2 - The Seattle Study

Several months after Katie's marvelous experience, I left Pocatella and went to Children's Hospital in Seattle.

I had a research grant to study the effects of an anti-cancer chemical called methotrexate on the brain and spinal cord of rats, which would ultimately show how this drug effects humans.

Still, I wanted to do more than be a rodent brain surgeon and study the effects of a drug on animals. I wanted to research the causes and meaning of the near-death experience. In my off-hours, I designed a study that would answer the most basic question: Does a person need to be near death to have a near-death experience? This may seem like an odd question, but it was the one that no one had really answered.

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Whether there is such a thing as communication between man and God, and whether energy can come to the mind of man from an outside source after his death is for each individual to decide for himself. Science has no such answers

—Wilder Penfield, the father of neurosurgery

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Janet Lunceford, my grant director at the National Cancer Institute, was very supportive of my research into near-death experiences. She explained that the purpose of an open-ended grant such as the one I had been given was to design and carry out the investigation of projects that came to mind during the time of the grant. They only needed to be approved in advance by her.

I began by organizing a research team. I assembled eight researchers. Among them were Dr. Don Tyler was chosen for his expertise in anesthetics and their effects upon the brain. Dr. Jerrold Milstein, director of the Department of Child Neurology, University of Washington, was chosen for his knowledge of brain stem and hippocampal function. For psychiatric input, I selected Dr. Bruce Greyson, head of in-patient psychiatry at the University of Connecticut and editor of the Journal of Near-Death Studies. He has published more than twenty papers on the subject and is considered to be the foremost scientific authority on adult near-death experiences.

Psychologist Kim Clark, a nationally known near-death researcher, was chosen for her expertise in counseling people who have had near-death experiences. She is the head of the Northwest Chapter of the International Association of Near-Death Studies (IANDS).

Clark's interest in near-death studies was sparked in a way that was similar to mine. While a young psychologist at Harborview Hospital in Seattle, she was counseling a patient named Maria who'd had a cardiac arrest. She was preparing this patient for life outside the hospital by telling her about the psychological adjustments that many heart patients must make.

The woman wasn't interested in what Clark had to say.

Instead, she wanted to talk about how she had floated around the hospital while doctors struggled to start her heart.
To prove that she had left her body, the woman insisted that there was a shoe on the ledge outside Clark's window. Clark opened the window, but could see no shoe. "It's out there," the woman insisted. Clark leaned out, but still could not see the shoe. "It's around the corner," said the woman. Courageously, Clark crawled onto the ledge of her fifth-floor window and around the corner. There sat a shoe, just as Maria had described. That event triggered an interest that has led Clark to study the near-death experience.

To research whether near death is required to have a near-death experience, we assembled two groups of children. The control group consisted of 121 children who were critically ill, but not near death. These children were on artificial lung machines, were treated with tranquillizers and narcotics, and ranged in age from three to sixteen years of age and were hospitalized in the intensive care unit at Children's Hospital. They all endured the fear and psychological stress of being in an intensive care unit.

Although these children never had life-threatening episodes, they were quite ill. For instance, one girl had been completely paralyzed for three months. She was at no time near the point of death, but she would certainly have had reason to hallucinate. Another girl had a peculiar problem in which her blood pressure would suddenly plummet, causing her to lose consciousness.

Other children in the control group experienced a horrifying disease known as epiglottis, in which the cartilage protecting the windpipe suddenly swells and prevents breathing. All of them had been bedridden for a long period of time, and most had been heavily medicated at one time or another. They had experienced the effects of narcotic drugs, the same drugs that some doctors thought had created Katie's visions. All 121 children in the control group had serious diseases, but had less than a five percent chance of dying.

The study group, on the other hand, was composed of children who had looked death in the face, kids who would probably have died or faced severe handicaps had it not been for modern medical care. There were twelve in the study group. To find that many, I had to comb ten years of hospital records and interview every survivor of a near-fatal illness. They were interviewed anywhere from a few weeks to ten years after their experience.

These twelve children represented quite a collection of diseases. All of them had cardiac arrests stemming from such accidents such as near drownings and automobile wrecks and such diseases as severe kidney problems, asthma, and heart stoppages during surgery. Given today's modern care, about fifty percent of cardiac arrest victims die.

