Near-Death and Out-of-Body
Experiences in the Blind: A Study ofApparent Eyeless Vision
Kenneth Ring, Ph.D.
Sharon Cooper, M.A.
University of Connecticut

ABSTRACT: This article reports the results of an investigation into near
death and out-of-body experiences in 31 blind respondents. The study sought
to address three main questions: (1) whether blind individuals have near
death experiences (NDEs) and, if so, whether they are the same as or dif
ferent from those of sighted persons; (2) whether blind persons ever claim
to see during NDEs and out-of-body experiences (OBEs); and (3) if suchclaims are made, whether they can ever be corroborated by reference to in
dependent evidence. Our findings revealed that blind persons, including
those blind from birth, do report classic NDEs of the kind common to sighted
persons; that the great preponderance of blind persons claim to see during
NDEs and OBEs; and that occasionally claims of visually-based knowledge
that could not have been obtained by normal means can be independently
corroborated. We present and evaluate various explanations of these findings
before arriving at an interpretation based on the concept of transcendental
awareness.

Kenneth Ring, Ph.D., is Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University ofConnecticut, where Sharon Cooper, M.A., was Research Assistant at the time of thisstudy. This study was funded in part by the Institute of Noetic Sciences, to which theauthors express their deep thanks for its support. They also acknowledge their deep
thanks to Lucienne Levy for her invaluable help in connection with this research. The
authors are also indebted to the following organizations for their collaboration in thisstudy: the American Council of the Blind; the American Foundation for the Blind;
Blindskills, Incorporated; the Massachusetts Association for the Blind; theMassachusetts Commission for the Blind; the National Braille Press; the National
Federation for the Blind; the National Federation for the Blind in Connecticut;
Newsreel Incorporated; the Theosophical Book Association for the Blind; and theZiegler Magazine for the Blind. Reprint requests should be addressed to Dr. Ring at
19A Stadium Way, Kentfield, CA 94904.
Journal of Near-Death Studies, 16(2) Winter 1997
1997 Human Sciences Press, Inc.

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This life's dim windows of the soulDistorts the heavens from pole to pole
And leads you to believe a lie
When you see with, not thro', the eye.
William Blake,
Everlasting Gospel" (circa 1818)"The

The question of whether blind individuals can actually see during
out-of-body experiences (OBEs) while close to death has long intrigued researchers in the field of near-death studies. In part, theidea that this seemingly impossible event could really occur has been
fueled by occasional anecdotal reports by prominent researchers (e.g.,
Kubler-Ross, 1983; Moody and Perry, 1988) that they have comeacross such cases in the course of their investigations. Lesser known
physicians interested in near-death experiences (NDEs), such as Fred
Schoonmaker of Denver's St. Luke's Hospital, have also mentionedthat they have heard such claims from their blind patients (Schoon
maker, personal communication, 1981). Similarly, another physician,Larry Dossey, opened his book Recovering the Soul (1989) with thedramatic case of a woman named Sarah, blind from birth, who had
detailed visual perception during surgery when her heart had
stopped.
As a result of these accounts in the literature, other researchers
and writers who have taken an interest in NDEs have used suchcases to make a powerful argument on behalf of the authenticity ofnear-death phenomena (Anderson, 1980; Habermas and Moreland,
1992; Iverson, 1992; Wilson, 1987; Woodward, 1976). Representativeof this view is a passage in a recent book by a leading figure intranspersonal psychology, the psychiatrist Stanislav Grof:.

There are . . . reported cases where individuals who were blind because of a medically confirmed organic damage to their optical sys
tem could at the time of clinical death see the environment. . .
Occurrences of this kind, unlike most of the other aspects of near
death phenomena, can be subjected to objective verification. They
thus represent the most convincing proof that what happens in near
death experiences is more than the hallucinatory phantasmagoriaof physiologically impaired brains. (1994, p. 31)

Yet there is reason, we think, not to leap too quickly to the conclu
sion that the evidence supporting visual perception in the blind is assolid as Grof's statement would imply. In fact, when one begins tolook into the basis for these claims, they appear to dissolve into themists of hearsay, unsubstantiated anecdote and other dead ends-andeven, in one case, outright fabrication. For example, Kubler-Ross andKENNETH RING AND SHARON COOPER

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Schoonmaker have never documented the cases they have mentioned
or published any details concerning them. Similarly, when one of us(K. R.) pressed Raymond Moody for further particulars about the blind
person he described in one of his books, he could only remember that
he had heard that account on an audio cassette provided to him byan elderly physician, but he no longer had the tape and could notrecall the physician's name (R. Moody, personal communication, 1992).
And the compelling case of Sarah, so vividly portrayed by Dossey,
turned out, as he confessed in a letter to K. R., to be a complete
fiction, though Dossey justified it on the grounds that such cases
seemed to be implied by the literature on NDEs (L. Dossey, personalcommunication, 1990). Indeed, Susan Blackmore (1993) has recently

reviewed all this evidence and concluded that none of it holds up to
scrutiny. In short, according to her, there is no convincing evidenceof visual perception in the blind during NDEs, much less documented
support for veridical perception (Blackmore, 1993).
Nevertheless, while there may be reason to concur with Black
more's assessment, there was at least one study that did attempt toinquire whether any evidence for this proposition could be gatheredby systematically interviewing a sample of blind respondents. In thatinvestigation, Harvey Irwin (1987) had field workers survey a sample
of 21 blind persons in Australia. The focus of Irwin's project was tosee whether any such persons had had an OBE and, if so, to get an

