Six Feet Over

12. SIX FEET OVER A Computer Stands By on an Operating Room Ceiling, Awaiting Near-Death Experiencers

ON THE FAR WALL of an operating room in the University of Virginia Hospital is an enormous photograph of an alpine meadow. The sky and grass are the vivid, lit-up blues and greens of travel posters and ads for allergy drugs, and wildflowers are thick as snow. The beautiful scenery is intended to calm the surgical patients who come here. In the case of a patient I’ll call Wes, the flowers have their work cut out for them. Wes is about to be momentarily—ever so briefly—almost killed.

The operation is a defibrillator insertion. Defibrillators are most recognizable as those electrified paddles you see being slapped on patients’ chests during cardiac arrest scenes on ER. Nowadays they make defibrillators the size of cell phones and—if you’re prone to dangerous heart arrhythmias—sew them right inside the chest.

The almost-killing is being done to test Wes’s newly implanted defibrillator. An electrical charge will hit his heart at the crest of a specific EKG peak, derailing the beat and rendering the organ a quivering (fibrillating) lump of tissue incapable of pumping blood. With no oxygen being delivered to his brain, Wes will be clinically dead within seconds. (As long as a heart begins beating again within about four minutes, no permanent brain damage occurs.) It’s then up to Wes’s new defibrillator to jump-start the beat. Patients like Wes are ideal subjects for a study of near-death experiences.

Outside of the alpine panorama, Room 1 is a fairly standard operating room. There is the operating table, bulky and complicated. There is the towering bank of cardiac monitors, the anesthesiologist’s station, the whiteboard on the wall (“21 Days to National Nurses Week!”). You would have to be looking carefully to notice anything out of the ordinary. It’s up near the ceiling. Taped to the top of the highest monitor is an open laptop computer, as if perhaps they’d run out of study carrels over at the science library and were packing the students in wherever they could fit them. The computer belongs to Professor Bruce Greyson, who works a few blocks away, in the university’s Department of Psychiatric Medicine.

Greyson has been studying near-death experiences (referred to by those who study them as NDEs) for twenty-nine years. It is difficult to sum up the NDE in a sentence. On a very nuts-and-bolts level, it’s an experience in which a person who came close to dying recalls having been someplace other than blacked out inside his or her body. Some recall traveling no farther than the ceiling, rising away from themselves like a pocket of hot air; others remember hurtling through a sort of tunnel, often toward an all-encompassing light and sometimes toward family or friends[43] who have died. Patients who recall hovering near the ceiling sometimes report having watched their operation or resuscitation from above. Though their descriptions can be remarkably detailed and accurate (more on this later), some people argue that the patients might have been extrapolating from things they heard or felt, or unconsciously incorporating memories of TV medical dramas or previous hospital visits.

Greyson is trying to find out: Were they up there or not? In a study begun in early 2004, he hopes to interview eighty defibrillator insertion patients just after they come out of anesthesia. If they mention a near-death experience that included an out-of-body experience, he will ask them to describe everything they saw from up above. Appearing on Greyson’s flat-open laptop during the operations is one of twelve images, in one of five colors, randomly selected by a computer program. The objects depicted are simple and familiar—a frog, a plane, a leaf, a doll. They are brightly colored and animated to help attract the patient’s eye (or whatever it is you use to see when you’ve left your visual cortex behind). It’s an ingenious setup: Since the laptop’s screen faces the ceiling, the images can’t be seen from below.

I rarely get excited about parapsychology experiments, but if this one produces even a single person who accurately describes the image, I’ll be up there on the ceiling, too. So far, none of the subjects interviewed has reported any type of near-death experience. Working against Greyson is the cocktail of anesthesia used on the patients; it includes a drug that interferes with their memory of anything they might experience (pain, fear, a field trip to heaven) while they’re under. “Though if the consciousness is leaving the brain, then would memory matter?” mused Greyson as we walked here today. He shrugged. “I don’t know.” In a similar study four years back—done at Southampton General Hospital in England by cardiologist Sam Parnia and neuropsychiatrist Peter Fenwick—only four of sixty-three cardiac arrest survivors interviewed recalled a near-death experience and none reported seeing things from an out-of-body perspective.

Greyson is working in tandem with a team of UVA cardiologists led by Paul Mounsey. (Mounsey declined to speak with me.) Interestingly, cardiologists—not parapsychologists—have published some of the most widely read studies on near-death experiences. A notable example was the study by Dutch cardiologist Pim van Lommel, published in the Lancet in 2001. His primary aim was simple, if ambitious: to find out what causes the near-death experience.

Theories abound. Oxygen deprivation and the drugs used in anesthesia are commonly suggested, and indeed, both drugs and lack of oxygen can trigger elements of the near-death experience—including the tunnel and the light and the out-of -body experience—when death is not near. (Pot, hash, LSD, ketamine, mescaline, and fighter pilot training blackouts have all been known to induce NDE-like experiences.) Intense stress or emotional states have been cited, as have endorphins and seizures. And then there’s the theory Greyson is testing for: the preposterous, marvelous, mind-whirling possibility that the patient’s consciousness somehow exits, and operates independently of, his body.

