Chapter
Fifteen
Dreaming and beyond
in spirituality, and increased love and acceptance for others. Eight years after the
events, all the patients claimed positive changes (van Lommel et al., 2001).INTERPRETING NDES
Dismissing NDEs as fabrications or wish fulfilment is unreasonable. The similari-
ties across ages and cultures, and the reliability of the findings, suggest that NDEs
have something interesting to teach us about death and consciousness. The
question is, what?
A common reaction, as to OBEs, is that NDEs are proof of dualism – of the exis-
tence of a soul or consciousness that operates independently of the brain and
can survive death. For Kenneth Ring (1980), the experiences ‘point to a higher
spiritual world’ and access to a ‘holographic reality’; for Parnia and Fenwick (2002),
understanding NDEs will require ‘a new science of consciousness’; for van Lommel
(2009), they are evidence for non-local consciousness or ‘endless consciousness’.
Two types of evidence are commonly given in support. First, NDErs describe
‘clear’ states of consciousness with lucid reasoning and memory when their brain
is severely impaired. ‘How could a clear consciousness outside one’s body be
experienced at the moment that the brain no longer functions during a period
of clinical death with flat EEG?’, ask van Lommel and colleagues (2001, p. 2044).
Indeed, how could it? If ‘clear consciousness’ were really possible with no heart-
beat and a completely flat EEG, this would indeed change our view of the mind–
brain relationship, but this has not been demonstrated. The problem concerns
timing. There is not one case in which we know that the experiences occurred
when the person’s brain was not functioning; the NDEs could just as well have
occurred just before, during, or just after the medical crisis. A number of phys-
iological differences have been found between NDErs and control groups, but
arguments continue about what this means for our understanding of mind, brain,
and consciousness (Trent-Von Haesler and Beauregard, 2013), and in particular it
is unclear whether the changes are a cause or a consequence of the NDE.Second, there are many claims of the paranormal, including compelling accounts
of people seeing things at a distance which they could not possibly have known
about. Yet these cases have not stood up well to investigation (for a review see
Blackmore, 2017). For example, van Lommel supports his claims of ‘endless con-
sciousness’ and ‘memory outside the brain’ (2013) with a decades-old anecdote
reported to him second-hand about someone commonly known as ‘dentures
man’ and which even believers in life-after-death have concluded is unconvincing
(Smit, 2008).
One way to find out whether consciousness persists beyond physical death would
be to provide randomly selected, concealed targets that NDErs could see during
their experience. The best study of this kind is AWARE (AWAreness during REsus-
citation), a multi-hospital project launched in 2008 to measure brain function
at the same time as providing hidden images that NDErs might be able to see.
Sadly, none of the patients who had NDEs looked at the hidden targets (Parnia
et al., 2014). One man did have an OBE and this occurred around 20 or 30 sec-
onds into his three-minute cardiac arrest. Interestingly, odd bursts of activity have‘at the time of physical
death consciousness
will continue to be
experienced in another
dimension, in an
invisible and immaterial
world’
(van Lommel, 2006, p. 148)
‘An individual who
should survive his
physical death is
also beyond my
comprehension [. . .];
such notions are for the
fears or absurd egoism
of feeble souls’(Einstein, 1949/2006, p. 7)