My study design was quite simple. I identified myself as being a physician who was interested in the psychological experience of being in an intensive care unit. I was careful to avoid any mention of near-death research since I didn't want to influence their responses in any way. I simply said that I wanted to learn what it was like to be very sick and that I hoped they would share the experience with me, no matter how strange it might be. The average interview lasted about two hours and followed a standard list of simple questions:

What do you remember about being sick?
Did you have any dreams or do you remember being unconscious?
Tell me everything you remember about being in the hospital.
What happened next?
What do you think happens after we die?
Can you describe your family's religious beliefs?
Can you draw me a picture of your experiences in the hospital?

The questions were carefully structured to be open-ended so the children weren't coached in any way. When these questions were answered, I then asked twenty-six questions from Bruce Greyson's near-death experience questionnaire. These questions deal with the specific characteristics of the near-death experience and enabled the responses of the children to be checked against the traits of NDEs.

Near Death Required

After hundreds of hours of research and questioning, I had my answer: A person does need to be near death to experience an NDE. Of the 121 seriously ill children, not one of them had anything resembling a near-death experience.
A few had vivid dreams, the type you would expect them to have. One child had the understandable dream of monsters dressed in white coats attacking her. Another remembered hearing nurses ask for medication or gloves. Of the 121 control patients, 118 had no memory at all of their hospital stay, in spite of having survived frightening illnesses and having passed through that life-saving torture chamber known as the intensive care unit.

I went outside the control group to interview thirty-seven children who had been treated with almost every kind of mind-altering medication known to pharmacology. These children had been given anesthetic agents, narcotics, Valium, Thorazine, Haldol, Dilantin, anti-depressants, mood elevators, and painkillers. My aim was to see if drugs caused the NDEs and to find out if those skeptical doctors who doubted Katie's experience were right.
None of them had anything resembling an NDE.

Even one girl who was helped to hallucinate didn't have any events resembling an NDE. She was a thirteen-year-old with Guillain-Barre syndrome, an affliction that causes a total body paralysis—in her case for several months. This disease begins in the feet and slowly advances toward the head. At first, walking is impossible. Then, week by week, the afflicted person can't sit up, can't breathe, and ultimately can't move any muscles. Through all of this, the Guillain-Barre victim is completely conscious and aware of what is going on around him.

The disease is extremely painful and annoying. One itches, for instance, but is unable to scratch. This itching can go on relentlessly for hours with no relief possible. With Guillain-Barre, however, the victim is never near death.

This young patient spent months suffering from the sensory and sleep deprivation associated with a stay in an intensive care unit. The only muscles she could use were those that controlled her eyelids. Because she was flat on her back in an iron lung, she saw only the lights on the ceiling.

To relieve her agony, she was liberally treated with almost every type of pain medicine available. Her pain became so severe that the doctors prescribed hypnotherapy designed to help her "leave" her body.

Despite all of this, she had no experience resembling an NDE. She remembers being hypnotized but describes it as a vague, surreal experience. "I was drifting; I could hear music," she said. "But I always knew I was being hypnotized, and it didn't really help that much with the pain."

If near-death experiences are hallucinations, why did this patient not have any experience remotely resembling an NDE?

The experimental group, those children who had survived cardiac arrest or who had miraculously returned from deep comas, had another story all together. Most of these children had at least one of the NDE traits—being out of their physical bodies, traveling up some sort of tunnel, seeing a light, visiting with people who describe themselves as being dead, seeing a Being of Light, having a life review, and maybe even deciding consciously to return to their bodies.

Usually, they would begin to describe their NDE with a look of puzzlement and a statement similar to that of one patient who said, "Well, I kind of remember a really funny thing that I can't exactly tell you. I was looking at myself and floating. It was dark and at the same time it was light. I was going somewhere, but I didn't exactly know where."

With further prompting, they would tell their story. Some would offer fragmentary images of a powerful experience. Others would come forth with wonderful and compelling stories, much like the one from Katie. Usually, they had not told their parents about their NDE. And none told any doctor or nurse unless it slipped out while they were semiconscious.

For example, one twelve-year-old patient I interviewed was unaware of how critically ill she had been following a cardiac arrest brought on by an attack of asthma. At the end of an hour-long interview in which we discussed every aspect of her hospitalization, from how the nurses had treated her to what the food had tasted like, I closed my interview by asking, "Is there anything else that you remember about being sick?"

She wrinkled her nose and said, "Well, yes, one other thing happened, but it's hard to describe. You'll probably think I'm crazy, but I did think that I was out of my body. I thought I was looking down at myself. I could see my mother holding my hand, and I could see a light."

All of the children were puzzled by what had occurred. They knew something special had happened, but their youth made them unsure of just what it was. For some, the experience meant nothing special. It happened and that was that. For others, it led to profound changes. Some of these children feel they were brought back for a purpose. Some are more mature than their friends or are now better students. None of these youthful NDEers was adversely affected by the experience. In fact, they all seem to be somewhat better off. Here are several case studies.