Van Lommel and his team interviewed 344 cardiac arrest patients in ten Dutch hospitals. All the patients had been clinically dead (defined by fibrillation on their EKG), and all interviews were done within a few days of the resuscitation. Eighteen percent reported at least one aspect of the typical near-death experience. Van Lommel marvels at the medical paradox of the cardiac arrest NDE: Consciousness, perception, and memory appear to be functioning during a period when the patient has lost, to quote van Lommel, “all functions of the cortex and the brainstem…. Such a brain would be roughly analogous to a computer with its power source unplugged and its circuits detached. It couldn’t hallucinate; it couldn’t do anything at all.”

The fact that only eighteen percent of resuscitated patients have any type of near-death experience led van Lommel to rule out medical explanations such as lack of oxygen to the brain. “With a purely physiological explanation such as cerebral anoxia…” he wrote, “most patients who have been clinically dead should report one.”

Van Lommel found that his subjects’ medication was statistically unrelated to their likelihood of having a near-death experience. (On the topic of anesthesia as an NDE inducer, Bruce Greyson makes the point that people under anesthesia but not close to death have far fewer NDEs than people who come close to death without being under anesthesia; so, as he puts it, “it’s hard to see how the drugs can be causing the NDE.”)

Fear was also unrelated to frequency of NDE (as was religious belief, gender, and education level). One of the explanations left standing was the last explanation you’d expect to read about in a copy of the Lancet: that perhaps the near-death experience was, to quote van Lommel’s paper, a “state of consciousness… in which identity, cognition and emotion function independently from the body, but retain the possibility of nonsensory perception.” Van Lommel ended his paper by encouraging researchers to explore, or at least be open to, the possibility that the explanation for NDEs is that the people having them are undergoing a transcendent experience. That is to say, their consciousness exists in, as van Lommel described it in a more recent paper, some “invisible and immaterial world.”

Greyson and Mounsey are exploring it. It took some doing. The hospital’s human subjects committee was uncomfortable with the study. To avoid upsetting his subjects, Greyson was asked to remove the word “death” from the consent forms and study title, a tricky undertaking when your study is on near-death experiences. Bear in mind, these are people with life-threatening heart conditions, people who are entering the hospital to have their hearts stopped. Greyson smiles. “And now for the dangerous part: I’m going to ask you if you remember anything.”

We’re back in Greyson’s office, on the first floor of a creaky, converted Charlottesville house with a wide, inviting porch that no one has time to sit on. Greyson squeezes his near-death research in amid his teaching duties and his private psychiatric practice. I frequently get office e-mails back from him when it’s 9 p.m. in his time zone. I’m not sure whether he has a family. On a shelf at his other office, at the hospital, there is a framed photograph of a child and another of some goats. “Is this your little girl?” I had asked him. He said no. I didn’t know what to say next. “Are these your goats?” is what I came up with. He explained that he shared the office. Greyson is dressed today in a deep green button-down shirt and casual dress pants. He wears wire-frame glasses and an even brown mustache. His hair sits neatly on his head, and his hands rest mainly in his lap. There’s a single barbell in the corner under a cabinet. I try, and fail, to picture him using it. Not that he seems unathletic. I just don’t envision him in motion. I envision him sitting. Working. Working and working.

We’ve been talking about the stigma of parapsychology. The University of Virginia is one of only three American universities with a parapsychology research unit or lab. Do they ever regret it? Greyson says there was a fair amount of debate as to whether to accept the original gift with which the parapsychology unit was founded. In 1968, Xerox machine inventor Chester Carlson, upon his wife’s urgings, bequeathed a significant number of his millions to the University of Virginia for research on the question of survival of consciousness after death. The university seems to have made peace with their decision, and with the department. “Though if you talk to individuals,” Greyson says, “you get the whole spectrum. Some people think this research is a waste of time and resources, and others think it’s a valuable contribution to medical science.” Though Greyson probably gets more respect from his parapsychology colleagues than from his peers in psychiatry, he seems to be held in high regard as a researcher here. On his mantel is a bronze bust—the university’s William James Award for best research by a resident. I had never realized how much William James looks like Thomas Jefferson.

“That is Thomas Jefferson,” says Greyson. “That’s the only bust you can get in Charlottesville, Virginia.”

THE FIRST CARDIOLOGIST to get involved in NDE research was Michael Sabom, currently in private practice in Atlanta. Sabom had read the work of psychologist Raymond Moody, Jr., who coined the term “near-death experience” and presented a series of cases in a 1975 book entitled Life After Life. Sabom was intrigued but skeptical. He was dissatisfied with Moody’s anecdotal approach and the fact that no attempt had been made to independently verify the things that people had reported seeing while seeming to be outside their bodies.

