Are these for real?
I’d say it’s all about how the brain deals with death, but I heard reports of people reading the tags off the back of lights (as if they had an out of body experience in which they floated up near the ceiling and looked down).
What’s up with that?
One of the best explanations I have ever heard, apart from the general position that death isn’t something that evolution can really have programmed your brain to handle, is that the unprecedented experience of death causes the brain to recall it’s most significant experience; passing down a tunnel and emerging into a bright light (i.e. birth).
It may be a load of hogwash, but it’s not a bad bit of reasoning, I think.
Oh, on the OP, got any specific stories that were independently investigated? (a lot of OOBE stories seem to be mere anecdote).
I don’t know about the near death experience from a personal standpoint, but I experimented with OOBE and lucid dreaming.
I was listening to the radio while lying in bed and I heard an “expert” on OOBE instructing to imagine a “fork in the road” as you begin to drift off to sleep. I imagined that the fork on the right went to sleepy-land and the fork on the left went to an OOBE. As I was drifting off to sleep, I heard a VERY loud buzzing sound. I flicked the light on and swatted at the air, imagining a big juicy bumblebee flitting around my head. I looked for a large winged insect for about 5 minutes before I gave up and went back to bed. I turned the radio back on, and just as I did, this expert on OOBE said that an indication that you are about to leave your body is “a loud buzzing sound or vibration.” I thought to myself “WOW!” I was close!
I experienced the buzzing sound several nights after that, but never had the courage to remain in the semi-sleep state I was in, always jarring awake in fear.
A few weeks later when I heard this sound again as I was drifting off to sleep, I summoned my courage and instead of waking myself, I let the buzzing continue for what seemed like 30 seconds until it went away on its own. I sat up in my bed, and everything felt the same. I was still in my body. I flopped back and went back to sleep.
At some point, I opened my eyes and saw my bedroom in its familiar blue night hue with a little light filtering in from the street.
Suddenly, I was bumping into the walls of my bedroom. It didn’t hurt or anything, but it was as if I was moving all over the place, but with no control over the direction I was going. I kept asking myself “WTF!” The odd thing is that I wasn’t scared. It was more confusing than anything else.
“What a strange dream” I thought to myself the next morning.
Only later, after reading some books on the subject, did I realize that I had what could be decribed as a “novice” OOBE.
There are a few things that make me think I actually was out of body. The first is that if it was a dream, it was the first that I can remember in my life where I was dreaming that I was in my bedroom, and everything looked the same in my dream as in reality. Except that I had no control and was mashing my face into the walls, but without pain. Usually, when i dream I do something painful, I feel the pain, at least in the dream. This was not the case with this event.
Also, almost all the books I’ve read comment on these “directionless” events that "novices’ experience. The interesting part about that is the fact that I didn’t read about that until after I experienced it.
Since that time, I’ve come to think that perhaps I was experimenting with something I shouldn’t. Too many un-forseen possibilities.
I’m deep into learning about lucid dreaming now. It seems much safer to me. I’ve had very infrequent success realizing that I’m dreaming when I’m dreaming, but when I have had success, it has been quite an amazing thing.
I know this all might sound flaky. It’s my first post on the SDMB too! Talk about horrid first impressions! Oh well.
Or this was just the first time in your life that you had a dream that you were in your bedroom, and everything looked the same in your dream as in reality. After all, you presumably have a memory of what your bedroom looks like in reality, so it hardly seems paranormal that you would have a dream about something you are in reality familiar with. Now, if you could have an OOBE and gain information somehow which you didn’t have before the dream/OOBE, that would be different. (Accurately describe the contents of someone else’s bedroom, say, although that might get us into Psychic Peeping Tom territory.) And you mention “lucid dreaming” and that you’d been more or less trying to have an OOBE.
So, this is either evidence of actual separation between the body and the mind or soul or spirit in a paranormal sense, or else is simply a description of a common human dream experience, the same way many people have “flying” or “falling” or “naked in a public place” or “I’m back in high school/college and it’s finals week and I realize I haven’t studied and don’t even know what classes I’m registered for” dreams without necessarily having to read about them in detail first.
I’ll just say it’s the first time I ever dreamt that I had no control over my own direction. Even if I have dreams that I’m being chased by big purple flying elephants, I am able to run in the direction I want.
well, I found a book for .29 at Savers where people who were clinically dead recalled exact details and conversations the nurses and doctors had while they were unconcious and, as far as the doctor who wrote the book was concerned, had all senses failing to work.
The book is “Beyond Death’s Door”, I believe, in case anyone would care to read it. It documents not only the good experiences, but also NDE’s where supposedly good Christians went to hell and were terrified out of their mind. The doctors theory was, since he had access to the NDE patients right when they were brought back, he could get those recorded before their bad experiences were pushed into their subconcious.