Patient One - "I Saw A Light Bulb In My Body"

An eleven-year-old boy had been having blackout spells for several months. Finally, his parents brought him to Children's Hospital for an evaluation. While waiting in the lobby, he had another blackout followed by a cardiac arrest. Chaos erupted. Doctors rushed to the lobby and started mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and heart massage. He was then put on a gurney and rushed to the intensive care unit, where emergency procedures were begun to restart his heart.

He was without a heartbeat for at least twenty minutes. During this time, several cardiac medications were given, with no success. One of the nurses present remembers saying, "I wish we didn't have to do this," meaning that she thought the life-saving attempts were useless.

As a last resort, the physicians tried the cardioversion paddles again. They pressed the devices against his chest and pushed the buttons that sent electrical current jolting through his heart. Miraculously, the boy opened his eyes and said, "That was weird. You sucked me back into my body!" He then lapsed back into unconsciousness.

The boy was taken to an operating room for emergency surgery. He had a condition called "sick sinus syndrome," in which the area of the heart that regulates the beating— the sinus node—stops working. An electrical pacemaker was implanted.

I spoke to the boy seven years later. He was in high school and worked at a part-time job. He had made a complete recovery from his cardiac arrest.

At first, he was very vague about this frightening experience. He didn't remember opening his eyes and speaking to the doctors and nurses after being brought back to life. He described the pain of the electric shock as "a pain I will never forget. I still have nightmares about the time that they put those paddles on my body."
Although his parents said that he didn't remember anything about that initial experience in the hospital waiting room, I sensed that this young man was somewhat troubled by his experience. I probed further, asking him for more details about that day and specifically about any dreams he might have had.

Finally, he looked me right in the eyes and said, "Well, if you promise not to laugh, I'll tell you what I remember. I still remember it as if it were yesterday.

"I remember going to the hospital that day. My parents had gone into a room [the admitting office], when suddenly I heard a whooshing sound in my ears. I felt like you feel when you go over a bump in a car going real fast, and you feel your stomach drop out. I heard a buzzing sound in my ears.

"The next thing I knew, I was in a room, crouched in a corner of the ceiling. I could see my body below me. It was real dark, you know. I could see my body because it was lit up with a light, like there was a light bulb inside me.

"I could see the doctors and nurses working on me. My doctor was there and so was Sandy, one of the nurses. I heard Sandy say, I wish we didn't have to do this.' I wondered what they were doing. I saw a doctor put jelly on my chest. My hair was really messed up. It seemed greasy, and I wished that I had washed my hair before coming to the hospital. They had cut my clothes off, but my pants were still on.

"I heard a doctor say, 'Stand back,' and then he pushed a button on one of the paddles. Suddenly, I was back inside my body. One minute I was looking down at my face. I could see the tops of the doctors' heads. After he pushed that button, I was suddenly looking into a doctor's face. Man, that hurt. It hurts just thinking about how much it hurts. I will never forget how much it hurt when the doctor pushed that button. I still have dreams about how much it hurt. Sometimes I wake up at night screaming from that pain.

"No, I have never heard of a near-death experience. I don't watch TV much. If I read, I read mostly comic books. No, I didn't tell my parents about it. I don't know why not; I guess I didn't feel like talking about it. I have never heard of anybody having this happen to them. I would not tell my friends about it. They would probably think I was crazy."

This young man had an out-of-body experience, one of the symptoms of the core experience. Typical of this, he saw his body illuminated by white light, while everything else seemed to be in darkness.

This patient didn't see this experience as an NDE. He considered it a dream. Despite that feeling, the experience transformed him, another result of the core experience. It is my observation that he now feels that he has a purpose in life. He is not overly interested in material things as so many of his friends are. He is more interested in acquiring knowledge than money. As he put it, "I don't feel like partying and drinking as much as my friends do or doing a lot of stupid stuff. I know that there is a better reason for living."

An interesting note about the NDE itself: He related many details about the experience that could be verified. He accurately described his own resuscitation, as though he really watched it from outside his body. An eleven-year-old cannot describe an emergency room resuscitation with any great accuracy, no matter how much television he watches. He was able to describe the positions and colors of the instruments around the room, the gender of the attending physicians, and even what they said during this frantic procedure.

Patient Two - "I Have A Wonderful Secret To Tell You"

At the age of ten, Chris developed seriously high blood pressure from a kidney problem. The danger became so acute that doctors transplanted one of his mother's kidneys into his body.