Sabom, then a professor of medicine and cardiology at Emory University in Atlanta, decided to do a study of his own, a controlled study. Of 116 cardiac arrest survivors he interviewed, he found six who could recall specific medical details they’d seen during their near-death out-of-body experience. The six patients’ descriptions of what they’d observed during their resuscitation were then compared to the report of the incident in their medical file. In no instances did the medical report contradict statements in the patient’s description. Nor were there any medical errors.

This was not the case with Sabom’s control group. Curious to see whether any old heart patient could come up with a convincingly detailed description of a cardiac resuscitation, Sabom interviewed twenty-five people who had spent time in coronary care units under similar circumstances to those of his subject group. All of them were familiar with the visuals of cardiac emergency: EKG monitors, defibrillator paddles, IV poles, crash carts. The controls were asked to describe, in as much detail as possible, what they would expect to see if their heart stopped beating and hospital staff attempted to resuscitate them. Twenty-two of the twenty-five descriptions contained obvious medical gaffes. Defibrillator paddles were hooked up to air tanks or outfitted with suction cups. The imaginary doctors were punching patients in the solar plexus and pounding on their backs instead of their chests. Hypodermic needles were being used to deliver electric shocks. It was as though chimps had been let loose in the emergency room.

Below is a passage from Sabom’s interview with one of the six NDE patients who’d described the specifics of their resuscitations. It is fairly representative of the level of detail and seeming cohesiveness of these people’s memories:

Another patient describes a pair of needles on the defibrillator unit, “one fixed and one which moved,” which was typical of 1970s-era defibrillators. (The man’s heart attack happened in 1973.) Sabom asks him how it moved, to which he replies, “It seemed to come up rather slowly, really. It didn’t just pop up like an ammeter or a voltmeter, or something registering…. The first time it went between one-third and one-half scale. And then they did it again, and this time it went up over one-half scale.” Though the man had been an air force pilot, he had never seen CPR instruments during his training.

Of course, it’s possible Sabom’s subjects were extrapolating from things they’d felt and heard, either just before their heart stopped or some time afterward. (The interviews were done years after the incidents had taken place, so doctors couldn’t be relied upon to verify the timing of specifics.) It’s possible the patients could have heard what the doctors and nurses were saying and subconsciously fabricated visual details to match. Hearing is the last sense to disappear when people lose consciousness. Dozens of articles have run in medical journals over the years addressing concerns about anesthetized patients hearing the things said about them during surgery.[44] Not just things like, “Nurse, more suction.” Things like, “This woman is lost” and “How can a man be so fat?”—both actual examples reported by patients in a 1998 British Journal of Anaesthesia article.

If it’s possible the patients heard things, it’s also possible they might have partway opened their eyes and seen things. And the things they saw could then have been incorporated into the viewpoint of being up above the scene. A couple of years back, epilepsy researchers at the Program of Functional Neurology and Neurosurgery at the University Hospitals of Geneva and Lausanne stumbled onto a site within the brain that, when stimulated, reliably caused the perception of looking down on one’s body from above. So convincing were the images that the patient in question pulled back when asked to raise her knees, because it appeared to her that her knees were about to hit her in the face. The visuals were limited to the person’s own body, however, and not the furniture or equipment or researchers around it. Still, one can imagine a blending of this viewpoint with information gleaned from things heard or seen.

The holy grail of NDE research, then, the best evidence that what seemed to be an extrasensory perception was indeed extrasensory, would be a deaf and blind patient: someone who “sees” things during a near-death experience that are later verified and that couldn’t have been inferred from something he or she saw or heard—because he or she can’t see or hear.

The closest Sabom has come to this is a woman named Pam Reynolds, who, in 1991, underwent brain surgery with her eyes taped shut, and molded, clicking inserts inside her ears. (Watching the brain stem’s responses to clicks is a way of monitoring its function.) Despite this, and despite the fact that her EEG was flat, meaning all brain activity had stopped (surgeons were repairing a massive aneurism and had drained the blood from her brain), she reported having “seen” the Midas Rex bone saw being used on her skull. She said it looked like an electric toothbrush and that its interchangeable attachments were kept in what looked like a socket wrench case. I went on the Midas Rex web page to have a look at their bone saws. Indeed, bone saws look nothing like any saw I’ve ever seen. They do look like electric toothbrushes—not the kind you or I might use, but the kind dentists use, with interchangeable heads and a metal handle attached to a long flexible tube that leads to a motor housing. After I’d recovered from reading the copy (“true high-speed bone-dissecting performance”!… “For cutting, drilling, reaming…”), I clicked on the Instrument Case page, where the various attachments were shown in a box resembling nothing so much as a socket wrench case.