account of it. Among his 21 respondents, three persons did indeed
report having had an OBE. Unfortunately, as Irwin ruefully had toadmit, all of these persons had either some residual or peripheral
vision, so they did not in the end constitute anything like a stringent
cohort in terms of which to evaluate the hypothesis that the blindcan see. Irwin's own conclusion at the time was that neither his own
survey nor the work of anyone else had demonstrated that persons
blind from birth even have OBEs, and therefore no evidence existed
that such individuals could see under such circumstances. "It now
remains," he wrote, "for further surveys to locate an OBE in acongenitally totally blind person" (Irwin, 1987, p. 57).
This is precisely what we have attempted to do in this study. In
what follows we describe the results of a research project in whichan effort was made to locate and interview blind persons, including
those blind from birth, who believed they had undergone either an
NDE or an OBE not related to any near-death incident. The principal
underlying aim of this study, however, will already be apparent: wewere concerned to determine whether in fact any reliable evidence

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could be educed from such a sample that the blind really do see
under such conditions.
The significance of such findings, should they be established, haslargely been implicit in our discussion thus far, but obviously thevalidation of such claims, or alternatively, the confirmation of allthese rumors over the years, would have far-reaching and possibly
baleful consequences for a conventional materialist view of science.
By the same reasoning, empirical support for sight in the blind would
be consistent with various "New Paradigm" visions of science thatare rooted in nonlocal, nondual or holonomic perspectives in which
consciousness is the primary reality. Furthermore, such findings
would raise profound questions, from any scientific perspective, aboutmind/body relationships, the role of the brain in vision, and indeed
the very mechanisms of sight.
Even within the more limited confines of parapsychologicalthought, such data would have a critical bearing on hypotheses hav
ing to do with the nature of OBEs and NDEs themselves. For ex
ample, V. Krishnan (1983) has argued that the perceptions reported
during OBEs may have a physical basis. As a test of this hypothesis,
Krishnan has proposed that the OBEs of congenitally blind persons
should be distinct from those with sight. Irwin, in his discussion ofthis issue, framed the implications neatly:
Specifically, because people who surgically regain their sight takesome time to learn visual identification of objects, the initial OBEs
in the congenitally blind should exhibit the same property if theexperience depends upon the visual pathways of the nervous system.
The content of a congenitally blind subject's OBE therefore may
speak to Krishnan's notion of the physical basis of out-of-body visual
impressions. (Irwin, 1987, p. 54)

Our data will thus provide a crucial test of Krishnan's hypothesis,
as well as speak to the long-standing controversy in parapsychology
over whether the OBE represents some kind of true extrasomaticstate or only a retrospective reconstruction based on sensory cues
and imaginal processes. In any case, the possible epistemological andmetaphysical implications of our findings potentially touch on deep
conundrums and perennial concerns in the history of both normal
and anti-establishment science.
Insofar as the specific and limited objectives of this study are con
cerned, however, there were three that formed the basis of this inquiry. Each can be phrased as a question. First, because we were
chiefly interested in NDEs in this research, there is a necessary pre-

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liminary question we need to answer to which no previous systematicinvestigation has even been addressed: do blind persons in fact have
NDEs and, if they do, are they the same as or different from thoseof sighted persons? Second, do blind persons, if they do report either
NDEs or OBEs, claim to have visual perceptions during these expe
riences? And, finally, if such claims are made, is it ever possible tocorroborate them through independent evidence or the testimony ofother witnesses? In other words, can one establish that these claims
are something other than mere fantasies or hallucinations?
These were the issues, then, this study was designed to probe.

MethodProcedure
In order to recruit qualified participants for this study, that is,blind persons who believed they had had either an NDE or an OBE,
we first made contact with 11 national, regional, and state organi
zations for the blind, to solicit their help in locating potential respondents among their membership. Toward this end, we provided a
notice to these organizations about our research that was then included in their respective publications, most of which were distrib
uted in Braille or in the form of an audio cassette, providing ourphone number and address and inviting interested individuals whobelieved they qualified to take part in this study to call or write us.
A similar announcement was also published in Vital Signs, the news
letter of the International Association for Near-Death Studies. Fi
nally, we alerted a few of our colleagues in the field of near-deathstudies about our project and asked them to refer any potentiallyeligible candidates to us.
After an individual made contact with us, we conducted a screening
interview over the telephone to make sure that he or she had theappropriate qualifications for our study. Specifically, we determined
the sight status of the person and made sure that he or she had
undergone either an NDE or one or more OBEs, not necessarily associated with a near-death crisis. Once the person's eligibility for the
study was established, we either then continued with the formal interview or scheduled a second call for that purpose. In a few cases,
one or more follow-up calls were necessary to clarify some aspectsof the respondent's account. In the interview, we took a detailed sight

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history from the individual and then conducted an in-depth probe
about his or her relevant experiences. This portion of the interview
was modeled on the format originally devised by Kenneth Ring
(1980), but was tailored to the specific interests of this study andthe special characteristics of our respondents. In the course of thisinterview, particular attention was given to obtaining information
about events or perceptions that in principle could be corroborated
by external witnesses or medical records. Where those witnesses
could be specifically identified or relevant records secured, we madeefforts to gain access to them and, when possible, to interview thewitnesses about their own recollections of the events or perceptions
described by the respondent.
All conversations were tape recorded with the permission of the
respondent, and transcripts based on these conversations were later
prepared, to permit detailed analysis of our findings. Finally, eachparticipant who expressed an interest to receive information about

the findings of this study was sent a summary at its conclusion.