After the transplant, a low-grade fever developed that his doctors couldn't control. Finally, wracked with stomach pain and losing strength, he was admitted to the hospital for further tests. The results were grim. Bacteria introduced into his body during the kidney transplant had invaded his heart, causing his aortic valve to swell.

Surgeons were forced to perform heart valve surgery, during which Chris "died" and was revived.

What he told me was substantiated by his mother, who had been at his bedside when he came out of surgery and told her this marvelous story, the same one he told me later.

"I woke up from surgery and there was my mom. I just couldn't wait to tell her what happened while I was on the operating table. I said, 'I have a wonderful secret to tell you, Mother. I've been climbing a staircase to heaven.

"It was such a good and peaceful feeling. I felt wonderful. I was on a staircase, and it was dark, and I started climbing upward. I got about halfway up the staircase and decided not to go any higher. I wanted to go on up, but I knew I wouldn't come back if I went too high. That would hurt my mom and dad; since my little brother had already died, they wouldn't have anyone to take care of."

Chris then turned and went down the staircase. When he reached the bottom, he felt himself slip back into his body.
Months later Chris had completely forgotten this experience. When I tell him about it now, he smiles and shrugs as though it happened to someone else.

Chris just didn't forget the staircase. He had been treated with many narcotics and Valium, all of which cause amnesia. His case and those similar to it make me think that everyone who has almost died may possibly have had a near-death experience. Perhaps they frequently don't remember because the drugs given to them erase memory.

Patient Three - "I Will Never Forget Him"

Dean had very serious kidney problems that left him dependent on daily dialysis to clean his blood. After suffering from shortness of breath and disorientation, his parents took him to Children's Hospital. While in the admitting room, the sixteen-year-old suddenly slumped over in his chair. A nurse anxiously searched for his pulse but found none.

Dean was rushed to intensive care, where doctors started chest compression and injected epinephrine and other drugs to start his heart. These efforts worked. Twenty-four hours later, Dean was awake and fully oriented.

Dean told his doctors that he remembered leaving home and that was all. He told his family something more. He said that "I had an experience for which there are no human words that can be used to describe." When asked specifically what had happened, Dean would only say that he'd had a "supernatural experience."

That is how the issue was left until Dean entered my study two years later. We chatted about his treatment in the intensive care unit until he seemed to feel relaxed. Then I asked him if anything out of the ordinary had happened.

"It certainly did," he said. Then he told me about the angel.

"I was apparently lying on a table in the intensive care unit when I suddenly found myself standing up and traveling through a very wide tunnel. I couldn't see any walls on either side, but still I had the feeling that this was a tunnel. I also had the feeling that I was moving very fast even though there was no wind blowing on my face.

"I knew I was going somewhere, but I didn't know where. I knew there was something for me at the end of that tunnel, and I really wanted to get there. As far as I was concerned, there was nothing greater than what existed at the end of that tunnel. Forget my body, forget being alive, all I wanted to do was get to the end.

"I reached a certain point in the tunnel where lights suddenly began flashing all around me. They made me certain that I was in some kind of tunnel, and the way I moved past them, I knew I was going hundreds of miles an hour.

"At this point I also noticed that there was somebody with me. He was about seven feet tall and wore a long white gown with a simple belt tied at the waist. His hair was golden, and although he didn't say anything, I wasn't afraid because I could feel him radiating peace and love.

"No, he wasn't Christ, but I knew that he was sent from Christ. It was probably one of his angels or someone else sent to transport me to heaven."

Suddenly, Dean had the perception that he was back in his body again. He said he never really found out what was at the end of that tunnel, but he knew it was a very special destination. He also felt that the entire experience made him different from other people because it was so "supernatural."

"I had something happen to me that can't be described in words," said Dean. "I think I came back from this experience because I have a purpose in life."

Dean's experience was too profound for words. It was only after he had talked to other people he saw on a television show who had had NDEs that he realized what had happened. When he heard what they had to say about their NDEs, he was better able to verbalize his experience.

After listening to their son, Dean's family also believed that he had a calling. As a result of this experience, the entire family developed a deep faith in God.

I discovered later that Dean had had another near-death experience, at the age of ten. By that age, he had already had two kidney transplants and had spent hundreds of hours on dialysis machines.

One day, while swimming, he nearly drowned. All those hours of being hooked up to dialysis machines passed before his eyes. He also felt the physical pain of recovering from transplant surgery. "Oh no," he thought. "All that pain for nothing."

Dean then felt himself slip out of his body and become bathed in a bright white light.

