0110 - Veridical NDE
This letter was sent in response to an article in a magazine:
''I was very interested in your article because I believe I had an NDE but mine happened to me when I was only five years old, which was 51 years ago! The story was related to me by my mum, who was obviously quite shocked to hear what I had to say at such a young age. Apparently, I was very ill with complications of scarlet fever.
I was unconscious at the time. When I regained consciousness I said to Mum that I had seen a beautiful lady dressed in a long white dress who was floating in front of a very bright ‘sunshine’ light. She beckoned me with her finger and I was just about to go with her, as asked, when my granddad (who died while I was ill and they hadn’t told me because I was so ill) sharply told me to go back.
I didn’t see him, he was beyond the light and I heard him. He sounded very stern (which was unusual for him to speak to me like that) so I did as I was told and didn’t go. My mum was obviously very upset at this story as she had just lost her father and I was very ill.''
Cas 1:
Le Dr K. M. Dale rapporte ainsi le cas d’un petit garçon de 9 ans nommé Eddie Cuomo :
« Ce petit garçon a émergé de son coma après trente-six heures. Dès qu’il a ouvert les yeux, à trois heures du matin, il a dit à ses parents qu’il était allé au ciel,où il avait vu sa grand-mère décédée, ainsi que sa tante Rosa et son oncle Lorenzo (…). Puis le petit garçon a déclaré qu’il avait également vu sa sœur Teresa, âgée de dix-neuf ans. C’était elle qui lui avait dit de revenir sur terre (…).
Le lendemain matin, quand les parents d’Eddie ont téléphoné au collège de Teresa, ils ont appris que celle-ci était brutalement décédée dans un accident de voiture, juste avant minuit, et que le personnel administratif du collège n’était pas parvenu à les joindre pour les prévenir du décès. Personne n’était donc au courant de sa mort, avant que le petit garçon n’en parle. »
Cas 2:
Robert et Suzanne Mays sont chercheurs à l’International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS), une des plus grandes institutions qui répertorient et étudient les EMI. Ils évoquent le récit d’un homme nommé Ken Leth. Durant son EMI survenue après un arrêt cardiaque, Ken avait vu un homme inconnu qui le regardait avec affection:
« Dix années après avoir fait mon EMI, ma mère, sur son lit de mort, m’a avoué que j’étais le fruit d’une relation extraconjugale. Mon père biologique était un homme juif qui avait été déporté et tué durant la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Ma mère m’a alors montré sa photo : c’était l’homme que j’avais rencontré lors de mon EMI, dix ans plus tôt… »
Dans le cas de cet homme qui ignorait tout de ce père, comment pourrait-il s’agir d’un désir inconscient de retrouvailles ? De même, il existe de nombreux témoignages de personnes ayant rencontré des frères et sœurs décédés dont elles-mêmes ignoraient l’existence. Ces EMI surviennent généralement chez des enfants. Les parents sont sidérés quand, à la suite de son EMI, l’enfant fait part de ce type de rencontre, alors qu’il n’est pas censé être au courant de ce frère ou de cette sœur décédés !
Cas 3:
Ainsi, Robert Mays raconte l’histoire d’une jeune femme qui, à l’âge de 5 ans, avait fait une EMI lors d’un coma induit par une méningite. Elle se souvenait s’être retrouvée dans un lieu paisible où elle se sentait en paix et en sécurité:
« J’y ai vu une petite fille d’environ 10 ans qui semblait me reconnaître. Elle me dit : “J’étais ta sœur. On m’a appelée “Rietje, le nom de ta grand-mère.” Elle m’a embrassée avec tendresse et m’a dit qu’il était temps maintenant pour moi de repartir. En un éclair, sans que je et j’ai vu les visages soulagés de mes parents. Je leur ai alors raconté ce que j’avais vécu et j’ai fait un dessin de l’“ange” qui m’avait accueillie. Mes parents étaient bouleversés : ils m’ont confirmé plus tard qu’ils avaient effectivement perdu une petite fille prénommée Rietje, un an avant ma naissance. Je ne le savais pas ! Ils avaient décidé de ne rien me dire avant que j’aie l’âge de comprendre ce que sont la vie et la mort. »
The world's leading expert on near-death experiences reveals his journey toward rethinking the nature of death, life, and the continuity of consciousness.
Cases of remarkable experiences on the threshold of death have been reported since ancient times, and are described today by 10% of people whose hearts stop. The medical world has generally ignored these “near-death experiences,” dismissing them as “tricks of the brain” or wishful thinking. But after his patients started describing events that he could not just sweep under the rug, Dr. Bruce Greyson began to investigate.
Sometimes experiencers meet recently deceased people who were not known to have died. Jack Bybee was hospitalized with severe pneumonia at age twenty-six, in his native South Africa. He described for me an encounter with his nurse during his NDE:
“I had been taken very ill, and was three to four weeks in an oxygen tent in status epilepticus, then double pneumonia, and so on and so on. I was friendly (read ‘flirting,’ when I could be) with a nurse from the farmlands of the Western Cape. She had told me it was her twenty-first birthday that weekend, and that her parents were coming in from the country to celebrate. She fluffed up my pillows, as she always did. I held her hand to wish her a happy birthday, and she left.
“In my NDE, I met Nurse Anita on the other side. ‘What are you doing here, Anita?’ I asked. ‘Why, Jack, I’ve come to fluff up your pillows, of course, and to see that you are all right. But, Jack, you must return, go back. Tell my parents I’m sorry I wrecked the red MGB. Tell them I love them.’