Subjects
Of the 46 persons who were screened for this study, 31 qualified
for inclusion and were interviewed. All but three of this final sample
had heard about our study through the notices we had distributed.
The exceptions were two persons referred to us by professional col
leagues and one individual who came fortuitously to the attention of
one of us as a result of meeting her husband while traveling to aprofessional conference.
Demographically, our sample consisted of 20 females and 11 males
whose ages ranged from 22 to 70 years. They were all Caucasian,overwhelmingly Christian with respect to their original religious tradition, but varied greatly regarding their educational attainment andoccupation.
Experiential Status. Sixteen of our respondents had survived an
NDE, while an additional five persons had undergone both an NDE
and one or more OBEs on other occasions not associated with theirnear-death incident. Thus, the total number of near-death experi
encers (NDErs) in this sample was 21. The remaining 10 were persons who had one or more OBEs only.
Of our NDErs, 13 had their experience in connection with an ill
ness or a surgical procedure; six as a result of an accident, usuallyKENNETH RING AND SHARON COOPER

107

involving an automobile; two were mugged; one was nearly killed bybeing raped; one almost perished in combat; and one survived a suicide attempt. (The totals here are 24 experiences since three persons
had two separate NDEs each and were therefore counted twice inthese tabulations.)
Most of the OBEs reported occurred during states of bodily quies
cence or relaxation, though some were occasioned by traumas, suchas falls or rapes. The great majority of these episodes were not deliberately induced, though a few persons in our sample did try on
occasion to bring them about through an act of will.
Sight Status. Not quite half of our total sample, 14, was comprisedof persons blind from birth. A few of our respondents classified as
blind from birth either had some limited light perception as children
or have retained some as adults, but a distinct majority of persons

in this category were without even any light perception at the timeof their NDE or OBE. An additional 11 persons fell into the categoryof adventitiously blind, which means they lost their sight sometime
after 5 years of age. The remaining six persons in our study wereindividuals who were severely visually impaired, most of them hav
ing at best only minimal non-delineated vision.
With respect to our two main experiential categories, NDEs andOBEs, the breakdown on sight status is as follows: among the 21
NDErs, 10 were blind from birth, nine adventitiously blind, and two
severely visually impaired; among the remaining 10 out-of-body experiencers (OBErs), four were blind from birth, two adventitiously

blind, and four severely visually impaired.
Of the 14 respondents blind from birth, two were congenitally blindand one had both his eyes removed by the time he was 41/2 years
old. The remaining 11 were born prematurely between 1946 and 1958
and all were placed in incubators where they received excessive con
centrations of oxygen resulting in blindness. These individuals developed retrolental fibroplasia (RLF), now commonly referred to as
retinopathy of prematurity (ROP).
Of our 11 adventitiously blind respondents, seven lost their vision
between the ages of 16 and 41 as a result of illness or accident. In
some cases, it was their near-death event itself that caused theirblindness. The other four lost their vision between the ages of 13
and 52 due to slow degenerative eye diseases including retinitis pig
mentosa (RP), glaucoma, and aging.
Three of our six visually impaired respondents developed RLF; two
had RP, both of whom had limited peripheral vison (14 and 20 degree

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field, respectively); and one was born with cataracts and developed glaucoma as a teenager. All six have been legally blind from birth and only
three of these individuals have been able to read any print at all.

Results
NDEs in the Blind
To examine the nature of NDEs in the blind, we must of course
restrict ourselves to the 21 respondents in our sample, 12 women andnine men, who reported NDEs. Our findings with respect to this issue
are unequivocal: blind persons, even those blind from birth, recountexperiences that clearly conform to the familiar prototype of the bea
tific NDE first popularized in Moody's book, Life After Life (1975).
Their narratives, in fact, tend to be indistinguishable from those ofsighted persons with respect to the elements that serve to define theclassic NDE pattern, such as the feelings of great peace and well-beingthat attend the experience, the sense of separation from the physicalbody, the experience of traveling through a tunnel or dark space, theencounter with the light, the life review, and so forth.
Before we turn to a statistical summary of our findings, however, it
will be helpful to present a couple of illustrative cases in order to pro
vide a sense of the actual narrative texture of these experiences. In
doing so, we will unavoidably discover some unmistakable evidence pertaining to our second, but primary, question, having to do with whether
the blind see during their NDEs. Nevertheless, we must defer a detailed
consideration of this issue for the time being since our purpose here ischiefly to report what some of our respondents told us they remembered
when they found themselves hovering between life and death. Becauseof space limitations, we will be able to present only one case in depth,
but we will follow it up with a synopsis of a second comparable instance.
Cases that we recount below with complete names are used with the
respondent's permission; if only a first name is given to identify a casefor purposes of reference, it is a pseudonym.

Vicki Umipeg
Vicki Umipeg is a married 43-year-old woman who has had twonear-death experiences. The first, when she was 12 years old, oc-

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curred as a result of appendicitis and peritonitis. Her second NDE
took place almost exactly a decade later, when she was seriously in
jured in an automobile accident.
Vicki was born very prematurely, having been in the womb only
22 weeks at delivery, and weighed just three pounds at birth. After
ward, her weight dropped precariously to one pound, 14 ounces. As
was common for premature babies in the 1950s, she was placed in
an airlock incubator through which oxygen was administered. Un
fortunately, because of a failure to regulate the concentration of oxy
gen properly, Vicki was given too much and, along with about 50,000
other premature babies born in the United States about the sametime, suffered such optic nerve damage as to leave her completely
blind. As she made clear in an initial interview with another researcher, Greg Wilson, who kindly provided his tapes and transcripts
to us, she has never had any visual experience whatever, nor does
she even understand the nature of light:
Interviewer: Could you see anything?

