Since NDEs have been on my mind lately, I found myself rereading Kenneth Ring's Lessons from the Light (1998). On pages 97-98, I came across a case that, while not an NDE itself, is obviously relevant to this subject and to some recent speculation of mine.
Ring reports that he "received a letter from a mother who wanted to share with me a baffling conversation she had had with her young son. At the time it occurred, she told me, by way of introduction, that she had had only a passing familiarity with NDEs, but what happened to her that day was to lead her to want to know much more about the subject."
The woman wrote:
The incident concerning Steven occurred when he was two years and two months old. (He is now two years and ten months old.) I was framing a picture of my grandmother and grandfather, who have been dead since before Steven was born. Steven was sitting nearby playing with a toy, and asked me what I was doing. I told him and explained that it was a picture of his grandma and grandpa, who were now dead. No one had ever discussed death with Steven before, and all of a sudden I found myself faced with doing just that, with no prior preparation….
I began by saying that they were no longer here with us and that they had gone to be with God…. Before I could say more, he said in a very matter-of-fact way: "When you die, it's a tunnel."…
I asked if there was anything in the tunnel. He replied that there was light in the tunnel. I asked what color the Light was, and he replied, "White." I asked if, when you die, you go through the tunnel. He answered affirmatively. I asked what you do when you come to the end of the tunnel. He said, "You go to the Light." He also volunteered that grandpa (pointing to the picture) was there with "a light on his head."
In her letter to Ring, the mother added:
I thought it was significant that several of your NDErs mentioned a feeling of homecoming, a familiarity, a feeling that they had always known everything they experienced. Is it possible that very young children retain some memory of having been there? Is it possible that by the time most of them have adequate verbal skills to express it, the memory is gone?
This small incident dovetails rather neatly with the speculations I presented in my last post.
Ring uses this letter as the springboard to a brief examination of NDEs in children. On pages 100-101 he recounts Melvin Morse's investigation of an NDE reported by a seven-year-old girl who nearly drowned. (In what follows, material in square brackets was written by Ring.)
Morse saw her for a follow-up examination. As a physician, he was interested in such matters as brain tumors and childhood leukemia, and had no interest whatever in NDEs….
After Morse introduced himself, but before starting his examination, Kristle turned to her mother and said, "That's the one with the beard. First, there was this tall doctor who didn't have a beard, and then he came in." [Correct, thought Morse.]
She then went on spontaneously to describe several other procedures that were performed on her, including a nasal intubation — all of which statements were again accurate. Morse, who had been there during all this time, knew that her eyes had been closed and that she had been profoundly comatose during this entire period….
Intrigued, he asked, "What do you remember about being in the swimming pool?"
"You mean when I visited the Heavenly Father," Kristle replied.
Nonplussed, Morse encouraged her to say more, but all Kristle would say that day was "I met Jesus and the Heavenly Father." Then, she got very shy or embarrassed and said no more.
However, when Morse returned the next week, he tried again, and this time he succeeded in prying out Kristle's full story. Here it is.
She remembered nothing of the drowning. However, in her words: "I was dead. Then I was in the tunnel. It was dark and I was scared. I couldn't walk."
She then told Morse that a woman named Elizabeth appeared, and that the tunnel then became bright…. They entered heaven. "Heaven was fun," she said. "It was bright and there were lots of flowers." She said there was a border around heaven that she could not see past.
Kristle reported to Morse that she met many people there, including her dead grandparents, her maternal aunt, and "Heather and Melissa," two souls waiting to be reborn….
Kristle then found herself able to see home and observed her mother cooking and her father, who was sitting on the couch, as well as her brothers and sisters playing. [According to Morse, when Kristle later described this scene to her parents, they were astonished that she accurately described their clothing, their positions in the house, and even the food her mother had been cooking.]