"Something wonderful happened to me then, but I didn't really know what it was," he said to me.

Dean's first experience was interesting because it contained a life review, which is extremely rare among children or teenagers.

Patient Four - "Everything Was White"

Kurt was a seven-year-old with severe muscular dystrophy. Because of this disease, he was unable to breathe very well, and he needed to breathe oxygen from a tank to live.

Kurt became progressively sicker and finally developed pneumonia, which usually marks the end of an MD victim's life.

Near the end, he was in intensive care when his heart stopped. The doctors gave him closed heart massage, pushing on his chest with their palms, and restored his heartbeat. Still, he was completely without heartbeat for three minutes.

When I spoke to Kurt hours after his resuscitation, he was very much at peace. He knew he was going to die soon and seemed relieved to know his physical grief was nearing an end. His recent experience, Kurt said, had shown him a world without pain. When his heart had stopped beating, Kurt suddenly found himself outside his body watching the doctors and nurses work to revive him.

"I saw Bonnie [one of the nurses present], and I said 'hi' to her," said Kurt. "Then everything became dark, until I saw angels. I was in a beautiful place with flowers and rainbows, where everything was white like it had its own light. I talked to several people while I was there, including Jesus, who wanted me to stay with him. I wanted to stay there, but we decided I had to come back and see my parents again. I'm not afraid to go back to that place."

I tried to get Kurt to draw what he had seen, but he was too weak to hold a pencil. He died a few weeks after we spoke.
I wish the family had been present at my interview to hear their son's description of what had happened to him. This interview took place in the emergency room at Children's Hospital. I did not feel comfortable telling his parents about the experience, and I know that the nurses who were present did not tell the family either.

I have anguished over this case many times. I realize that I should have shared what I knew with Kurt's family. But neither I nor any of the other medical personnel present felt that a hospital environment allowed for a discussion of this kind. As one of the doctors present said: "For me to say to a family, 'and by the way, your son thought he went to heaven during the resuscitation,' would have made me feel like I was crazy. Medical school didn't teach me to talk about things like that."

Nonetheless, muscular dystrophy wastes a family just as it wastes the victim. Perhaps they should have been allowed to stay while their son was resuscitated. Knowing that their child had had an intense visionary experience before he died would have at least comforted them as they faced their son's imminent death.

Patient Five - "I Might Not Come Back"

June, an eight-year-old girl, nearly drowned in a swimming pool when her hair became caught in the drain. Her parents, an emergency medical team, and finally emergency room doctors gave her CPR for more than forty-five minutes before her heart began beating again. She made a full neurological recovery in less than six weeks.

The story would have ended there had the bicycle incident not happened. June was riding down her driveway toward the street when her mother shouted from the house for her to be careful. Distracted by her mother's voice, June rode into the street and was almost hit by a passing car.

"Did you want me to die again?" shouted June from across the street. "I might not come back next time."

June then told her mother what had happened when her life almost ended in the swimming pool. The story so worried June's mother that she asked her family doctor to refer them to a psychiatrist. Knowing my interest, the doctor instead referred them to me. Here is June's story:

"All I remember was my hair getting stuck in the drain and then blacking out. The next thing I knew, I floated out of my body. I could see myself under the water but I wasn't afraid. All of a sudden I started going up a tunnel, and before I could think about it, I found myself in heaven. I know it was heaven because everything was bright and everyone was cheerful.

"A nice man asked me if I wanted to stay there. I thought about staying; I really did. But I said 'I want to be with my family.' Then I got to come back."

This patient has full recall of the event. Not only does she remember its intense spiritual nature, but she can now totally recall the events of the resuscitation, from the time the paramedics reached her in the backyard to the work done on her in the emergency room.

Patient Six - "It Would Be Wrong To Push The Button"

Eight-year-old Michelle was taken to the emergency room by her mother, who said she had been feeling ill and acting extremely disoriented. After giving a urine sample to a nurse, Michelle became unresponsive and then quickly slipped into unconsciousness. Through her urine sample and other tests, doctors determined that the little girl was in a diabetic coma. She had the highest blood sugar level ever recorded at this hospital.

She remained in a deep coma for several days before awakening with stories of drifting out of her body and being given the chance to choose her fate by the push of a button.