“Then Anita was gone—gone through and over a very green valley and through a fence, where, she told me, ‘there is a garden on the other side. But you cannot see it. For you must return, while I continue through the gate.’
“When I recovered, I told a nurse what Anita had said. This girl burst out into tears and fled the ward. I later learned that Anita and this nurse had been great friends. Anita had been surprised by her parents, who loved her dearly and had presented her with a red MGB sports car. Anita had jumped into the car, and in her excitement raced down the highway, De Waal Drive, along the slopes of Table Mountain, into ‘Suicide Corner’ and a concrete telephone pole.
“But I was ‘dead’ when all that happened. How could I possibly know these facts? I knew them as stated above. I was told by Anita in my experience.”
When Jack told me this story about fifteen years ago, emphasizing his astonishment at meeting the nurse he thought was still alive, I recognized right away that there was something important in his account I hadn’t appreciated before. I had heard many accounts of experiencers meeting deceased loved ones in their NDEs, starting with Henry more than thirty years earlier telling me he saw his parents after he shot himself. Of course, Henry knew that his parents had died and, what’s more, yearned to see them again, which made me as a young psychiatrist suspect he had hallucinated them. But Jack had no way of knowing that his nurse had died, and no yearning to see her on her weekend off with her parents. This was an apparent encounter with a deceased person that couldn’t be dismissed as wishful thinking. And Jack was not the only experiencer who told me a story like this.
And a few years later, Barbara Langer told me about a similar NDE she had had after a car crash at age twenty-three:
“I was recuperating from hepatitis at the home of a young couple I’d recently come to know, David and Christine. Christine soon became a close friend and took care of me. I’d been staying in their guest room for a few weeks when the accident happened.
“Christine and I were taking their sick white cat to see the veterinarian on a sunny Tuesday afternoon. She was driving David’s Volkswagen bus into town and we were talking about an upcoming concert. I was holding the cat, Nasty, on my lap. Suddenly Nasty wriggled free. He jumped onto Christine’s arm and began climbing up her neck. She tried to push him off and I reached over and tried to get him off her. That’s the last thing I remember about our intended trip to see the vet. Later, I learned that we’d crashed into the back of a school bus and both of us went through the windshield. I was unconscious for almost a week.
“I felt that I was hurtling through a dark and vast universe at a tremendous speed. I felt small, calm, and detached but interested in my trip, while at the same time I was very aware of the speed at which I was traveling. This seemed to go on for a long time.
“I found myself blissfully alone in a very green meadow, in a valley surrounded by rounded green hills. There were flowers, and a stream there. I remember the colors were beautiful and intense and the atmosphere was ethereal. The feeling of all-pervading peace and love that I felt was gloriously uplifting.
“Then I found myself going down a path in another lofty, ephemeral place. Christine was next to me and wearing the same blue jeans that she’d put on that day, and we were gliding down the pathway side by side. She looked serene and astoundingly beautiful. I have no idea of how I appeared, but I knew that the two of us were surrounded by and filled with love.
“We were on a narrow, earthen footpath. Soon the pathway split, going into two different directions. We both knew that this was the place where we would have to part and go our separate ways. We were calm and communicated without words. Christine telepathically asked me to be sure to tell David that she would love him forever. She then took the path that went right; I took the path that went left. It was unclear as to where these pathways would lead us. There was no conscious decision on our parts as to what we should do, but it was clear which way each of us needed to go. We parted with the shared understanding that we would be together again, but later. Now, however, we’d each have to undertake the hard part of the journey that lay ahead of us without each other’s company.
“My path led me instantaneously back to my physical body. I regained consciousness in the hospital. There were still slivers of window glass from the car windshield in my hand, and a gash on my forehead. I didn’t recognize my face in a mirror that was held up for me, and was told by a friend that I’d just gotten ‘a face lift from the middle.’ I had double vision from the triple concussion the doctors said I’d gotten, but I hadn’t lost my contact lenses and my hepatitis was gone.
“Friends and family came to visit. One friend showed me a newspaper article about the accident, and that’s when I learned about Christine’s death. Christine reportedly died at the scene of the crash, and I was taken to a nearby hospital and not expected to live.
“Putting the various pieces of my experience together, I realized that I had died and come back and my friend didn’t, but she was in a much nicer place. I wished that I had stayed there with her because there was nothing in my life then that made me feel invested in the physical world.”
Book: https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=L3QzKgAAAEAJ&pg=GBS.PA162_236
Later that same year, one-hundred-year-old Rose described for me a comparable NDE when she was hospitalized with pneumonia during World War I:
“During the war, I was very ill in the hospital. One morning the nurse came in and found me showing no sign of life whatever. She called the doctors and the matron, to whom I also appeared dead, and I remained so, they told me afterwards, for at least twenty minutes.
“Meanwhile, I found myself in a beautiful, green, undulating country. There were beautiful, large trees here and there, and their leaves seemed to give out a sort of gentle radiance. I then saw a young officer with a few soldiers approaching. The young officer was my favorite cousin, Alban. I did not know that he was ‘dead’, nor had I ever seen him in uniform; but what I saw of this was confirmed by a photograph of him I saw some years later.
“We spoke for a few minutes happily and then he and the few men marched off. Then a presence beside me explained to me that all of these soldiers were allowed to go and greet and help those others who met death on the battlefields.
“My next vivid recollection after this was of looking down, from about ceiling height, onto a bed on which lay a very emaciated body. There were white-coated doctors and nurses around it. In a few moments I was looking up at them, and feeling a sensation of intense disappointment. I had come back from something so lovely and so utterly satisfying.”
Book: https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=L3QzKgAAAEAJ&pg=GBS.PA162_236