’s birth, so that he or she is this one and not some other one, no one.

“So equality must be axiomatic, a given; as the Declaration of Independence says, that we are equal is a truth self-evident. We are equal by the logic of eachness. Each by definition is distinct from every other each and therefore equal as such. We are equal because each brings a specific calling into the world, and we are unequal in every other respect—unfairly, unjustly, utterly unequal, except in the face of each’s unique genius. Democracy rests, therefore, upon the foundation of an acorn.

“The acorn pushes beyond the edge; its principal passion is realization. The calling demands untrammeled freedom of pursuit, a freedom ‘live on arrival,’ and this freedom cannot be guaranteed by society. (If the opportunities for freedom are decreed by society, then society has the superior power, and freedom becomes subject to society’s authority.)  As democratic equality can find no other logical ground but the uniqueness of each individual’s calling, so freedom is founded upon the full independence of calling.

“When the writers of the Declaration of Independence stated that all are born equal, they saw that the proposition necessarily entailed a companion: All are born free. It is the fact of calling that makes us equal, and the act of calling that demands we be free. The principal guarantor of both is the invisible individual genius.

“The only theoretical guarantor of the individuality required by democracy and for the sake of whom the American democracy was brought into being is that same soul, here called angel, acorn, genius, by any name as well. Loss of the daimon collapses democratic society into a crowd of shoppers wandering a mall of mazes in search of the exit. But there is no exit without the guide of an individual direction.”

James Hillman, The Soul’s Code, 271-274.