Vicki: Nothing, never. No light, no shadows, no nothing, ever.
Interviewer: So the optic nerve was destroyed to both eyes?
Vicki: Yes, and so I've never been able to understand even the con
cept of light.

Interestingly, the overall form of Vicki's two experiences, whichwere separated by a period of 10 years, was extremely similar, almost
as though they were replays of one another, albeit with some variations owing to the particularities of Vicki's life circumstances oneach occasion. To minimize redundancy, we will present a fairly full
exposition here only of Vicki's second NDE, since according to her
own testimony, it was the more detailed and vivid of the two.
In early 1973, Vicki, then 22, was working as an occasional singer
in a nightclub in Seattle. One night, at closing time, she was unable
to call for a taxi to drive her home and circumstances forced her totake the only other option: a ride with a couple of inebriated patrons.
Not surprisingly, a serious accident ensued during which Vicki wasthrown out of their van. Her injuries were extensive and life-threat
ening, and included a skull fracture and concussion, and damage to
her neck, back, and one leg. In fact, it took her a full year after
being released from the hospital before she could stand upright without the risk of fainting.
Vicki clearly remembers the frightening prelude to the crash itself,
but she has only a hazy recall of finding herself alternately out of

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her body and then back inside of it at the accident scene. Her only
definite recollection of anything external to herself while out-of-body
is a very brief glimpse of the crumpled vehicle. Although this aspectof her experience was confusing, she does claim that while in her
out-of-body state she was aware of being in a nonphysical body that
had a distinct form and that was, as she put it, "like it was madeof light."
She has no memory of the her trip to Harborview Hospital in theambulance, but after she arrived at the emergency room, she cameagain to awareness when she found herself up on the ceiling watch
ing a male doctor and a woman-she is not sure whether the woman
was another physician or a nurse-working on her body. She could
overhear their conversation, too, which had to do with their fear that
because of possible damage to Vicki's eardrum, she could become deaf
as well as blind. Vicki tried desperately to communicate to them that
she was fine, but naturally drew no response. She was also awareof seeing her body below her, which she recognized by certain iden
tifying features, such as a distinctive wedding ring she was wearing.
According to her testimony, Vicki first had a very fleeting imageof herself lying on the metal table and she was sure, she said, that"it was me," although it took her a moment to register that fact withcertainty. As she later told us:
I knew it was me.... I was pretty thin then. I was quite tall andthin at that point. And I recognized at first that it was a body, but
I didn't even know that it was mine initially. Then I perceived that
I was up on the ceiling, and I thought, "Well, that's kind of weird.
What am I doing up here?" I thought, "Well, this must be me. Am
I dead?... . " I just briefly saw this body, and ...
I knew that it
was mine because I wasn't in mine. Then I was just away from it.
It was that quick.

Almost immediately after that, as she recalls, she found herself
going up through the ceilings of the hospital until she was above theroof of the building itself, during which time she had a brief panoramic view of her surroundings. She felt very exhilarated during thisascension and enjoyed tremendously the freedom of movement she
was experiencing. She also began to hear sublimely beautiful andexquisitely harmonious music akin to the sound of wind chimes.
With scarcely a noticeable transition, she then discovered she had
been sucked head-first into a tube and felt that she was being pulled
up into it. The enclosure itself was dark, Vicki said, yet she wasaware that she was moving toward light. As she reached the opening

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of the tube, the music that she had heard earlier seemed to be transformed into hymns, similar to those she heard during her previous
NDE, and she then "rolled out" to find herself lying on grass.
She was surrounded by trees and flowers and a vast number ofpeople. She was in a place of tremendous light, and the light, Vicki
said, was something you could feel as well as see. What the light
conveyed was love. Even the people she saw were bright and reflected
the light of this love. "Everybody there was made of light. And I was
made of light. There was love everywhere. It was like love came fromthe grass, love came from the birds, love came from the trees."
Vicki then became aware of five specific persons she knew in life
who were welcoming her to this place. Debby and Diane were Vicki's
blind schoolmates, who had died years before, at ages 11 and 6, respectively. In life, they had both been profoundly retarded as well as
blind, but here they appeared bright and beautiful, healthy and vi
tally alive, and no longer children, but, as Vicki phrased it, "in theirprime." In addition, Vicki reports seeing two of her childhood caretakers, a couple named Mr. and Mrs. Zilk, both of whom had alsopreviously died. Finally, there was Vicki's grandmother, who had es
sentially raised Vicki and who had died just two years before thisincident. Her grandmother, who was further back than the others,
was reaching out to hug Vicki. In these encounters, no actual words
were exchanged, Vicki says, but only feelings of love and welcome.
In the midst of this rapture, Vicki was suddenly overcome with asense of total knowledge:
I had a feeling like I knew everything ... and like everything madesense. I just knew that this was where . .. this place was where I
would find the answers to all the questions about life, and about
the planets, and about God, and about everything. . . . It's like theplace was the knowing.

And then she was indeed flooded with information of a religious
nature as well as scientific and mathematical knowledge. She cameto understand languages she didn't know. All this overwhelmed andastonished her:I don't know beans about math and science.... I all of a sudden
understood intuitively almost things about calculus, and about theway planets were made. And I don't know anything about that. ...
I felt there was nothing I didn't know.

