Near Death Experiences: A Dummies' Guide

[Jack Shaftoe]

Listening to wayyyyyy too many supernatural podcasts this year has led to a complete fascination with Near Death Experiences and the weird congruities within (life reviews, tunnels of light, being greeted by deceased relatives/friends, floating above your body and seeing/hearing stuff you couldn't possibly have known but which gets confirmed as being accurate later on). There's a whole database of them called NDERF and I've read literally hundreds, they're fascinating. So many weird things in common, so many little details which can't be explained.

I used to run a Mind Body and Spirit (spooky woo) section in a bookshop and I'm now horribly aware the books on past lives, NDEs and reincarnation I'm bulk-ordering from the library are exactly the sort of rubbish I used to resent putting on shelves. 

So, any CaBers died and come back? Ever had a mysterious stranger pick you out of a crowd and pass on some information from a dead relative (I want this to happen so badly). Or is it all a load of rubbish that happens to be really well-organised for some mysterious reason?

If this was Reddit, I'd put a 'serious answers only' thing on, but I can't, and that's not really what I want anyway. But I think I'm serious about it.

[Buelligan]

I don't know, I've had some exceeding weird things happen.  Can't even tell you.  But it does occur, perhaps this is similar to some near death experiences - people seeing light, relatives whooshing in from the past (enough to put me off dying permanently), what crosses my mind is this -

Think about people who get off their tits on hallucinogenics - the tales of old about people thinking they can fly.  It's pretty common, no?

Is this a common(ish) experience because people can fly when they drop acid or is it a common experience because many of us have heard those tales before we eat the green ones (whether they're ripe or not)?  It makes me wonder.  I'm pretty sure I know the answer but I could be wrong.

One thing I do know though, the old brain is as tricky and strange as anyone you'll ever meet in the real world.  That is certain.

[Ray Travez]

I became interested in NDEs in around 2004, read about 30 books, mostly autobiographies. There were a series of three by a cop, which I liked- she was sceptical of her experiences while at the same time being forced to accept them as being real in some way. There was a book by someone who had had a very negative NDE from a suicide attempt. Most of the books were called things like "Saved by the Light", "Love of the Light" or "Basking in (guess what!) The Light" but hers was called something like "Hellish Visions of Darkness". So that was interesting, being a bit of an outlier.

[Icehaven]

Yep I think I'd be more convinced by similarities between accounts if at least some of them came from people who'd definitely never heard of near death experiences or read anything about them before, but that's virtually impossible.

Are there any cultural or geographic patterns? I'm thinking of another recent thread where someone posted about how when sufferers of schizophrenia hear voices, in some countries/cultures they tend to be frightening, negative and destructive, but in others they're the voices of dead loved ones or "kind spirits" and are more protective. Be interesting to see if there's any similar variations to NDEs.

[Alberon]

The long tunnel towards the light, meeting deceased friends and relatives and the like are very familiar to the general public and often appear as tropes in fiction.

IIRC there was a somewhat scientific experiment where objects were placed in operating theatres high up where the patient could only see them if floating around the ceiling. Following up experiences of leaving their bodies during surgery or near death none reported correctly what the objects were. I'll have to see if my memory is right and look for it.

[Ray Travez]

Are there any cultural or geographic patterns?

The only difference I remember reading is that when you come out of the tunnel you see a 'being of light' represented by a religious figure that's relevant to you, so in the west you might see Jesus whereas in India maybe it'll be Buddha. Other than that it's pretty similar... but then there are four different types of NDE. I can't remember them all. One, you go to a fuzzy warm place. Two is a negative NDE where you see nasty stuff and get told off a bit. Can't remember the third, and the fourth type is the classic one depicted in movies, where you meet the aforementioned 'being of light' and he gives you a biscuit.

[imitationleather]

During my recent overdose I saw nowt but a concerned ex, paramedics, nurses, doctors and mental health workers.

Why does everyone else get interesting life-changing stuff when they nearly die and all I have is that shite? It's because I don't earn enough, isn't it? Classism again. Cunts.

