“It ain’t over till it’s over.”
— Yogi Berra
ACCORDING TO the Netflix documentary Surviving Death, the first collection of near-death experiences was penned in 1892 by Albert Heim, a geologist in Switzerland. He was climbing the Alps, fell and started tumbling toward his death. “He described time expanding as he fell faster and faster.” Heim survived the fall. He “started asking other mountain climbers who had falls from great heights” if they, too, had “blissful experiences.” Heim collected 30 such stories. Several of these climbers reported “leaving their bodies” and entering “some other realm.”
But stories were all that Heim had. They were lacking an embracing theory. It wasn’t till 1975 that Raymond Moody Jr., a medical doctor and philosopher professor, published Life After Life and termed the phrase near-death experience. In it, Moody claims to have studied 150 near-death experiences (NDEs), many of them remarkably similar. More on that later. For now, I’d like to look at the pervasiveness of NDEs.
According to the International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDs), a “scientific” journal devoted to this topic, as well as the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation (NDERF), 13 million people, over the years, have had near-death experiences. Really?! This number sounds high to me, but I’m not a “scientist.” The number is supposedly extrapolated from a 1992 or 1993 Gallup poll, but I haven’t been able to uncover that documentation. The research foundation calculates that 774 NDEs occur daily in the USA. That number also sounds absurdly high. However, even if there are several thousand people living who were once temporarily dead (I mean clinically dead), that’s a lot of people to have similar visions of their own deaths.
And NDEs have been occurring much more often in the last few decades because medical advances are bringing more people back from the edge of death.
Two weeks ago, the New York Times ran a story about dying visions. These are relatively common. My mother, for example, told me just a few days before she passed that she had been visited by her brother the previous evening. She believed that he was there in the room with her although he had died 50 years earlier. In their last few days or weeks, people often believe they are visited by a dead relative.
These visions lend insight to the meaning of death. But, let’s be clear, they are not NDEs. So let’s stick to the topic right now, okay? A near-death experience is defined by NDERF as “a lucid experience associated with perceived consciousness apart from the body occurring at the time of actual or threatened imminent death.” According to Dr. Bruce Greyson, an expert in these life-after-death affairs, of the people revived after flirting with death, 17 percent “remember vivid and detailed near-death experiences that occurred while their hearts were stopped.” A study of cardiac arrest patients published in September 2023 in the journal Resuscitation looked at 550 patients in British and American hospitals who received CPR after their hearts stopped beating. Fewer than 10 percent of these patients recovered but, of the survivors, 40 percent claimed to be at least partially conscious during CPR — just 20 NDEs. Not a lot, but still …
I’ll go into detail in my next column, but here’s the teaser: It’s not uncommon for near-dead people to:
· Feel at peace, comfortable, free of pain,
· Feel like they’re leaving their own bodies, often being able to “see” their bodies while floating above the hospital operating room,
· Move down a tunnel, often dark blue in hue, and
· Meet a deceased relative.
Bottom Line: Scientific study of near-death experiences is rather recent but already it seems as if they do occur in significant numbers and have certain similarities.
This is so inspiring. At the age of 81 death is something you begin to consider. I’m very interested in your writing. It’s comforting and extremely interesting. Thank you!