Since, in the past, I've been critical of authors who misreported the facts of the famous "Pam Reynolds" NDE case, I thought I should point out an example of someone who gets it right.
In his new book The End of Materialism, parapsychologist Charles Tart describes the Reynolds case in some detail (pages 230-238). Tart correctly observes that Reynolds was not clinically dead for the veridical parts of her NDE. He writes:
But note that while Pam was heavily anesthetized — certainly deep enough to feel no pain from the cutting and sawing on her scalp and skull — she was not "dead," as she would be later.
Later, after describing the non-verifiable parts of her experience, he adds:
One can argue about the precise timing in Pam's NDE — if time in an altered state is experienced more rapidly than in an ordinary state, for example, could her entire NDE have taken place while there was still activity in her living brain, before it was brought to a standstill? — such that her NDE did not really occur while she was technically dead? But that's an argument that itself pushes against a lot of our ideas about what time is, so it certainly looks, by ordinary standards, as if parts of Pam's NDE happened after she was physically dead.
Kudos to Dr. Tart for presenting the case clearly and accurately.
Incidentally, the account contains two interesting footnotes. In the first, on page 234, Tart addresses a criticism raised by Keith Augustine in his well-known paper, "Hallucinatory Near-Death Experiences." Reynolds had monitoring devices placed in her ears; these molded earplugs produced a rapid-fire series of clicks (11.3 clicks per second, according to Irreducible Mind, p. 392, footnote 21) at a volume of approximately one hundred decibels. She was also sedated. Even so, she accurately reported a statement made by a female doctor in in the operating room.
Tart writes:
One critic (Augustine 2007) has argued that [Reynolds] might have been able to hear the doctor's statement with her normal hearing because she was inadequately anesthetized. As I responded (Tart 2007), I tried listening to hundred-decibel music with ordinary muff-type headphones while my wife spoke loudly in the room beside me, and although I was fully conscious, with no disadvantage of clouding by any sort of drugs, I couldn't make out a word she said. I have normal hearing but a hundred decibels is literally deafening.
The second footnote refers to the book The Scalpel and the Soul, by Allan J. Hamilton. Tart writes, rather — um — tartly:
It looked as if a second, comparable case had appeared just at the time of this writing (Hamilton 2008), but rumors in the parapsychological community are that this is a composite case rather than an actual one, and so of no evidential value. My attempts to contact Dr. Hamilton have received no reply.