As these revelations were unfolding, Vicki noticed that now next
to her was a figure whose radiance was far greater than the illumi-

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nation of any of the persons she had so far encountered. Immediately,

she recognized this being to be Jesus, for she had seen him once
before, during her previous NDE. He greeted her tenderly, while sheconveyed her excitement to him about her newfound omniscience andher joy at being there and with him again.
he communicated to her: "Isn't it wonderful? Everything is beautiful here, and it fits together. And you'll find that. But
you can't stay here now. It's not your time to be here yet and you
have to go back."
Vicki reacted, understandably enough, with extreme disappoint
ment and protested vehemently, "No, I want to stay with you." But
the being reassured her that she would come back, but for now, she

Tlepathically,

had to "go back and learn and teach more about loving and forgiving."

Still resistant, however, Vicki then learned that she also needed
to go back to have her children. With that, Vicki, who was then childless but who "desperately wanted" to have children-and who hassince given birth to three-became almost eager to return and finallyconsented.
However, before Vicki could leave, the being said to her, in theseexact words, "But first, watch this."
And what Vicki then saw was "everything from my birth" in acomplete panoramic review of her life, and as she watched, the being
gently commented to help her understand the significance of her actions and their repercussions.
The last thing Vicki remembers, once the life review had been com
pleted, are the words, "You have to leave now." She then experienced"a sickening thud" like a roller-coaster going backwards, and foundherself back in her body, feeling heavy and full of pain.

Brad Barrows
A second case is that of Brad Barrows, a 33-year-old man living
in Connecticut, who had a near-death experience in the winter of1968 when he was only 8 years old. At the time, he was a student
at the Boston Center for Blind Children, and had contracted a severecase of pneumonia and eventually had severe breathing difficulties.
Afterward, he was told by nurses that his heart had stopped, appar
ently for at least four minutes, and that cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) had been necessary to bring him back.

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Brad remembers that when he couldn't breathe any longer, he felt
himself lifting up from the bed and floating through the room toward
the ceiling. He saw his apparently lifeless body on the bed. He also
saw his blind roommate get up from his bed and leave the room to
get help. (His roommate later confirmed this.) Brad then found him
self rapidly going upward through the ceilings of the building until
he was above the roof. At this point, he found that he could see
clearly.
He estimates that it was between 6:30 and 7:00 in the morningwhen this happened. He noticed that the sky was cloudy and dark.
There had been a snowstorm the day before, and Brad could see
snow everywhere except for the streets, which had been plowed,
though they were still slushy. He was able to give us a very detailed
description of the way the snow looked. Brad could also see the snowbanks that the plows had created. He saw a street car go by. Finally,
he recognized a playground used by the children of his school anda particular hill he used to climb nearby.
When asked if he "knew" or "saw" these things, he said: "I clearlyvisualized them. I could suddenly notice them and see them. ..

. Iremember . . . being able to see quite clearly."
After this segment of this experience, which happened very fast,
was over, he found himself in a tunnel and emerged from it to findhimself in an immense field illuminated by a tremendous, all-encom

passing light. Everything was perfect.
Brad could clearly see in this domain, too, though he commented
that he was puzzled by the sensation of sight. He found himself walking on a path surrounded by tall grass, and also reported seeing talltrees with immense leaves. No shadows were visible, however.
While in this field, Brad became aware of beautiful music, likenothing he had ever heard on earth. Walking toward the sound, hecame to and climbed a hill, eventually encountering a glittering stone
structure so brilliant that he thought it might be burning hot. But
it wasn't, and he entered it. The music continued here as well and,to Brad, seemed to be praising God. In this structure, Brad encoun
tered a man whom he didn't recognize but from whom emanated an
overwhelming love. The man, without a word, gently nudged Brad
backward, initiating a reversal of his experience, ending with hisfinding himself in bed gasping for air, attended by two nurses. Brad,
like Vicki, has been blind from birth.

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These two cases, which took place a continent apart and before
the advent of modern near-death studies, show an obvious structuralsimilarity and clearly exemplify the familiar Moody-type pattern of
NDEs. To be sure, not all of the NDEs described by our blind re
spondents are as rich in their narrative line as those of Vicki andBrad, but there is no question that the great preponderance of theseexperiences conform to the classic form of the NDE.
To examine this point from a statistical perspective and help toprovide something of an overview of our findings here, we can list
a number of the common features of NDEs and state how often they
are mentioned in the interviews of our 21 respondents in the NDEr
category. Feelings of peace, well-being, or being loved were reported
in 20 interviews; a sense of separation from the physical body, or an
actual out-of-body experience (OBE), in 14; seeing one's own physicalbody, in 10; going through a tunnel or dark space, in eight; meetingothers, such as spirits, angels, or religious personages, in 12; seeinga radiant light, in eight; hearing noise or music, in seven; a life review, in four; encountering a border or limit, in six; and a choice orbeing told to return to life, in 10.
In general, although the numbers in the various sight categories(that is, blind from birth, adventitiously blind, and severely visually
impaired) were too small to permit statistical tests, inspection reveals
no obvious differences among sight subgroups with respect to thefrequency of NDE elements. Thus, whether one is blind from birth,loses one's sight in later life, or suffers from severe visual impair
ment, the type of NDE reported appears to be much the same andis not structurally different from those described by sighted persons.
With these facts established, we can now turn our attention to ourprincipal interest in this study, namely, whether and to what extent
blind persons claim to be able to see during their NDEs and OBEs.

Visual Aspects of NDEs and

OBEs in the Blind
We have already had evidence from the summaries of Vicki's andBrad's narratives that there appear to be clear visual repre
sentations, both of things of this world and of an otherworldly nature,
during the NDEs of blind persons. The question we face here, however, is how common such testimony is among our respondents as awhole.