But why was Reynolds unable to describe any of the people in the room? Sabom nominates “weapon focus phenomenon,” which you can read all about in a 1990 issue of the Journal of Law and Human Behavior. Research has shown that victims of armed criminals are able to accurately recall the weapon used on them ninety-one percent of the time, and the guy holding it only thirty-five percent of the time. So perhaps the bone saw had hijacked Pam Reynolds’s attention. Or, who knows, perhaps she paid a visit to the Midas Rex web page, too. This is the trouble with anecdotes.

Though there is no deaf-blind NDE study, there is a study of blind people who have had NDEs. Psychology professor and International Association for Near-Death Studies cofounder Kenneth Ring and then–psychology Ph.D. candidate Sharon Cooper contacted eleven organizations for the blind, explaining that they were looking for blind people who had had near-death or out-of-body experiences. They ended up with thirty-one subjects (and a book, called Mindsight, published in 1999). Twenty-four of these subjects reported being able to “see” during their experiences. Some “saw” their bodies lying below them; some “saw” doctors or physical features of the room or building they were in; others “saw” deceased relatives or religious figures.

Strangely, the subjects who reported “seeing” these things included people who had been blind from birth: individuals whose dreams almost never contain visual images, just sounds and tactile impressions. An example is a man named Brad, who reported having floated up above the building, where he could see snowbanks along the streets, of “a very soft kind of wet” slushy snow. He saw a playground and a trolley going down the street. When asked if perhaps he did not see but somehow sensed these things, Brad replied, “I clearly visualized them. I remember being able to see quite clearly.” (Others were less decisive: “It was seeing but it wasn’t vision,” said a woman named Claudia.) Understandably, the experience was confusing and, in one woman’s words, frightening. “It was like hearing words and not being able to understand them,” she told Ring, “but knowing they were words.”

I was mainly interested in whether any specific, unique details of what the blind people had “seen” could be verified by others who had seen these details, too. The book includes a chapter on corroborative evidence, but it is a bit disappointing. Often the people who could have verified what the blind people said they’d seen were impossible to track down, or did not recall any details of the events. One exception was a woman named Nancy, who lost her sight as a result of surgical complications. (They accidently cut and then sewed shut a large vein near her heart.) After the mishap, on her way into emergency surgery, she “saw” both her lover and the father of her child standing down the hallway from where her gurney was being wheeled toward an elevator. Ring tracked down both the lover and the dad, and both confirmed that they had watched her gurney go by from down the hall. However, there was some question as to exactly when she had gone blind (i.e., was it before or after the gurney ride?). And it’s hardly the kind of whiz-bang dazzle shot—to borrow Gary Schwartz’s terminology—that you hope for. You’d want the two men, or at least one of them, to have been “seen” (and then verified by someone else) doing something unique, something other than just being there—eating a banana, say, or tripping over an IV pole.

The most impressive near-death dazzle shot I’ve come across was not something reported by a blind person. It was a sneaker, seen by a migrant worker named Maria, who had a heart attack in Seattle. Maria told her ICU social worker—a woman whose parents did her the gross disservice of naming her Kimberly when her last name was Clark[45]—that she had not only spent time watching herself being worked on by the ER team, but had drifted out of the building and over the parking lot. It was from this perspective that she noticed a tennis shoe on a ledge on the north end of the third floor of the building. Later that day, Kimberly Clark went up to the third floor and found a tennis shoe where Maria had reported seeing one. Unfortunately, she didn’t bring along a witness.

The sneaker story eventually made its way to Kenneth Ring. In much the same way as unverified anecdotes of blind people’s near-death “sights” prompted his Mindsight study, Ring set out in search of other “cases of the Maria’s shoe variety,” cases he would then attempt to verify. He found three, which he describes in a 1993 article in the Journal of Near-Death Studies. Oddly, two of the three incidents involve shoes. In the first anecdote, Ring communicated with an ICU nurse who had returned to work from vacation wearing a new pair of plaid shoelaces. A woman she helped resuscitate saw her the next day (presumably in a different pair of shoes) and said, “Oh, you’re the one with the plaid shoelaces.” When the nurse expressed surprise, the woman said, “I saw them. I was watching what was happening yesterday when I died.” Another out-of-body heart attack patient reports to a nurse that he saw a red shoe on the hospital roof; a skeptical resident gets a janitor to let him up onto the roof, where he finds a red shoe (and loses his skepticism). No doubt someone out there is working on a journal article about “shoe focus phenomenon,” but until then, the out-of-body traveler’s affinity for footwear must remain a mystery.

Ring interviewed both these nurses, though apparently could not track down any third parties to corroborate the stories. It’s possible the patients had somehow seen these items before surgery. It’s also possible, in the case of the shoe on the roof, that it’s a coincidence. You can’t be sure. You’re relying on one person’s claim. The danger of that is best expressed in the form of a hand-glued last-minute errata slip in Ring’s book:

Readers are advised to disregard entirely the… Appendix, in which a case of a blind woman who purported to have an NDE is described…. We discovered, to our chagrin, that this case has fraudulent aspects. Dr. McGill, who offered this account to us in good faith, now believes she was deceived by the woman in question.