Ring also reports the case of Nina, a nine-year-old girl who had an NDE during a surgical operation. Raymond Moody reported Nina saying:
I heard them say my heart had stopped but I was up at the ceiling watching. I could see everything from up there. I was floating close to the ceiling, so when I saw my body I didn't know it was me. Then I knew because I recognized it. I went out in the hall and I saw my mother crying. I asked her why she was crying but she could not hear me. The doctors thought I was dead.
Then a pretty lady came up and helped me because she knew I was scared. We went through a tunnel and I went into heaven. There are beautiful flowers there. I was with God and Jesus. They said I had to go back to be with my mother because she was upset. They said I had to finish my life. So I went back and woke up.
The tunnel I went through was long and very dark. I went through it real fast. There was light at the end. When we saw the light I was very happy…. The light was very bright. [p. 102]
Then there is the case of a nine-month-old baby boy who suffered a cardiac arrest during an emergency surgical procedure and was without a pulse for 40 minutes. Afterward he was in a coma for three months. Ring reports:
Two years later, when he was five, he was having lunch one day with his father and spontaneously brought up the time "when he had died."
As the mother observed before she related this event to us, neither parent had ever heard this story before. She went on to say, "He had never, ever, been told that he had died. He was never told the things that happened to him."
In any case, as the mother recalled a conversation, it went like this:
He sat down besides his dad, and he said, "Dad, do you know what?" And his dad said "What?" "You know I died." "Oh, you did?" And he said, "Yeah." His dad said, "Well, what happened?" And he said, "It was really, really dark, daddy, and then it was really, really bright. And I ran and ran, and it didn't hurt anymore." And his dad said, "Where were you running, Mark?" And he said, "Oh, Daddy, I was running up there [pointing upward]…. And he said he didn't hurt anymore, and a man talked to him. And his dad said, "What kind of words did he say?" And Mark said, "He didn't talk like this [pointing to his mouth], he talked like this [pointing to his head]." Because he couldn't tell you with his little vocabulary that it was through the mind. And he said, "I didn't want to come back, Daddy, but I had to." [Pp. 108-109]
This event occurred before the publication of Raymond Moody's Life after Life, which first popularized the idea of NDEs, so there is little chance that the child or his parents had been exposed to this concept.
Finally Ring gives the example of a pediatrician named David B. Herzog who "reported a case in a medical journal [Critical Care Medicine] that involved a little girl who was only six months of age when she may have had an NDE."
The infant suffered renal and circulatory failure and barely survived. Herzog reports:
Some months after her discharge, she had a panic reaction when encouraged by some siblings to crawl through a tunnel at a local store. The cause of this reaction was not obvious but the "tunnel panic" was seen again on a number of occasions. According to her mother, during these episodes the patient would talk very fast, be unduly frightened and overwhelmed, and would seem as if she knew the tunnel quite well. At the age of 3 1/2, when her mother was explaining the impending death of her grandmother, the child replied, "Will Grandma have to go through the tunnel to get to see God?" [p. 112]
One thing I learned from rereading the opening chapters of Lessons from the Light is that I was mistaken in my objection to the AWARE study currently being carried out. I had argued that someone in the grip of an an NDE would probably not focus on extraneous details such as pictures taped to the top of shelves. However, it is clear from the cases Ring reports that at least some NDErs do notice extraneous details, such as dust and cobwebs on top of light fixtures.
This being the case, I would expect that some patients in the AWARE study would observe and remember the pictures. If a significant number of NDEs are reported by this pool of patients — NDEs that include the OBE component — and if none of the patients can remember or describe the hidden pictures, then this would constitute significant evidence that the experience is at least partly hallucinatory, though, in itself, it would not explain the veridical perceptions that have already been established in some earlier cases.
