This is more of
the NDE reports collected by Penny Sartori.
It is curious just how the reports do tend to conform to a distinct and
easily recognizable pattern. Essentially
this phenomenon is now well publicized and the overwhelming message to everyone
is that dying is no longer the end of the journey. Better, with this knowledge fear will not
dominate at all and acceptance is the likely attitude used during passing over. Thus there is little remaining risk of
lingering in limbo.
Even if this were
all hooey, it is still a huge improvement in terms of adapting to the onslaught
of death.
Again we are
bringing back more and more data through these reports. Death is also not the only way in which one
can approach the afterlife. It can also
be approached through lucid dreaming as well.
The
children who have near-death experiences - then lead charmed lives: Study
reveals youngsters as young as six months can have lucid visions
The Mail has
been serialising intensive care nurse PENNY SARTORI's compelling research into
near-death experiences. Here in part three she reveals how children can have
such experiences and how this can affect their lives...
How old do you need to be to have a near-death
experience? Old enough, you may imagine, to be able to construct a narrative in
your mind. Or to describe it in language.
The evidence, however, suggests that children
as young as six months can have lucid visions — and even remember them years
later.
Of course, no one can see into the mind of a
baby. But consider a case documented in the medical journal Critical Care
Medicine. The researchers writing in the journal had kept in touch with the
parents of a six-month-old boy who’d nearly died in hospital during a serious
illness.
Three years later, that same child was told by
his parents that his grandmother was dying. He had just one question: was she going through the tunnel to meet
God?
The ‘tunnel’, as the researchers knew, is a
common component of near-death experiences (or NDEs), as is the presence of a
being — who is sometimes defined in religious terms and sometimes not.
Other very young children have reported similar
experiences. Take the case of Tom, the four-year-old son of a British soldier
called Gary, who was based in Berlin. Tom had been complaining of stomach pains
and was writhing in agony when doctors discovered that the boy had an
intestinal blockage, and immediately operated.
It was ‘touch and go’, Gary told me, but Tom
survived. A few months later, Gary had a day off
and asked him where he’d like to go. The boy said he wanted to go to ‘that
park’ again.
When asked which park, he said: ‘The one through
the tunnel that I went to when I was in the hospital. There was a park with
lots of children and swings and things, with a white fence around it. I tried
to climb over the fence, but this man stopped me and said that I wasn’t to come
yet and he sent me back down the tunnel and I was back in the hospital again.’
Like those of adults, the NDEs of even very
small children contain one or more of the usual components, such as the tunnel,
a bright light, meeting dead relatives, out-of-body experiences, seeing a
beautiful garden and coming to a barrier and being ordered to return to life.
The most common component children report is a
sense of overwhelming happiness. This leaves such a lasting impression that
it can even have a negative effect on children who experience it.
Dr Phyllis Marie Atwater, a researcher who’s
collected hundreds of cases of childhood NDEs, says that some have tried to
commit suicide afterwards in order to find their
way back to their blissful visions. Such cases, however, are rare.
Usually, children who experience NDEs report
being given the option of returning to life and deciding to take it. The reason
is often that the child doesn’t want to upset its parents.
As an intensive care nurse who has also done a
PhD on near-death experiences, I’ve personally come across many such cases. If
a child is a bit older, though, he may also say he felt the need to return to
earth in order to accomplish something in his life.
This is what happened to Natasha, now aged 33,
from Cardiff, who is deaf.
'The voice kept calling me into a bright
light'
At the age of nine, she’d had such a severe bout
of whooping cough that the doctor had told her parents she was unlikely to
survive the night. She was at home and fast asleep when she was woken by a
bright light.
‘The light was spilling into the room around the
edge of the door and I could hear my name being called — even though I’m
profoundly deaf,’ she recalled. ‘I got up to see what the light was, and turned
round to see myself still in the bed, asleep.
‘But the voice kept calling me, so I opened the
bedroom door and it was just this pure brilliant white light. I stepped into it
and kept walking towards the voice. I was just walking in light; there wasn’t
anything else.
‘Then I was in a room and realised there was a
presence behind me. He put a hand on my shoulder but told me not to turn
around. I had to go back, he said, because I was important and had a job to
do.’
The next day, the crisis in Natasha’s illness
had passed. But she didn’t tell anyone about her experience for many years. ‘I
thought they’d think I was lying or crazy,’ she said.
The NDE remained vivid in her mind, and although
she’s not religious, she says it’s given her inner strength and self-belief —
‘as though I’m here for a reason’.
Like Natasha, many children fail to tell their
parents about an NDE. Often, however, it’s because they assume the vision is
something that happens to everyone.
Only when they grow up do they realise they’ve
experienced something unusual — something that may even have changed their
lives.