When I spoke to Michelle, at my office at Children's Hospital several weeks after her recovery, she didn't want to talk about her coma experience. She shyly avoided the subject, shrugging her shoulders when I asked her if there was anything special she remembered while in the hospital. It wasn't until I gave her a piece of paper and crayons to draw what had happened that she began to loosen up and talk about her memories of being on the threshold of death. She said that when she lost consciousness she had been feeling very nauseous and dizzy:

"All of a sudden I was floating above my body looking down at myself. There were two doctors pushing me on one of those stretchers toward a room. Both were women doctors. I felt funny. I was sick and my head hurt when my mom brought me in, but when I was floating, I didn't feel bad. I felt good.

Her mother, who was present, told me there was more to the story, but once again Michelle didn't want to talk. I gave her another piece of paper and said she could draw what had happened if she wanted to. She did. As her crayon drew people in white, she began to talk about the second part of her near-death experience. The emotion of the experience weighed heavily on Michelle. She told her story slowly, not looking up from the paper as she talked:

"I was somewhere lying down. Behind me were a whole bunch of people in white. They were talking to me. In front of me were two buttons, a red one and a green one. The people in white kept telling me to push the red button. But I knew I should push the green one because the red button would mean I wouldn't come back. I pushed the green one instead and woke up from the coma. I don't know why I knew that the red button was bad. But it was because I'm still here."

This event contains several elements of the near-death experience. For one thing, she is out of her body. She is able to provide excellent details about what happened during her resuscitation. Such details as the positions of instruments and the number of people in the room are all described accurately by Michelle.

She also had to make a decision to return to the body, which is another core element of the near-death experience. In fact, fifty percent of the children in my study made some sort of decision to return to the body. For Michelle, it was the pushing of a burton. For others, it is being asked whether or not they want to return.

Another child told me that after major heart surgery a lady dressed in white teased her and tried to make her follow her down a long sidewalk. The girl decided to come back when she became tired of walking. In all instances, a conscious decision to return is present. In adult studies, only about twenty percent of the patients made a conscious decision to return.

Michelle saw beings in white, another core element. She describes them as doctors instead of "beings of light." When I asked her why she thought they were doctors, she answered that they were "big and dressed in white and I was scared of them."

Although her interpretation is different, she has all the elements of an NDE.

Patient Seven - "I Crawled Up The Tunnel"

Mark's story is among the most fascinating near-death experiences because of his age when it happened—he was only nine months old. It wasn't until he was seven that Mark told his parents about his remarkable experience. His recall was amazing for two reasons. For one, most people don't remember anything from that age. For another, Mark had never been told of his cardiac arrest by his parents.

At the age of nine months, Mark had severe bronchiolitis. While in the emergency room, he had a full cardiopulmonary arrest. For more than forty minutes, doctors worked to revive him and finally did. Most people show signs of mental retardation from experiences such as this, but not Mark. He had a full recovery and has shown normal growth and development since crossing the threshold of death.

Mark first mentioned his near-death experience when he was three years old. Then, following a Christmas pageant, he said that God didn't look like the man in the play they had just seen. When his father asked him what he meant, Mark told him what had happened during that frantic night two years earlier:

"I saw nurses and doctors standing over me trying to wake me up. I flew out of the room and [went to the waiting room, where I] saw Grandpa and Grandma crying and holding each other. I think they thought I was going to die."

He then reported seeing a long, dark tunnel and crawling up it. He said it was difficult to crawl without a helping hand, but he couldn't say who was helping him. At the end of this tunnel was a bright light that kept him going.

At the end of that tunnel, he found a "bright place" and "ran through fields with God." He was very animated when he described this run with God. He said that "one can double jump in heaven" (a statement, incidentally, that I heard later from another patient) and run without effort.

God then asked if he wanted to go "back home." Mark said "no," but God told him he would come back again some other day.

Mark remembered his experience vividly until the age of five, when doctors removed the trachea tube they had inserted to remedy a problem known as tracheomalacia, or floppy windpipe. Then the memory of the experience began to fade. I suspect that the removal of the trach tube signaled his subconscious that he was no longer in danger of dying, and he began to lose memory. Now, Mark is a well-adjusted teenager who has high hopes of becoming a physical therapist or athletic trainer.

At first, most people are skeptical of this story. As one colleague said: "A nine-month-old child crawling to heaven? Give me a break." Still, could a nine-month-old remember a near-death experience? The answer is yes.

Recent research indicates that learning and memory begins much earlier than previously thought. In one research project, seven-month-olds watched a videotape showing them how to fit a toy together. The researchers then gave those pieces to the children, who were then able to assemble the toy as a result of what they had learned from the video. In the control group, children were given the pieces without first seeing the video and were unable to fit the toy together.