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First, let us look at how many of our respondents report being
able to see during their NDEs or OBEs. Of our 21 NDErs, 15 claimed
to have had some kind of sight, three were not sure whether theysaw or not, and the remaining three did not appear to see at all. All
but one of those who either denied or were unsure about being able
to see came from those who were blind from birth, which means that
only half of the NDErs in that category stated unequivocally thatthey had distinct visual impressions during their experience. Nevertheless, it is not clear by any means whether those respondents blindfrom birth who claimed not to have seen were in fact unable to, or
simply failed to recognize what seeing was. For instance, one man
whom we classified as a nonvisualizer told us that he could not ex
plain how he had the perceptions he did because "I don't know what
you mean by 'seeing.'" He was not the only such person to admit
such perplexity, so that even among those cases we felt obliged toclassify as not involving sight, the possibility is not entirely foreclosed. As a whole, however, our data here are quite consistent inindicating that the preponderance of our blind NDErs do indeed report vision during their near-death encounters, while only a minority
are unsure about the matter or, in some cases, have no clear senseof sight.
Evidence of vision is even stronger among the OBErs in our sam
ple. Nine of our 10 OBErs claimed sight, and if we include the fivepersons who had both an NDE and one or more OBEs on other oc
casions, the figures are 13 out of 15. In this connection, one of the
NDErs whom we classified as a nonvisualizer during her NDE did
report vision during her OBEs.
Overall, the number of persons who indicated they had some kindof vision, either during an NDE or OBE, was 25, which was 80 per
cent of our entire sample. Even for those blind from birth, 9 of 14,
or 64 percent, likewise reported sight.
Given that some kind of vision is the rule for the blind, we cango on to ask, just what do they see?
In general, they report the same kinds of visual impressions assighted persons do in describing NDEs and OBEs. For example, 10of our 21 NDErs said they had some kind of vision of their physicalbody, and seven of our 10 OBErs said likewise. Occasionally, there
are other this-worldly perceptions as well, such as seeing a medical
team at work on one's body or various features of the room or surroundings where one's physical body was. Otherworldly perceptions
abound, too, and for NDErs, as we have already seen, they seem to116

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take the form characteristic for transcendental NDEs of sighted persons: radiant light, otherworldly landscapes, angels or religious fig
ures, deceased relatives, and so forth. Somewhat similar otherworldly
perceptions are sometimes found for OBErs as well, though these,
when they occur, are usually limited to seeing light, beautiful colors,
and meeting others. None of our OBErs recounted a life review.
How well do our respondents find they can see during these epi
sodes? We have already noted that the visual perceptions of Vicki
and Brad appeared extremely clear and detailed, especially when
they found themselves in the otherworldly portions of their near
death journeys. While not all of our blind NDErs had clear, articu
lated visual impressions, nevertheless enough of them did so that
we can conclude that the NDE cases like Vicki's and Brad's are fairly
typical in this regard. For instance, one of our interviewees whosesight perished completely as a result of a stroke at age 22, and wasnear-sighted before that, told us in connection with seeing her body,her doctor, and the operating room during her NDE: "I know I could
see and I was supposed to be blind. . . . And I know I could see
everything... . It was very clear when I was out. I could see details
and everything."
Another man, who lost his vision in a car accident at the age of19, had a comforting vision of his deceased grandmother across avalley during his NDE. In commenting on his clarity, he said: "Ofcourse I had no sight because I had total destruction of my eyes in
the accident, but [my vision] was very clear and distinct. . . . I had
perfect vision in that experience."
Still another man, this one blind from birth, found himself in anenormous library during the transcendental phase of his NDE andsaw "thousands and millions and billions of books, as far as you could
see." Asked if he saw them visually he said, "Oh, yes!" Did he seethem clearly? "No problem." Was he surprised at being able to see
thus? "Not in the least. I said, 'Hey, you can't see,' and I said, 'Well,of course I can see. Look at those books. That's ample proof that I
can see.'"
Typically, vision is reported as clear, even acutely so, by our respondents in the otherworldly domain, where seeing is often described as "perfectly natural" or "the way it's supposed to be."However, sometimes the initial onset of visual perception of thephysical world is disorienting and even disturbing to the blind. This
was true for Vicki, for example, who said:

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I had a hard time relating to it [i.e., seeing]. I had a real difficult
time relating to it because I've never experienced it. And it was
something very foreign to me. . . . Let's see, how can I put it intowords? It was like hearing words and not being able to understandthem, but knowing that they were words. And before you'd neverheard anything. But it was something new, something you'd not beenable to previously attach any meaning to

Later, in commenting on the shock of these initial visual impres
sions, she even used the word "frightening" to characterize them. She
also told us that she was never able to discriminate colors as such,but only "different shades of brightness," about which impressions
she could only wonder afterward whether they represented whatsighted people meant by color.
However, after this brief and confusing period of adjustment, theexperiencer's perception quickly seems to become self-organizing andcoherent; then it is as if the individual has been seeing his or her
whole life. As Brad commented on the naturalness of his own per
ception in the otherworldly domain:..

. It was so natural it was almost
It was like it was always there.
as if I should have always been able to see like that. . . . I could
never understand why I never could do that back in my own body,
yet it was so unbelievably natural. . . . I thought to myself I shouldbe able to carry this right back with me. It's just something I've
always had. . . . I was very comfortable with it.