Many of the accounts cited by Ring make it clear that the subject's perception is not limited to any one particular object of interest, but is closer to an omniscient perspective. Take the case of Craig, who had an NDE when he nearly drowned. Describing the event, he wrote:
All of a sudden, I noticed a floating sensation, as if I were rising. I was shocked to find that I was floating upwards into the open air above the river. I remember vividly the scene of the water level passing before my eyes. Suddenly I could see and hear as never before. The sound of a waterfall was so crisp and clear that it just cannot be explained by words. Earlier that year, my right ear had been injured when somebody threw an M-80 into a bar where I was listening to a band, and it exploded right next to my head. But now I could hear perfectly clearly, better than I ever had before. My sight was even more beautiful. Sights that were close in distance were as clear as those far away, and this was at the same moment, which astounded me. There was no blurriness in my vision whatsoever. I felt as if I had been limited by my physical senses all these years, and that I had been looking at a distorted picture of reality. [p. 35]
A similar report of enhanced perception was made by an actor who had an out-of-body experience (not an NDE) while dancing on stage.
Suddenly, without a moment's warning, I found myself in steel rafters near the ceiling of the room. I was aware of the gloom of the girders rising up through the shadows, and looking down on the spectacle below, I was startled to see that my vision had changed: I could see everything in the room — every hair on every head, it seemed — all at the same time. I took it all in, in a single omnipresent glance: hundreds of heads arranged in wavering rows of portable chairs, a half-dozen babies sleeping in laps, hairs of many different colors, shining from the light on stage. Then my attention shifted to the stage, and there we were in multicolored leotards, whirling about in our dance, and there I was — there I was — face-to-face with [his dancing partner]. [p. 57]
Compare this to the case of a woman who lost consciousness after being rushed to the hospital with pneumonia:
I was hovering over a stretcher in one of the emergency rooms at the hospital. I glanced down at the stretcher, knew the body wrapped in blankets was mine, and really didn't care. The room was much more interesting than my body. And what a neat perspective. I could see everything. And I do mean everything! I could see the top of the light on the ceiling, and the underside of the stretcher. I could see tiles on the ceiling and the tiles on the floor, simultaneously: three hundred degree spherical vision. And not just spherical. Detailed! I could see every single hair and the follicle out of which it grew on the head of the nurse standing beside the stretcher. At the time, I knew exactly how many hairs there were to look at. But I shifted focus. She was wearing glittery white nylons. Every single shimmer and sheen stood out in glowing detail, and once again, I knew exactly how many sparkles there were. [pp. 62-63]
Very clear visual perceptions are common in NDEs. Ring mentions a questionnaire distributed by Janice Holden, a professor at the University of North Texas, to people who had experienced OBEs near death. She received 63 replies. Ring writes:
79% of her sample reported having clear visual perceptions, and a comparable percentage also stated that it was distortion-free, in color, and involved … a panoramic field of vision. Furthermore, 61% of her cases claim that they had a complete and accurate memory of the physical environment, and a like percentage even said they could read during their OBE! [p. 58]
Addressing the issue of the veridical NDEs, Ring first recounts the well-known story of Maria's shoe, which I covered in detail in an earlier essay. Then he gives us a couple of other stories involving shoes.
A 1985 case involved a woman who had been resuscitated. The nurse who investigated the case reported:
She told me how she floated up over her body, viewed the resuscitation effort for a short time, and then felt herself being pulled up through several floors of the hospital. She then found herself above the roof and realized she was looking at the skyline of Hartford. She marveled at how interesting this view was, and out of the corner of her eye, she saw a red object. It turned out to be a shoe ….
I was relating this to a resident, who, in a mocking manner, left. Apparently, he got a janitor to get him onto the roof. When I saw him later that day, he had a red shoe and became a believer, too. [p. 67]
Ring says he asked the nurse whether she had ever heard of the case of Maria's shoe. She had not.
In 1982, Ring tells us, a nurse named Joyce Harman
returned from work after a vacation. On that vacation, she had purchased a new pair of plaid shoelaces, which she happened to be wearing on her first day back at the hospital. That day, she was involved in resuscitating a patient, a woman she did not know.