'I feel as though I must be here for a reason'
In the Eighties, Dr Melvin Morse — who worked at
an American paediatric intensive care unit — decided to carry out research on
children who’d had NDEs and see them again at regular intervals. The results
were astonishing.
Ten years on, his 30 childhood NDE survivors,
many of whom had their visions when their hearts had stopped, appeared to be
leading charmed lives. They were good at schoolwork, they were mentally stable,
they had empathy for others and not one of them had become addicted to drugs or
alcohol.
According to Dr Atwater’s own vast NDE
data-base, child survivors are likely to have long-lasting relationships when
they’re older — while people who have NDEs as adults, for some reason, have a
higher divorce rate than average. In addition, the child survivors had lower
blood pressure than average, and more sensitivity to light and sound.
Intriguingly, their tolerance of prescription drugs decreased as they grew
older.
Dr Atwater also found that many considered
themselves to be spiritual. However, their spirituality was often quite
separate from the religion in which they’d been brought up.
In a few cases, church ministers had actually
complained that children who’d experienced NDEs were disruptive — because they
had asked questions clerics had been unable to answer.
Some names have been
changed. Extracted from The Wisdom Of Near-Death Experiences by Dr Penny
Sartori, to be published by Watkins Publishing on February 6 at £10.99. © 2014
Dr Penny Sartori. To order a copy for £9.99 (incl p&p) call 0844 472 4157.
It
happened to me and I felt euphoric, CORINNA HONAN writes
Mine was the unvarnished, bargain-basement
version. No luscious flower borders, no playback of my life, no kindly-looking
man in a white robe, not one solitary angel.
But I have certainly had a near-death
experience. I know it wasn’t a dream. Dreams can be vivid, but their intensity
soon dissipates. They don’t keep hijacking your thoughts and pounding you all
over again with overwhelming emotion.
It happened some years ago, when I was in my 20s,
before I knew that these bizarre visions even had a name.
A year after joining the Daily Mail as a news
reporter, I had been sent to Corfu to write a travel piece on learning to sail.
I was assigned to a small yacht — part of a flotilla led by a captain, his
engineer and the PR for the company.
I was happy: I’d just bought my first flat, I’d
met the man I’d eventually marry and I’d made it to Fleet Street. And this was
certainly the first job I’d ever had that involved loafing in the sun and boarding
a rubber speedboat every evening to sample the local tavernas.
On the night in question, it was the captain’s
birthday. Two or three people drank far more than usual, and one of them was in
charge of the speedboat taking us back to our yacht. I was sitting on its
squishy rubber side as we zoomed into the dark night.
In our mellow mood, none of us noticed that our
driver had forgotten to switch his lights on. At full speed, he crashed into a
yacht at anchor.
My back took some of the impact — but I didn’t
know this. In a split second, I’d fallen unconscious and tumbled into the
bottom of the speedboat.
So, no warning whatsoever that the accident was
about to happen: not one of us had even seen the yacht looming. And there was
no time to think or cry out.
Yet in that tiny sliver of time between
consciousness and the void, time slowed right down. I became aware that I was
wafting down a long, dark tunnel. I felt calm and relaxed. There was a bright
light at the end that was acting as a kind of magnet, with a slow but even
pull.
The tunnel was straight, with indeterminate
walls, and the light — which didn’t hurt my eyes — grew steadily brighter as I
approached it.
None of this was frightening. My brain had
become a puddle of pure emotion. Euphoria, if you like.
I remember thinking the following words: ‘I’m dying, and I’m happy about it.’
Actually, I’m convinced I said them out loud. I
have no idea how long I was unconscious but it must have been for some
time. My companions had somehow heaved me into the yacht involved in the
crash. Then blackness descended again.
The following morning, I woke up in a slimy
sleeping-bag. It took a while to register that it was drenched in blood — from
a deep cut on my left hand. And that I was in a stranger’s yacht.
Surprisingly, I felt no panic at all, and no
pain. Still high on my vision, I kept replaying the tunnel, the slow pull
towards the light, and those words: ‘I’m dying, and I’m happy about it.’
Ridiculous! How could I have been happy to die? And, anyway, I hadn’t.
It had been a near thing, though. As I was to
discover later, two of my vertebrae were fractured, a couple of ribs had left
their moorings, my sternum was cracked, my left thumb joint had shattered like
an egg-shell, my index finger was broken and I had a severe whiplash
injury.
A dentist whose yacht was parked nearby stitched
up my dangerous cut; a tiny Greek clinic set my hand in plaster.
I seemed to spend a lot of that day grinning
idiotically. Was I in shock? No doubt — but I was also in a state of
semi-euphoria and feeling only the tiniest flickers of pain.
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