Patient Eight - "Sparks Would Fill The Air"

Cindi's is a story of the eighties. She is a seventeen-year-old who was kicked out of her home at the age of fifteen and has since lived with her boyfriend. An infrequent drug user, one night she smoked crack (a crystal form of cocaine) and then complained of severe chest pains. By the time her boyfriend drove her to the hospital, she was in complete cardiac arrest.

Doctors worked to resuscitate her for several hours, even opened her chest and administered cardiac massage. Although normal heartbeat was restored, Cindi lay comatose for several hours.
Finally, her family doctor, Vern Cherentenko, arrived and spoke to her. "You can't give up," he told her. "You have to fight. We've done all we can, and now it's up to you." He then asked her to open her eyes and talk to him. After several seconds, her eyelids fluttered and she awoke.

I spoke to Cindi a couple of weeks after her brush with death. She told me of a spiritual journey that led to a meeting with her long dead grandfather.

"I passed out in the car. The next thing I remember was floating above my body and watching the doctors pushing on my chest I now know that they were inside my chest, but I couldn't see that. All I could see was them working on me, and I couldn't really see any of the details.

"I then passed into a room filled with all of my friends. The room was very large and open at the top. It was like looking out at the sky. Sparks would fill the air and streaks of light zoomed up from the earth and burst into rainbows. I wanted very much to be one of those sparks, but I didn't know how to lift myself up and become one.

"I wanted to leave the room, but the door was closed. I knew if I opened it, I could never return. I was afraid of the door but wanted to go through it too, if you know what I mean.

"My dead grandfather then came to help me. He was a very religious man. He took me by the hand and said, 'Go back to your body. You have work to do.' Then he led me out of the room and back to my body. The next thing I remember, I was awake."

Cindi's experience is classic in its content. She sees a roomful of people, has contact with her dead grandfather. She experiences a barrier in the form of a door. She knows that if she opens it she will not return to her body.

One might wonder about the return aspect of this near-death experience. When her family doctor whispered in her ear that the decision to return is up to her, could his voice somehow have become mixed up in her mind with that of her dead grandfather's? Possibly, but whoever was responsible, she responded well.

Patient Nine - "I Was Floating Above My Body"

Linda was thirteen years old when she had a severe asthma attack that led to a cardiopulmonary arrest.

The day before her asthma attack, she had taken several oral medications and had used the inhalant as often as every half hour to overcome her wheezing.

About midnight she awoke and asked for more medication, which her parents gave her. Several hours later, she woke up screaming. By the time her parents got to her room, Linda had stopped breathing and was blue from lack of oxygen. Her father began administering mouth-to-mouth resuscitation until a medical unit arrived and injected her with epinephrine, which restored her breathing. She was then moved to the hospital.

Linda was not at all reluctant to talk about her experience. When I asked her what she remembered, she was quick to tell me:

"It was a funny feeling. I was in a lot of pain before I blacked out. Then all of a sudden I was looking down at my body! But at the same time, it wasn't like I was really out of my body looking down. I was in it and out of it at the same time.

"I couldn't see anything that was being done to my body. I couldn't see the rest of the room or anything. All I could see was myself lying on the floor. Also I had a very peaceful feeling, like nothing had really happened to me at all."

After her brief out-of-body excursion, Linda didn't remember anything else until she arrived at the hospital.

She found the experience to be interesting but not particularly meaningful. Several times during the interview, Linda said that she felt lucky to have had the experience and lucky to be alive.

Patient Ten - "I Looked Yucky"

Six-year-old Daniel was struck by a car while riding his bicycle and received a severe head trauma. He was comatose for two weeks. He remembers almost nothing of the accident or of the moments before. He says he remembers taking his bicycle out of the garage and riding down the driveway. His most vivid remembrance is what happened after he was struck:

"I was standing there watching the doctors load me into the ambulance, when I saw that i was outside my body. My mom was crying and everyone was in a hurry.

"When I got to the hospital, I watched the doctors put tubes in me. I looked yucky because I was bloody and bruised.

"I then went down a tunnel that was dark. At the end of the tunnel was a bright light. I wasn't sad and I wasn't happy, but I did want to get to the light. When I got to it, I met three men. One was very tall and the other two were short. Behind them was a rainbow bridge that stretched across the sky. They seemed nice, but I was afraid of them anyway.

"All of a sudden I was back in my body. I looked down at my feet, and the men were there. Then they disappeared, and I was completely back."

This experience made Daniel believe that other worlds exist. It was also somewhat frightening for him because he thought that these men were going to take him to a place away from his parents. "They seemed nice," Daniel told me. "But I didn't want to leave my mom and dad."