That’s why I like the computer-near-the-ceiling project. It’s a study, not an anecdote. Unfortunately, it’s a slow-moving study. Because of limitations imposed by the human subjects committee, Greyson has interviewed fewer than thirty subjects to date.

Is there any other experimental avenue for proving that a mind (soul, personality, consciousness, whatever) can travel independent of its body? There is, though it’s not an avenue along which mainstream researchers would be willing to stroll. It involves people who claim to be able to will them-selves to have out-of-body experiences—simply pull their consciousness out of the garage and take it for a ride.[46]

If you wanted to prove that it’s possible for some version or vestige of the self to exist independent of body and brain, you could try to set up some sort of detector in a room far away from one of these purported free-floaters, and instruct him or her to head on over. It’s a jump to further conclude that this is what we do when we die, but it would make it easier—for me, anyway—to accept that NDEs are something other than a neurological/psychological phenomenon.

In 1977, a group of parapsychologists undertook just such a project, on the campus of Duke University. I was pleased to see that the main author on this study was the late Robert Morris, of the University of Edinburgh. I’d written an article on Morris’s telepathy work years ago; I liked the fact that he had cooperated with the skeptics group CSICOP (Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal) in designing the experimental protocol.

Morris and his colleagues worked with a single subject named Stuart Harary, who had participated in previous out-of-body experience projects at Duke. Harary was instructed to leave his body and travel to one of two detection rooms, either fifty feet or a quarter mile away. To determine whether he could actually do this, Morris stationed people in the detection room and had them try to sense Harary while he “visited.” The results were no better than chance. There were about as many reports of detection during control periods as when Harary believed he was out of his body.

Surmising that animals might be more keenly attuned to extrasensory presences, Morris next did a series of trials using snakes, gerbils, and kittens as detectors. The cages were set up on top of an activity platform that registered movements on a polygraph, whose readout could then be compared to the timing of Harary’s “visits.” As anyone who’s been to a herpetarium could have predicted, the snakes did not work out. They didn’t move around when Harary was visiting the room, and they didn’t move around when he wasn’t. The gerbils proved similarly apathetic. “The rodents spent most of their time either chewing on the cage bars or resting quietly,” wrote Morris.

Morris eventually settled on a kitten that had seemed to show an affinity for Harary. The kitten was not caged but let loose in a corralled area with a grid taped out on the floor; in this case the behavioral measure was the number of squares entered per one hundred seconds and the animal’s vocalization rate. Disappointingly, the kitten seemed to be reliably less active when Harary indicated he was “there,” leading some of the researchers to wonder whether they’d gotten the protocol backward. Perhaps Harary’s presence wasn’t stimulating the animal but calming it. Morris and his colleagues went through a half dozen methodological variations, including one in which the kitten was sequestered under an inverted box until Harary “arrived,” whereupon the box, which was hooked to a pulley, would slowly and dramatically rise like a stage curtain. It is around this point that I like to insert the image of a group of white-haired Duke alumni wandering into the building on a homecoming tour.

The experiment dragged on so long that around page 11, Morris begins referring to the kitten as a cat, noting that it had by then grown to maturity. He reported a number of anecdotal occurrences—frustratingly, a couple of casual bystanders proved better at sensing Harary than the official “human detectors”—that would seem to indicate something was up, but overall there was little to suggest that Harary had been anywhere but inside Harary’s head. Nonetheless, everyone seemed to have a good time, and scientific literature is the richer for the introduction of the measurement unit “meows per second.”

A few years later, a team of non-university-affiliated paranormal researchers tried a similar experiment, with strain gauges in place of kittens and gerbils. Here our out-of-body traveler was an amateur parapsychologist from Maine named Alex Tanous. For clarity, Mr. Tanous referred to his out-ofbody self as Alex 2, and his stay-at-home self as Alex 1, and so I will, too. Alex 2’s mission was to travel six rooms distant, enter a suspended (to keep floor vibrations from setting off the strain gauges) eighteen-inch cube, and view one of five randomly generated images, which would appear in one of four colors and four quadrants. Meanwhile, Alex 1 would tell the researchers what he sees. A tape was kept running, so that the researchers could see if the strain gauges were registering force specifically when Alex 2 was correctly reporting what he “saw,” as this would suggest that he had actually been inside the cube—rather than knowing the target remotely, via some more ordinary, garden-variety ESP.

