in intensive care or during surgery, or who have had close encounters with death such as I have described, but who have had nothing dramatic to report. My own father-in-law is a case in point. Some years ago he suffered a severe heart attack while undergoing kidney surgery. A few months later, he had open-heart surgery to remove the scarring caused by the attack and was in a coronary intensive care unit for several days. While he had some mild hallucinations as a result of the medication he was on, there was nothing he could identify as truly mystical, nothing approaching an NDE.
Leading figures in NDE research admit they don’t know why some have the experience and others do not. In an interview, Dr. Bruce Greyson, a psychiatrist at the University of Connecticut’s Medical Center and one of the best-known researchers in this field, told me he considers it quite possible that all those who “die” and come back have an NDE, but that for unknown reasons some of them repress it. Greyson said, “It could be either that they didn’t actually come close enough to really dying or that some other factor, say, the medication, interfered in some way. In situations like this, people are under extreme stress, so it’s hard to calculate all the variables.”
Intrigued, I followed this up by interviewing three anaesthetists, including Dr. Richard Cooper, assistant professor in the Department of Anaesthesia at the University of Toronto Medical School. They told me that there are usually three components in any general anaesthetic: analgesics to prevent pain, muscle relaxants to prevent bodily movement during the surgery or other procedure and amnesics to ensure the experience is forgotten. As Cooper explained, the amnesics are to erase or prevent the formation of memories of the operation. “People don’t want to be aware of what has gone on,” he said. Those rare few who do manage some recall generally are plagued by a sense that “something has gone wrong.” They can even have recurring nightmares in which they sense danger or risk of death but are unable to move to avoid it. The amount of amnesic given (usually one of the benzodiazepines) varies with each patient, and the effects vary as well, depending on other drugs being administered at the same time. Some surgery, the doctors said, is done without the use of amnesics if it is thought they might interfere with, for example, the heartbeat of cardiac patients. However, given the wide use of memory suppressants in most serious operations, I find it noteworthy, not that many who experience clinical death during surgery don’t have an NDE, but that so many appear to remember so clearly that they did.
Kenneth Ring, whose first book, Heading Toward Omega (1984), examines the transformative effects of NDEs on those who experience them—including the temporary heightening of perceptual abilities—is today one of the leading authorities on this entire phenomenon. Particularly striking and persuasive are his ongoing studies of blind people who have had either NDEs, out-of-body experiences or, in many cases, both. The first results of this research came in a 1997 article in the International Association for Near-Death Studies’ official Journal of Near-Death Studies. Those wishing to follow this aspect further should read also Ring’s 1999 book, Mindsight, written with co-researcher E. Valarino. The blind subjects interviewed ranged from those congenitally blind from birth to those who lost their sight because of accidents or disease later in life. Ring and his associates are unequivocal in their conviction, based on the evidence presented by this group of NDErs, that the blind do have visual perception, that is, they can see in a clear and detailed fashion during their experience—even those who are blind from birth.
In his first book on near-death experiences, Life After Life, Moody analysed the “otherworld journeys” of those who have been to the brink of death and have reported “miraculous” glimpses of a world beyond. They found a plane of existence glowing with love and understanding, a place of bliss and light that can apparently be reached only “by an exciting trip through a tunnel or passageway.” In his later book, The Light Beyond, he summarizes the characteristics of these “near-death visions” in this way: “NDErs experience some or all of the following events—a sense of being dead, peace and painlessness even during ‘painful’ experience, bodily separation, entering a dark region or tunnel, rising rapidly into the heavens, meeting deceased friends and relatives who are bathed in light, encountering a Supreme Being, reviewing one’s life, and feeling reluctance to return to the world of the living.”4
By chance, a few days after I had read Life After Life, I noticed a brief story in the Toronto Star about a man who had been critically wounded in the abdomen by a shotgun blast at close range. He was a night watchman at a Canadian Tire store outlet in the west end of Mississauga, Ontario, and had surprised two thieves in the act. What caught my eye was the statement in the story that this security guard had “died” twice during the many hours of surgery required to save him. I kept the clipping for three months and then tracked him down by phone. He was by then well on the road to a near-miraculous recovery and was willing to give me an interview. I told him nothing in advance of my area of interest. I spent several hours with him and discovered that, although he was reluctant to talk about it at first, he had had an experience that he described as “a kind of religious conversion.” It turned out that during the moments or minutes when his vital signs had totally flattened out on the monitor and the doctors were certain they had lost him, he had in fact had an NDE.
It was my first direct encounter with anything of the sort, and it gave me a strange feeling to hear him describe roughly the same phenomenon outlined in Life After Life. Incidentally, at that time he had not read the book and had been afraid to speak to anyone else about his experience for fear of being thought strange. Not every detail matched the complete profile of an NDE given above, but there were enough of the major traits—the tunnel, the sense of shining light and the reluctance to “go back”—to make me realize he was talking about essentially the same thing. I wrote the story and it gained a considerable response from readers and other media.
I was not the first Toronto Star journalist, however, to have reported such a case. In my first months at the paper, well before Moody set off the NDE floodtide with Life After Life, a colleague of mine at the newspaper, Sidney Katz, wrote the strange story of Leslie Sharpe. Sharpe, who at that time headed a successful Toronto-based printing firm, had never concerned himself with the ultimate mystery of life after death. But, as Katz told it, “. . . late one spring afternoon a year ago, Sharpe, sixty-eight, had an experience that changed all that. He died.” Katz, basing his account on an article by Sharpe that had just been published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, told how the man had gone to Toronto General Hospital complaining of sharp pains in his chest and left arm.5 Once in bed, his symptoms vanished and blood pressure, heart sounds, everything, seemed completely normal. Later that same day, however, at two minutes to four in the afternoon, he looked at his watch. A few seconds afterwards, he gave a very deep sigh and his head flopped over to the right.
He reported: “I remember wondering why my head flopped over, because I hadn’t moved it. I figured I must be going to sleep. That was my last conscious thought.” Immediately, Sharpe was looking down at his own body from the waist up. “Almost at once, I saw myself leave my body, coming out through my head and shoulders. The body was somewhat transparent, although not exactly in vapour form. Watching, I thought, ‘So this is what happens when you die.’” Next, the businessman found himself sitting on a small object, tilted at a forty-five-degree angle, and travelling through a blue-grey sky at great speed. He had the feeling he didn’t know where he was or where he was going but that this was “one journey I must take alone.” He felt safe and that everything was “being taken care of.” Then he began to feel a “delightful” floating sensation as he was bathed in a bright yellow light.
He wrote: “I have a scar on my right leg, the result of an old injury. Although at the time I was not conscious of having any lower limbs, I felt the scar being torn away and I thought, ‘They have always said your body is made whole out here. I wonder if my scars are gone?’” Continuing to float, he tried unsuccessfully to locate his legs. The sensation of tranquility and joy engulfed him so fully that he could only describe it afterwards as “something beyond words to tell.” Just then, a series of hard blows to his left side brought him back to consciousness. His heart had