[Jack Shaftoe]

Sorry to hear that, imitationleather (the overdose and the lack of white tunnels and life reviews). It's about 8% of people who are declared clinically dead then recover who report this stuff, so it's still a small minority. Or maybe it is class-based, I'll have to read the whole of NDERF again and try and work out how posh each person is.

More seriously, I did think before I posted this 'hmm, is this going to trivialise peoples' real experiences a bit?', but I do think it's genuinely fascinating and it does seem to massively change the outlooks of people who've been through it. It's changed my outlook just from reading about it so much, to the point where it anyone tells me someone close to them died, I have to be careful not to be all 'pfff, they're much better off now, quick life review and off to the next incarnation', which I suspect is rarely appropriate.

[Emotional Support Peacock]

If warm fuzzy cliches give people a more pleasant death because that's what they are expecting, then they should be encouraged.

[Jack Shaftoe]

IIRC there was a somewhat scientific experiment where objects were placed in operating theatres high up where the patient could only see them if floating around the ceiling. Following up experiences of leaving their bodies during surgery or near death none reported correctly what the objects were. I'll have to see if my memory is right and look for it.

I was just reading about that bit! The people interviewed said they'd been focused on seeing their lifeless bodies being attended to by panicked doctors and nurses rather than looking around for cunningly-placed Lego Bionicles or whatever, but I suppose they would say that.

That said, one of the classic OOB experiences is some woman floating above herself during an operation and getting distracted by spotting a shoe wedged into a roof beam. Someone went up there to check and a shoe was indeed there, where you couldn't see it at all from ground (citation needed, obviously). Loads of stuff about people hearing conversations in other rooms about them, which I like.

[Janie Jones]

'Put your harp down. You've got to go and stand by a tunnel. Your beloved son is about to die.'

'But when I died, he was a gorgeous little 4 year old, the light of my life. Now he's a nasty old man, considerably older than I was when I got killed in a car crash. We've got nothing in common. I've seen what he wanks over in that care home. Can't I just...'

'HURRY UP!'

[Jack Shaftoe]

Yeah, I don't want to see my family when i die, they're all right, but we're not that close. Be nice to have a bit of space tbh.

[Buelligan]

If warm fuzzy cliches give people a more pleasant death because that's what they are expecting, then they should be encouraged.

Absolutely this.  My own view is that, given the event is inescapable, it's better approached in as mentally relaxed a manner as can be achieved.

Everything (I think, honestly, everything) I've ever done that was really challenging or difficult or may have given me apprehension, like controlling a very fast motorcycle in a monstrous high-sider, being smashed between two cars moving at speed or falling off a tall horse, has always gone far better when I've just allowed my subconscious to run things.  In my opinion, too much mind is a dangerous thing.

[JaDanketies]

I've used DMT many times, comboing it with other psychedelics after reading reports on the internet about how great it mixes with them. And it does.  However the weirdest experiences have ironically been when I was otherwise relatively sober.

Some of the various experiences I've had on it include:

• shooting through the stratosphere at rocket speed before presenting in front of a psychedelic demonic space alien who judged my soul with a thousand eyes
• entered some interdimensional space where alien intelligences calmly sorted soul-eggs for reincarnation

However it's a crapshoot and there have been times when I've become a car or where everything turns into snakes, or where I see some giant Cthulu, or space pixies putting the atoms of the universe together. Not always NDEs.

There have also been a lot of times when I've been on a ketamine-psychedelic combo where I have felt that I was dying or had died. Pretty much always ended up in Hell. But that might be because I'm watching grindcore music videos at the time.

Also once I was merely on LSD, listening to () by Sigur Ros and thinking that I had to leave the house to go to a concert eventually. And the stress of knowing I had  an appointment to keep made me think I'd died. However I knew I hadn't died that time, although it did feel a lot like I'd died.