Publish And Perish

My study was published November 1986 in the American Journal of Diseases of Children, the American Medical Association's pediatric journal. It proved—as no other study before—that a person must be on the brink of death to have the symptoms of an NDE. My findings eliminated the theory that NDEs are the result of drugs or sleep deprivation or that they are merely bad dreams or the subconscious awareness of surgery.

Think about it. Of the 121 patients we interviewed who had survived a serious illness but were not near death, 118 had no experience at all. The remaining three had dreams of white-coated monsters and the like.

Meanwhile, eight of the twelve survivors of heart attacks had visions of leaving their bodies and traveling to other realms. That is almost seventy percent, a percentage so high it eliminates the element of chance or statistical error. In addition, I did not permit anyone to volunteer for the study. Instead, I interviewed over a ten-year period survivors of cardiac arrest. Doing that prevented children from entering the study who might have made up a story just to be included.

I also thoroughly reviewed the medical records of all patients I studied, carefully documenting the drugs they were on, the anesthesia used, the amount of oxygen in their blood, and the results of various laboratory tests. I carefully matched my control patients and those in the study group to make sure they were the same age. I also made sure that both groups were intubated, or attached to an artificial lung machine.

The reason for this matching was to see if near-death experiences are hallucinations caused by drugs or lack of oxygen in the blood as many physicians believe. The answer is that they are not. Many of the patients who had full-blown near-death experiences were not being treated with any hallucinogenic medications at all. The control group had nothing resembling near-death experiences despite being treated with such drugs as morphine, Valium, and Thorazine and such anesthetic agents as Dilantin, phenobarbital, mannitol, and codeine. The patients were also hypoxic, had acid-base balance disturbances, and had high CO2 levels, and every combination you could imagine. Yet they had nothing we could call an NDE.

To make sure I wasn't missing anything, I had a team of medical students comb the psychological and medical literature in search of drugs, psychological states, or oxygen-deprivation states that caused hallucinations similar to NDEs. Ketamine and LSD came the closest, but neither of these drugs is used in normal patient care nor were they used on either my control or study group.

Most researchers are faced with the problem of "publish or perish." In my case, I published and perished. Three articles on the Seattle study were published in the American Medical Association's prestigious pediatric journal. The scientists and physicians who reviewed my protocol were very complimentary about my research design and the scientific validity of the results.

I did not sensationalize the results in any way. Although I knew this research would be of great interest to the general public, I felt that any publicity might leave me open to charges that I was trying to benefit personally from the research. I assumed that physicians would be intensely interested in these results, and they were. I received requests for reprints of the articles from around the world as well as phone calls from colleagues who were excited to read our results and who had encountered similar cases in their own practices.

The study showed that near-death experiences are seen in the great majority of critically ill children and clearly have some association with the dying process. It also revealed that these experiences are clearly not caused by drugs, but are a natural psychological process associated with dying.

These results had not even been tested for in the studies of the near-death experience conducted by Dr. Raymond Moody and others.

I was fortunate that the editors of the American Journal of Diseases of Children were open-minded enough to publish our research. I emphasized in my conclusion that these experiences are probably a natural part of the dying process and as such are worthy of study. I have never asserted that they are proof of life after death nor do I feel that a hospital is the proper place to study religion and metaphysics.

I made the point that people die in hospitals and that therefore the dying process should be examined in hospitals.

Unfortunately, the hospital's Human Subject Review Committee didn't agree with me. They suddenly and mysteriously refused to let me continue with the same research that three years earlier had been approved with the proclamation that mine was "the most interesting research project we have reviewed in a long time."

I was crushed. I returned to the committee and asked for $3,000 to proceed with the second phase of the Seattle study. The plan was to study Asian immigrants to the Seattle area to see what children from a different culture experience at the point of death.

This time the committee said that such a study would be too intrusive on patient's rights. By making them relive these traumatic events, I was causing unnecessary suffering.

I pointed out that the opposite had been true. The patients actually appreciated a doctor showing interest in their experience. And besides, participation was voluntary. Subjects were told that they didn't have to talk unless they wanted to.

The answer from the committee was "No." I couldn't even get permission to informally study these patients.
I feel that intruding on patient's rights had nothing to do with the decision. The real reason, I feel, is that doctors don't like to research death. Although most people die in hospitals, the subject of death is almost taboo there.

I remember the head of my research program asking me why I was researching near-death experiences. I told him that although much was known about infant colic and toilet training relatively little was known about the dying process. I simply wanted to know what happened at the point of death.

When I said that, he shook his head. "But what are you really trying to do?"