Head researcher Karlis Osis, who died in 1997, reported that Tanous had 144 hits and 83 misses. Does this mean that Tanous got all three aspects (color, quadrant, image) of the target correct sixty-three percent of the time? When chance would dictate a correct guess only once in eighty tries? Why hasn’t this guy been on the news? Why hasn’t he turned the world upside down? Osis further claimed that when Alex 2 was seeing the targets correctly, the mean activation level of the gauges inside the chamber was significantly greater than when he wasn’t seeing the target correctly. “Therefore,” concludes the paper, “it is our opinion that the [strain gauge] results can most likely be attributed to the subject’s out-of-body presence in the shielded chamber.”

Though I suspected that a conversation with Tanous would leave me chewing on my cage bars, I decided to try to call him. I did not succeed, because in 1990, Alex 2 had, like Osis, made the big one-way trip out of his body. So we are left to conclude that either Tanous was some sort of bizarre on-call living ghost, or Osis was a deluded or sloppy researcher.

SO LET’S SAY, just for a moment, that people who have near-death experiences are actually leaving their bodies. That they are making some sort of transcendent journey into a different dimension. And that one of the off-ramps in this dimension leads to the afterlife. This means that near-death experiences could—just possibly—provide us with a sneak preview of our own impending eternity. If only someone had kept a list of near-death experiencers’ descriptions of this place.

Someone did. Michael Sabom’s book includes an appendix of all twenty-eight “transcendental environments” glimpsed or “visited” during subjects’ near-death experiences. There seem to be two basic versions: the weather report and the farm report. Fully half the environments consisted of nothing but sky. Heaven appears to have a similar weather system as earth; there were approximately the same number of reports of blue sky and sunshine as there were of clouds and mist. One or two meteorologically inclined individuals included both in their report (e.g., “blue sky with an occasional cloud”).

The other half of the twenty-eight descriptions consisted of gardens or pastures, often with a gate thrown in. The heavenly farmland was more or less deserted, the exceptions being one pasture with cattle grazing and one landscape of people “of all different nationalities, all working on their arts and crafts.”

It seems pretty clear what’s going on here. People are experiencing something dazzling and euphoric and totally foreign, and interpreting it according to their image of heaven. Greyson agrees. “I think the experience is so ineffable that we just put whatever framework, whatever models and analogies we have, onto it.” Greyson says these cultural overlays also apply to the experience of rushing down a tunnel. “I had one truck driver I interviewed call it a tailpipe.” Likewise the experience of being sent back to return to one’s body. In one journal article I read, a man who lived in India experienced this as being told there’d “been a clerical error.”

The alternate explanation, of course, is that the people who had these NDEs actually saw heaven, and that heaven looks just like it looks in the holy books. This is, of course, tricky to prove. Someone who’s been there would have to bring back photographs. Preferably someone scientific, someone trustworthy and pedigreed.

On December 26, 1993, the Hubble Telescope made visual contact with Heaven and took hundreds of pictures and sent these pictures of Heaven to Goddard Space Center in Maryland…. In the pictures of Heaven, you can see bright light and what looks like the Holy City…. Heaven is located at the end of the Universe.

This dispatch comes to us courtesy of the Internet Religious News service. One fine day I called Goddard Space Flight Center to see what they had to say about this. “Well,” said a good-natured NASA spokesperson named Ed Campion, “it is true that Hubble focuses on faint lights at the most distant parts of the universe.” That’s why NASA sent a telescope way out into space—to get it closer to the oldest, most distant parts of the universe, the stuff that dates to the Big Bang. But Campion hadn’t heard about the heaven photos. Or the secret NASA space probe that recorded millions of voices singing “Glory, Glory, Glory to the Lord on high” over and over—as reported, here again, by our imaginative friends at the Internet Religious News service. Or the NASA photos of the “two Giant Human-Looking Eyes in deep space that are billions of light years around and billions of light years apart looking at Earth.”

“That last one,” said Campion, “kind of gives me the willies.”

Realistically speaking, if the place experienced by people who almost die exists as something other than a neurological phenomenon, it’s no more likely to be located by astronomers than the soul was likely to be located by the early anatomists. It exists (if it exists) in a dimension other than that of time and space, a dimension we typically can’t access (if indeed we do access it) until we die. Greyson’s thinking is that cessation of the brain’s everyday activities, as happens during clinical death, might enable the consciousness to tune in to a channel normally blocked or obscured by the chatter. “It’s almost as if the brain in its normal functioning stops you from going there,” he told me. “And when you knock those parts of the brain out, then you’re able to.”

Other than a brush with death, are there other ways to deflect that bothersome everyday sensory input and experience the transcendent reality that may or may not be out there all the time? You bet. The following is a passage from a chapter on the drug ketamine in the book Anesthesiology: “I would suddenly find myself going down tunnels at high speed…. One time I came out into a golden light. I rose into the light and found myself having an unspoken interchange with the light, which I believed to be God.” London psychiatrist and ketamine authority Karl Jansen quotes the passage in his own book Ketamine: Dreams and Realities. Ketamine is today rarely used as an anesthetic and fairly commonly used as a recreational drug. Jansen used to be of the opinion that since ketamine—or LSD or pot, for that matter—can produce ersatz near-death experiences, this meant that surgical or cardiac arrest patients’ near-death experiences were similarly hallucinogenic.