The 'shooting through the stratosphere to be judged by a demonic alien' thing was probably the most like the classic NDE experience

[shiftwork2]

Quite looking forward to my (hopefully not untimely) cark because it's going to be so interesting.  The closing down of the mind.  I expect I'll think 'ah of course it's like this' and then gone.

[Buelligan]

Heh, yes.  And maybe that thing that happens sometimes when one's falling asleep, you hold your breath accidentally and wake briefly with a gasp and think oh yes I've done that thing, I wonder if it's like that when you die.  Only this time you won't gasp and you'll think balls, this really is it then.  Oh well, it's been great, now the big jump...

[Kankurette]

None of my suicide attempts have been that interesting.

[iamcoop]

During my recent overdose I saw nowt but a concerned ex, paramedics, nurses, doctors and mental health workers.

Why does everyone else get interesting life-changing stuff when they nearly die and all I have is that shite? It's because I don't earn enough, isn't it? Classism again. Cunts.

Did you see me gently lower my testicles onto your forehead?

Just because that happened just before I called the emergency services and your ex

[imitationleather]

Not even that. Buggerheads.

[imitationleather]

Sorry to hear that, imitationleather (the overdose and the lack of white tunnels and life reviews). It's about 8% of people who are declared clinically dead then recover who report this stuff, so it's still a small minority. Or maybe it is class-based, I'll have to read the whole of NDERF again and try and work out how posh each person is.

More seriously, I did think before I posted this 'hmm, is this going to trivialise peoples' real experiences a bit?', but I do think it's genuinely fascinating and it does seem to massively change the outlooks of people who've been through it. It's changed my outlook just from reading about it so much, to the point where it anyone tells me someone close to them died, I have to be careful not to be all 'pfff, they're much better off now, quick life review and off to the next incarnation', which I suspect is rarely appropriate.

BTW I don't think your thread is trivialising this stuff. If it was I wouldn't have posted. You've been honest on here about your personal life and I think even if your mental health is a bit fucked you've got to keep a sense of humour about it. Sometimes gallows humour is all you have.

[Jack Shaftoe]

100% agree.

[Elderly Sumo Prophecy]

I think I read somewhere that the white light thing is just your brain's way of dealing with the fact that your consciousness will soon cease to exist. It gives you a way of processing and visualising what's about to happen. There was also something about the same chemicals released when you take DMT being also released when you're about to die.

I'm not going into the light anyway. The little lady from Poltergeist said not to.

[checkoutgirl]

If this was Reddit, I'd put a 'serious answers only'

I'm more interested in why you have an interest in this. Are you searching for something? Did something happen in your childhood? Do you just like the stories? Are you making money off it?

What the devil?

[checkoutgirl]

Is this a common(ish) experience because people can fly when they drop acid or is it a common experience because many of us have heard those tales before we eat the green ones

Ghosts are often from the Victorian era. Aliens are usually little green fellas. People dressing in their past lives are Napoleon 50% of the time it seems.

Coincidence innit? They couldn't all be lying or delusional.

I quite like the idea of a paranormal dimension existing but can't muster a single scrap of interest in it at all. It has to be a little bit convincing and it never is. And the people making the claims often look like they have nothing else in their life and need it to be true to make themselves a morsel more interesting. And they never are.

[Buelligan]

I'm more interested in why you have an interest in this. Are you searching for something? Did something happen in your childhood? Do you just like the stories? Are you making money off it?

What the devil?

Obvs, can't speak for others but remember being quite interested in this stuff when my mother was dying.  It was untimely and I felt so fucking powerless.  Think I was looking for reassurance that, when she inevitably went where I couldn't stand with her, she would be OK.  Then I understood that I could never know and even if I did, there was fuck-all I could do about it.  So I stuck to popping little mints in her mouth when she wanted them and hoping it helped.

I think I've mentioned it before but her father, when he died, told her, that children aren't afraid to go to bed when they are tired.  I know that was important to her.

I'm afraid this isn't funny. 