Not exactly Earth shattering. People in comas who are assumed to have ‘no senses working’ (ie they are unconscious) regularly recall hearing what’s going on around them. Consciousness has many levels. Just because you can’t respond and your ‘conscious’ brain is shut down doesn’t mean that you can’t hear, and recall what you heard later with perfect clarity. This is the basic principle underlying subliminal education and some forms of hypnosis
D Riffer, I think you should read this staff report.
Lately, my dreams have been getting interesting again :). But for a while, I would usually dream of getting up, having breakfast, going to work, or just lying in bed. If it hadn’t been for the lack of continuity between my dream and waking experiences, it would have been hard for me to tell what I really did. If we didn’t fall for illusions, they wouldn’t be illusions.
I went to a catholic high school and in religion class, we were told of people who had commited suicide and “seen hell and came back.” I have a problem with people using a badly understood phenomenon (NDE) as a proof of anything.
I am not an expert in neither neurology, psychiatry, or even the occult. However, I have all reason to believe that memory is nothing but a function of the brain. So explain this: how can sensory information picked up outside the body be relayed to a distant (and supposedly inactive) brain for storage?
(But I really, really, really want to believe you can go to heaven and back!)
Here Cecil Adams answers the question: Do near-death experiences prove there is life after death?
In his article, Cecil suggests that it’s:“Just a hallucination. Fine, but why does everybody have the same hallucination?” A possible explanation for this has been proposed by Dr. Rick Strassman in his recent book “DMT: The Spirit Molecule”. Dr. Strassman suggests that the naturally occurring neurotransmitter DMT is responsible for near-death & mystical experiences as well as alien abduction experiences. Interestingly enough, DMT is released by the pineal gland–the site of the mythic “Third Eye” that can supposedly be opened during deep meditation.
The most interesting aspect of Strassman’s hypothesis is that the Pineal Gland releases a high amount of DMT during the last moments of one’s life, and this very well could be the brain’s method of easing the transition between life and death. It may have a role in facilitating the soul’s movement in and out of the body.
It’s really a fascinating book. Although some of his ideas are pretty “out there”, he was an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of New Mexico, and his work continues to stand as the only federally approved DMT trials in human subjects. And as this interview with him shows, giving DMT to volunteers can have some pretty bizarre results!
I reserve the right to believe in ANY Supreme Being (or to disbelieve, for that matter) until said SB (not SOB) will take the time to stop by for some tea and crumpets and straighten our belief system back out. >>debate for 'nuther thread<< but I think the scarriest thought for me is that “That’s it”. People die and thats it. No continuation of energy, no Space Dolphins, Aliens, Heaven, Hell, NOTHING. For my concious brain, thats too much to handle.
I’ve read this book and it’s sequel ‘Before Death Comes’ - it’s written by a Christian and to be honest, It seemed to be just a very thick gospel tract to me.
Thanks for the link jovan.
Thanks Frinkboy for the Cecil link and the “the Spirit Molecule” info.
Interesting. Doug describes his experiences very closely to what I’ve experienced while lucid dreaming. Maybe the two are really much the same. To me, it doesn’t matter what the basis for it is, whether physiological or otherwise. It’s definitely an enjoyable “hobby.”
D Riffer, that VERY loud buzzing sound also precedes episodes of Sleep Paralysis. Here’s a link on the subject, if you’re interested:
http://watarts.uwaterloo.ca/~acheyne/S_P.html
Some people claim that the initially unpleasant experience of Sleep Paralysis leads eventually to an Out-of-Body Experience, once they have taught themselves not to fight it.
Reasonable. He’ll be along soon to do just that. 
On the other hand, while the explanation in Cecil’s column (visual cortex neurons firing more or less at random produce the “tunnel of light” effect) does make some sense, is there any additional clear non-religious explanation for the common OOBE/NDE phenomena (viewpoint “floating” over scene of coma/death, passage at speed through tunnel towards bright light, rapid replay of past experiences, etc.). The second might be recall of birth, as has been hypothecated, though that seems a bit far-fetched to me.
No ulterior motive but the usual one here, just curiosity as to what alternatives to survivalism in some form can put forth to account for the fact that many but not all people going through NDEs and many OOBEs seem to share one or more of these phenomena.
How common is that particular set of experiences? That is, do people in Japan or China or Nigeria report the same experiences as people in the U.S.? Have people seemingly been reporting the same set of NDE phenomena without hearing about what other people have reported, or has that specific set of experiences seemingly spread along with the reports of other people’s experiences?
Now that you mention it, I don’t think that everyone has the same vision. My grandmother had a NDE during childbirth and said that she was crossing a vast river. I asked her if there were tunnels, lights, etc., but she said that it was just the river and a bunch of people she knew on the other side (dead ones, obviously). If everyone actually did have the exact same experience, I’d tend to think that there was more to it.