To conclude this section, we would like to bring all of these visualthreads together in one specific illustrative case of still another ofour blind respondents, a woman we'll call Marsha. Marsha is a 40
year-old married woman living in Connecticut who had an NDE on
January 16, 1986, when she was 32, as a result of complications in
her pregnancy.
Like Vicki, Marsha was a premature baby, having been born after
only a six month pregnancy, and, as a result, had developed a con
dition of retinopathy of prematurity. Unlike Vicki, however, she has
always had some limited vision. In this respect, Marsha told us: "Ihave some vision in my left eye, not a whole lot. I don't have any
reading vision-I can't read print at all, but I can see, like, people
and stuff, but they look . . . blurry." We classified Marsha in theseverely visually impaired category, as her actual vision was extremely poor and she uses a guide dog.
Marsha's case is mainly of interest here in showing how the visual
perception of a severely visually impaired individual during an NDE

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is not only enhanced, but can become virtually perfect. In her interview with us, she made it plain that her heightened acuity pertained
both to her out-of-body perception as well as to that which she experienced in the otherworldly portion of her experience. As to theformer, Marsha told us that when she was coming back, she wasaware of seeing her body:
Interviewer: Could you describe it? Could you see it in detail?
Marsha: Yeah, it just looked like me. I was, like, asleep.
Interviewer: And how was your vision, if I could put it that way,
when you were looking down on yourself?
Marsha: It was fine.... It was normal.
Interviewer: When you say normal, you mean clear?
Marsha: Yeah, everything. There was no problem with it.

Concerning the quality of her otherworldly perception, she com
mented:Interviewer: Were you able to see better than you could in the physi

cal world?
Marsha: Oh, yeah.
Interviewer: What was your visual perception like in this room [inthe otherworldly portion of her NDE]?
Marsha: Everything, I could see everything. . . . All the people, all
the way back. Everything.
Interviewer: In what way? Could you be a little more specific?
Marsha: It was perfect. It would not be like that here. There wasno problem. It was, like, you know- everything, you could see
everything. It was not like your eyes. I don't know what normal
vision would feel like. It was not like your eyes see. It couldn't be
my eyes because my eyes were back over here. I could see gold in
the room. Gold on the walls. There [were] white birds and angels
and all these people.
Interviewer: When you saw birds and the people and the room, were
you seeing it in detail or just like you see now?
Marsha: No, no. It was detail. It was white light. Everything waswhite light in there. And there was gold on the walls.

Later on, in elaborating on her perception of colors during thispart of her experience, Marsha was similarly definite about what she
was aware of:Interviewer: And could you see it [color] clearly in the experience?
Marsha: Yes. Everything was the way it was supposed to be.

Finally, when the interviewer probed to get Marsha's further
thoughts on her visual experience during her NDE, this exchange
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Interviewer: If you had to say how much sight you actually had at
the time of your experience, is there a way for you to describe it?
Marsha: It was, like, perfect. I don't see how it could not be perfect.
I can't say I could see like I see now. . . . I could see everything[then].
Interviewer: Do you have any thoughts on the fact that you had
vision during this experience?
Marsha: Well, see, it was vision, but I don't think it was my eyes.
I don't know how it works because my eyes were back here, andsince they are not right and I could see everything right, there had
to be more special vision somehow.

Although Marsha still has some residual physical vision, it is clearthat her comments echo both those of Vicki and Brad concerning thequality of her visual perception, especially in the otherworldly realm.
There, she saw perfectly and in detail that was astonishing to her
and for which she had no explanation. And like Vicki and Brad, who
had also noted the naturalness of their otherworldly vision, Marsha
used a phrase we have encountered before, namely, "everything was
the way it was supposed to be." Likewise, her visual impression ofher physical body seemed clear and distinct, in contrast to her eve
ryday vision. Overall, her testimony was as striking as it was con
sistent and showed that severely visually impaired persons, too, may
find that coming close to death appears to restore their sight to normal, and perhaps even superior, acuity.
In summary, as a whole our interviews with both NDErs andOBErs offered abundant testimony that reports of visual perception
among the blind are common, that their impressions concern boththings of this world and otherworldly domains, and that they areoften clear and detailed, even in narratives furnished by those whohave been blind from birth.

Corroborative Evidence for OBE
and NDE Visions
Obviously, in order to demonstrate that the perceptions describedby our blind experiencers are something other than mere fantasies
or even complex hallucinations, it will be necessary to provide somekind of confirming evidence for them, preferably from other inde
pendent witnesses or from reliable documentation. But just here, notsurprisingly, is where it proves difficult to gather the type of indis
pensable corroboration that would help to cinch the argument that

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what they report seeing is indeed authentic. In many cases, such as
those of Vicki and Brad, the reported NDEs or OBEs took place solong ago that it is no longer possible to know precisely who the wit
nesses were or where to locate them. In other instances, potential
informants have died or were not accessible to us for interviews. As
a result, much of the testimony of our respondents is dependent on
their own truthfulness and the reliability of their memories. As arule, we did not have cause to question the sincerity of our respon
dents, but sincerity is not evidence and one's own word is hardly thelast word when it comes to evaluating the validity of these accounts.
Nevertheless, in at least some instances, we are able to offer someevidence, and in one case some very strong evidence, that theseclaims are in fact rooted in a direct and accurate, if baffling, per
ception of the situation. In this section, we will present two of ourcases in which we could document some measure of evidentiality forthe visual perceptions of the blind.