[Operty1]

My dad had been suffering dementia for years before he died, his personality and memory virtually gone. I thought if there was an afterlife, would he get his memories and personality back? would they be somehow downloaded from some kind of spirit backup server? Or would his afterlife be plagued forever with the hell he lived through? I came to the conclusion that none of that seems likely.

Regarding NDE's, I think the brain has a 'coping' mechanism as the body shuts down, delivering some kind of last comforting experience. Then what? unconscious black? I wonder what the experience is for those that don't have a natural death? accidents, war victims, some kind of instant switch off?

I would love there to be something after this, the bureaucracy involved in it though makes it seem unlikely. Maybe I just can't comprehend it in my current form? Maybe death is like finding out how the magic trick of life is performed, and you just go 'oohhhhh, now I get it'.

[Icehaven]

If there was an after/further life I don't see why your corporeal life should necessarily have much if any bearing on it. Maybe this is some kind of larval stage. I should add I don't really believe there is anything after so I haven't really thought this through.

[Jack Shaftoe]

I'm more interested in why you have an interest in this. Are you searching for something? Did something happen in your childhood? Do you just like the stories? Are you making money off it?

Honestly? Apologies, because I've been drivelling on about this elsewhere on the boards: I have gender dysphoria, which is almost as boring to write about as it is to have, but for various tedious reasons I'm very unlikely to do anything about it and this year have been working through coming to terms with it. This thing that's been yelling at me for as long as I can remember, for about a hundred times a day, and been behind almost every decision I made, or don't make, is going to be with me until I cark it and I'm always going to feel shit that I was too scared to do anything about it back when I theoretically could. Even if I did something about it now, that doesn't bring my my teens and twenties and the life I could have had (I'm fifty now, my current life's quite nice though, no real complaints).

So the idea that death might not be the end, although I don't mind greatly if it is, and I might go on to other existences, or might have had them already, in which I'm not a big tired bloke who flinches every time he sees his reflection*, is fascinating and honestly makes me a bit giddy.

I had zero interest in the subject until I stared doing my own research listening to silly podcasts and reading around it, and suddenly the weird similarities in these accounts became impossible to ignore. Mentally, I'm already putting cuttings on a corkboard and linking them with red string, but I'm not quite there in the real world. If is this the real world, ahhhhhh.

My dad did die of a stroke this time last year, after slipping into vascular dementia, so that's probably in the mix too. But honestly, he went quite easily, as these things go, and before he lost too much of himself, so I didn't have too many many unaddressed issues there. Also, I have to be honest, I'm not that invested in what happens to other people, I want to know what happens to meeeeee.

Regarding the 'it's the brain comforting itself' idea, someone pointed out that the brain is terrible at comforting itself, it would far rather have panic attacks or become full of guilt or fear or anything that might keep its owner alive for a few more moments. And the out of body stuff is deeply strange, as I said, so many weird little details or conversations the person shouldn't have heard or seen (often in other rooms, sometimes halfway across the world), that later get confirmed.

* less so now I've lost a couple of stone, he said shallowly.

UPDATE: I'm definitely not making money off discussions around this - and trying not to give any money to shysters either - was very temped by a tarot reading/medium thing lately but decided I'm not quite there yet. I also worry I sound like I'm trying to get people here to join a cult or something, which I'm not. Although I'm not ruling out starting one.

[Sebastian Cobb]

If there was an after/further life I don't see why your corporeal life should necessarily have much if any bearing on it. Maybe this is some kind of larval stage. I should add I don't really believe there is anything after so I haven't really thought this through.

Even that gets tricky though doesn't it? Are people born blind going to end up blind in the afterlife, whereas people who lost their sight due to an accident reset etc?

[Icehaven]

Even that gets tricky though doesn't it? Are people born blind going to end up blind in the afterlife, whereas people who lost their sight due to an accident reset etc?

No because anything physical in this life has no bearing on the next, I was thinking we're a larva for whatever it is that makes our consciousness carry on to another life when the body dies (more like what gets described as a soul, although obviously that's a loaded term). I don't see how that's actually possible though so that's as much of a hole in the theory as anything else.