The resuscitation was successful, and the next day, Ms. Harmon chanced to see the patient, who volunteered, "Oh, you're the one with the plaid shoelaces! … I saw them," the woman continued. "I was watching what was happening yesterday when I died. I was up above." [p. 68]
Another case comes from the 1970s. A clinical instructor named Sue Saunders
was helping in the emergency room to resuscitate a sixtyish man who was flatlined. Medics were shocking him repeatedly, with no results. Ms. Saunders was trying to get him oxygen, using a "bag-without-mask" apparatus. In the middle of the resuscitation, someone else took over for her and she left.
A couple of days later, she encountered this patient in the cardiac unit. He spontaneously commented, "You looked so much better in your yellow top."
She, like Joyce Harman, was so shocked at this remark she got goosebumps, for she had been wearing a yellow smock that day (and had not worn it since).
"Yeah," the man continued, "I saw you. You had something over my face, and you were pushing air into me. And I saw your yellow smock." [pp. 68-69]
Perhaps even more intriguing are cases of blind patients who reported visual perceptions in their NDEs. Ring wrote a whole book on this subject, Mindsight. Lessons from the Light summarizes a couple of the better cases, including that of Vicki Umipeg, who was blind from birth. She had two separate NDEs, one at the age of 20 after an attack of appendicitis, and the second at the age of 22, following a car crash.
She says, "Those two experiences were the only time I could ever relate to seeing, and to what light was, because I experienced it. I was able to see."
She described her second NDE to Ring. (Material in square brackets was written by Ring.)
The first thing I was really aware of is that I was up on the ceiling, and I heard this doctor talking — it was a male doctor — and I looked down and I saw this body, and at first, I wasn't sure that it was my own. But I recognized my hair… It was a very long … and it was down to my waist. And part of it had to be shaved off, and I remember being upset about that…. From up there on the ceiling, I could tell they were very concerned, and I could see them working on this body. I could see that my head was cut open. I could see a lot of blood [though she could not tell its color — she still has no concept of color, she says].
I went up through the roof and then. And that was astounding!… It's like the roof didn't … it just melted. [last ellipsis in original]
From that vantage point she saw "lights, and the streets down below, and everything." Her experience continued as she entered some other dimension of reality. Ring summarizes:
Now finding herself in an illuminated field, covered with flowers, she sees two children, long deceased, whom she had befriended when they were all in a school for the blind together. Then, they were both profoundly retarded, but in this state, they appear vital, healthy, and without their earthly handicaps. She feels a welcoming love from them and tries to move toward them. She also sees other persons whom she had known in life, but who have since died (such as her caretakers and her grandmother), and is drawn toward them, too.
Ring asked how her NDE compared to her dreams.
VU: No similarity, no similarity at all.
KR: Do you have any kind of visual perception in your dreams?
VU: Nothing. No color, no sight of any sort, no shadows, no light, no nothing.
KR: What kinds of perceptions are you aware of in your typical dreams?
VU: Taste — I have a lot of eating dreams. And I have dreams when I'm playing the piano and singing, which I do for a living, anyway. I have dreams in which I touch things … I taste things, touch things, hear things, and smell things — that's it.
KR: And no visual perceptions?
VU: No.
KR: So that what you experienced during your NDE was quite different from your dreams?
VU: Yeah, there's no visual impression at all in any dream I have. [pp. 75-78]
Notice a few of the common denominators in the above material.
Vicki Umipeg said, "I looked down and I saw this body, and at first, I wasn't sure that it was my own. But I recognized my hair."
Nine-year-old Nina said, "I was floating close to the ceiling, so when I saw my body I didn't know it was me. Then I knew because I recognized it."
Seven-year-old Kristle said, "I was dead. Then I was in the tunnel. It was dark and I was scared." Then a lady appeared and took her to heaven. "It was bright and there were lots of flowers."
Nina said, "The doctors thought I was dead. Then a pretty lady came up and helped me because she knew I was scared. We went through a tunnel and I went into heaven. There are beautiful flowers there."
A three-and-a-half-year-old asked, ""Will Grandma have to go through the tunnel to get to see God?"
There are many other commonalities, of course. Though some details vary, the basic experience seems to be remarkably consistent, whether reported by young children, adults, or people born blind.