He has of late changed his tune: “The fact that near-death experiences can be artificially induced does not imply that the spontaneously occurring NDE is ‘unreal’ in some way,” writes Jansen in Ketamine. “It has been suggested that both may involve a ‘retuning’ of the brain to allow the experience of a different reality from the everyday world.” If this is true, it suggests it may be possible to preview death by taking ketamine—which is precisely what self-described psychonauts Timothy Leary and John Lilly did, in what they called “experiments in voluntary death.”

If you want to have a K-induced near-death experience, I read in Jansen’s book, you should take a fairly ambitious dose, and you should take it by injection. You should also be prepared for all manner of physical side effects ranging from the dangerous to the embarrassing. Your eyes may wander off in different directions. Your body may jerk uncontrollably. In his book, Jansen passes along the advice of The Essential Psychedelic Guide author D. M. Turner, which is to have a friend or “sitter” present when you take ketamine. (Turner, Jansen wryly points out, died alone in the bath with a bottle of K beside the tub.)

Before I traveled to England for my mediumship course, I scheduled an interview with Jansen in London. I wanted him to be my sitter, but I didn’t, at this point, tell him. I was hoping he’d offer. I imagined we’d sit in his office and chat for a while, and then he’d open a drawer. I happen to have some ketamine right here. I’ll gladly provide you with a safe, clinical environment in which to have a near-death experience with absolutely no unsightly side effects.

Jansen made no such offer. He was in the process of relocating to New Zealand and was staying at a hotel while in London. He had no office, so we met in his hotel bar. He was tall and suave and accompanied by a similarly tall and suave Russian woman. We talked for half an hour, shouting over the din while the Russian woman looked on intently. I imagined her looking on intently while my eyes rolled around in my head and my extremities spazzed. I no longer wanted to take drugs with Dr. Jansen.

The clean-and-sober voluntary-death alternative takes the form of a Buddhist meditation. Pure Land Buddhists, who date back to A.D. 400, believe that by practicing certain rather extreme forms of meditation, it’s possible to experience the same heavenlike locale that people report having experienced during brushes with death. These guys were the original near-death experience researchers. One of the junior monks’ duties was to sit at the bedside of moribund elders and jot down their deathbed visions of the Pure Land. By the eleventh century, more than a hundred accounts of the Pure Land had been transcribed, including many from people who had been thought dead and then revived. The monk Shantao was one of the most ardent devotees; his sermons contained long, vivid descriptions of the Pure Land. Possibly too vivid: Osaka University professor Carl Becker writes in an article in Anabiosis: The Journal for Near-Death Studies that at least one listener was compelled to take the express route to the Pure Land, committing suicide in the days following the sermon.

Should you, too, wish to preview the afterlife, here are instructions for the “constantly walking meditation practice”: “For a single period of 90 days, only circumambulate exclusively…. Until three months have elapsed, do not lie down even for the snap of a finger. Until the three months have elapsed, constantly walk without stopping (except for natural functions).”

Before you begin, I should warn you that both Pure Land Buddhists and ketamine users occasionally experience something closer to hell than heaven. As do near-death experiencers. Researcher P. M. H. Atwater, who interviewed more than 700 people about their near-death experiences, reported that 105 of these individuals described their experience as unpleasant. But only one researcher ever claimed to be hearing tales of literally hellish goings-on. Cardiologist Maurice Rawlings recounted dozens of stories of people hearing screams and moans and witnessing violent scenes of gruesome torture at the hands of grotesque animal-human forms. Rawlings raised eyebrows in the NDE community with his second book, which advocated a commitment to Christianity as a way of ensuring one doesn’t end up in the sorts of hellish scenarios he claimed his non-Christian near-death experiencers were describing.

If you take Rawlings out of the picture, reports of hell-like sights and sounds are rare.[47] You will be pleased to know that Atwater never once heard a description of a fiery or even unseasonably hot locale. Both Atwater and Greyson concluded that the difference between an unpleasant near-death experience and a pleasant one is largely one of attitude. A bright light at the end of a tunnel can seem warm and inviting, or it can seem mysterious and terrifying. People of the world “all working on their arts and crafts” can seem like heaven or, if you’re me, hell. The same vast expanse of empty sky that looks beautiful to one person may seem lonely and barren to another. I once interviewed a geologist who searches for meteorites on empty, wind-battered ice fields in Antarctica, where the snow is whipped into knee-high white swirls. He sometimes gives talks and slide shows of his travels to the public. Most people tell him they can’t imagine spending months at a time in such a cold, barren locale. One night a quiet older woman came up to him as he was putting away his slides and said, “You’ve been to heaven.”

Bruce Greyson has also written papers on what he calls the distressing near-death experience. I asked him whether researchers had ever looked for a correlation between having a hellish near-death experience and being a mean, rotten person. Just, you know, wondering. His answer was reassuring: “We have very blissful accounts from horrible people.” He told me the story of a Mafia bagman who was shot in the chest and left to die. While lying there bleeding, he had “a beautiful experience, in which he felt the presence of God and unconditional love.” One of the focuses of Greyson’s near-death work has been the effects—often profoundly positive—that near-death experiences have on people’s lives. The bagman, for example, quit the Mafia and now counsels delinquent boys. “He walked away from his lifestyle,” says Greyson. “I talked to his former girlfriend, who used to complain to me: ‘Rocky just doesn’t care about money, about things of substance anymore.’”

I DON’T KNOW if Wes can hear anything, but he surely can’t see. His face, like the rest of his body, is draped in blue surgical cloths. If he could see, he’d surely be entertained. Everyone in the room is dressed in bulky lead kilts and matching lead dickeys to protect their thyroids and reproductive organs from the real-time X-rays that are helping the surgeons thread a sensor wire through Wes’s[48] heart. The wire will be connected to the body of the defibrillator, soon to be sewn into a pocket in the pectoral muscle just below the spot where a more conventional shirt pocket would be.

And now it’s time to almost kill Wes. A technician from the defibrillator company fiddles with a small computer that remotely manipulates the implanted device. In the corner of the screen is the company’s disquieting logo, a heart with a jagged lightning bolt through it. “We’re preparing to shock,” announces the technician. Depending on the voltage and on what the heart is doing when you shock it, the charge can either induce or stop fibrillation. “So it can kill him, or save him,” she says brightly.

This time, they’re aiming—temporarily, of course—for the former. “Here we go,” says the technician. “I’m enabling and… I’m inducing.” The jolt makes Wes’s chest muscles contract violently, jerking his torso up off the table as though he’d been kicked from below. “We have VF,” says the technician, sounding all urgent and mission-control. “VF” stands for ventricular fibrillation. On the EKG monitor, Wes’s heartbeat dithers wanly. What’s going on in his mind right now? Is he beholding the bright light? Speeding through the tunnel? Attending an appliqué class? Wherever he is, it’s a brief visit; three seconds later the defibrillator is preparing to shock his heart back to lub-dub.

Twenty minutes later, Wes is being wheeled to the recovery room. Technically speaking, anyone who makes it to a recovery room can’t have been dead. By definition, death is a destination with no return ticket. Clinically dead is not dead dead. So how do we know the near-death experience isn’t a hallmark of dying, not death? What if several minutes down the line, the bright light dims and the euphoria fades and you’re just, well, dead? We don’t know, says Greyson. “It’s possible it’s like going to the Paris airport and thinking you’ve seen France.”

Greyson is an inestimably patient person in a field rife with inconclusive data and metaphysical ambiguities. I ask him what he thinks, in his heart of hearts. Does the personality survive death? Surely, after all these years, he has an opinion. “It wouldn’t surprise me at all if we come up with evidence that we do survive. I also wouldn’t be terribly surprised if we come up with evidence that we don’t.”

Sabom is less equivocal. I asked him, in an e-mail, whether he believed that the consciousness leaves the body during an NDE and is able to perceive things in an extrasensory manner. “Yes,” came the reply.

I asked van Lommel the same question, and got the same reply. “I am quite sure that it is not a hallucination or a confabulation,” he wrote. “I am convinced that consciousness can be experienced independently from the body, during the period of a nonfunctioning brain, with the possibility of nonsensory perception.”

Van Lommel mailed me a draft of a new article in which he presents a theory as to how this might be possible. He uses the analogy of radio or TV transmissions. All these channels, these different electromagnetic fields packed with information, are out there all the time. We can’t watch HBO if we’re already watching Bravo, but that doesn’t mean HBO’s broadcast ceases to exist. “Could our brain be compared to the TV set, which receives electromagnetic waves and transforms them into image and sound? When the function of the brain is lost, as in clinical death or brain death, memories and consciousness still exist, but the receptivity is lost, the connection is interrupted.” Then he went all Gerry Nahum on me. His paper stepped into quantum mechanics, to phase-space versus real-space, to nonlocality and fields of probability. Neuronal microtubules made an appearance. I had to set it down.

I can’t evaluate this sort of theorizing, because I have no background in quantum physics. A few months ago, I was corresponding with a Drexel University physicist named Len Finegold. I mentioned quantum-mechanics-based theories of consciousness. You can’t hear someone sigh through e-mail, but I heard it anyhow. “Please beware,” came his reply. “There are a lot of people who believe that just because we don’t have an explanation for something, it’s quantum mechanics.”

So I’m holding out for the guys on the ceiling. As soon as someone sees an image on Bruce Greyson’s computer, you can mark me down as a believer.