Frank
Our first example is one of apparently veridical perception during
an OBE in which a respondent claimed to have seen himself. Whatmakes this case of special interest, however, is that he also saw something he couldn't have known about by normal means. Furthermore,
he told us that a friend of his was in a position to confirm his tes
timony. Frank is 66 years old, but lost his sight completely in 1982.
He cannot see anything now, including light or shadows. He has had
several OBEs, however, since becoming totally blind. What follows
is his recall of one of them.
Around 1992, a friend of Frank's was going to be driving him to
the wake of a mutual friend. As Frank remembered the incident:
And so I said to her that morning, I said: "Gee, I haven't got a goodtie to wear. Why don't you pick me up one?" She said, "Yeah, I'll
pick you up one when I get down to Mel's [a clothing store]." So
she picked it up and dropped it off and said, "I can't stay. I've got
to get home and get ready to pick you up to go to the wake." So I
got dressed and put the tie on. She didn't tell me the color of thetie or anything else. I was laying down on the couch and I could
see myself coming out of my body. And I could see my tie. The tie
that was on. And it had a circle on it-it
was a red-and it had agray circle, two gray circles on it. And I remember that.

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The interviewer then probes for further details and clarification:
Interviewer: Now just for the chronology of it, you were lying downwith this tie on, you saw yourself going out of the body, and thenyou saw the tie?
Frank: I saw the tie 'cause I told her the color.
Interviewer: You told your friend who was driving you?
Frank: Yeah, when she came back to pick me up. . .. And when
she came down to pick me up, I said to her, "Are the circles grayin this tie?" And she says, "Yes."
Interviewer: Was she surprised that you knew?
Frank: Yes. She said, "How did you know?" She said, "Did anyone
come here?" I said, "No, nobody came here." You know, you can'ttell 'em [laughs], 'cause they just don't accept, they don't believe init.
Interviewer: And do you remember what the tie looked like evennow?
Frank: Yeah. It's a rose-colored tie with circles on it and dots in the
middle of the circle. Whitish/grayish circle around there. And it's abeautiful tie, 'cause every place I go they remark on it. So she said
to me, "Who told you?" And I said, "Nobody." I said, "I just guessed."
I didn't want to tell because, like I said before . . . you can't say
things to certain people.

Naturally, after hearing this story, we were eager to see if we could
track down the woman involved in this incident. That proved difficult, since Frank had lost contact with her, but eventually he wasable to locate her and, without telling her exactly why we were interested to talk with her, put us in touch with her. One of us (S.C.)
did conduct an open-ended interview with this woman shortly after
ward and summarized it as follows in her notes:
I independently called his friend who said she did purchase a tie
for Frank that day and did pick him up for the wake. However, she
didn't have a clear recollection of the sequence of events that day
to confirm the accuracy of Frank's story and didn't remember theexact design and colors of the tie. She added that Frank is a down
to-earth guy who in her experience does not embellish stories. Andeven though she couldn't independently corroborate his account, shetended to think he was probably accurate in recounting the details.

So here, although we lack the crucial confirming facts we needfrom the witness involved, we nevertheless have a highly suggestive
instance that this man's recall of his experience is essentially accu
rate. However, the obvious weaknesses in and ultimate inconclusive
ness of this case were overcome in our second example, in which a

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direct and independent corroboration of the respondent's own testi
mony was obtained.

Nancy
The next respondent was a 41-year-old woman we will call Nancy
who underwent a biopsy in 1991 in connection with a possible cancerous chest tumor. During the procedure, the surgeon inadvertently
cut her superior vena cava, then compounded his error by sewing it
closed, causing a variety of medical catastrophes including blindness,a condition that was discovered only shortly after surgery whenNancy was examined in the recovery room. She remembers waking
up at that time and screaming, "I'm blind, I'm blind!"
Shortly afterward, she was rushed on a gurney down the corridor
in order to have an angiogram. However, the attendants, in theirhaste, slammed her gurney into a closed elevator door, at which point
the woman had an out-of-body experience.
Nancy told us she floated above the gurney and could see her body
below. However, she also said she could see down the hall where twomen, the father of her son and her current lover, were both standing,looking shocked. She remembers being puzzled by the fact that they
simply stood there agape and made no movement to approach her.
Her memory of the scene stopped at that point.
In trying to corroborate her claims, we interviewed the two men.
The father of her son could not recall the precise details of that par
ticular incident, though his general account corroborated Nancy's, but
her lover, Leon, did recall it and independently confirmed all theessential facts of this event. Here is an excerpt from our interview
with him, which bears on this crucial episode.
Leon: I was in the hallway by the surgery and she was coming out

and I could tell it was her. They were kind of rushing her out.
Interviewer: Rushing her out of where?
Leon: Of the surgery suite where she had been in the recovery area,
I think. And I saw these people coming out. I saw people wheelinga gurney. I saw about four or five people with her, and I looked andI said, "God, it looks like Nancy," but her face and her upper torso
were really swollen about twice the size it should have been. At
that point I looked and I said, "Nancy, Nancy," and they just-she
didn't know, I mean. She was out of it. And they told me they weretaking her down for an angiogram.
Interviewer: Who told you that?

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Leon: I believe a nurse did. I'm not quite sure. I think I was stillin a state of shock. I mean, it had been a long day for me. You're
expecting an hour procedure and here it is, approximately 10 hours
later and you don't have very many answers. I believe a nurse did.
I know I asked. And I think Dick [the father of Nancy's child] wasthere at the same time. I think he and I were talking in the hallway.
Interviewer: Do you know how far you were from Nancy?
Leon: When I first saw her she was probably, maybe about 100 feetand then she went right by us. I was probably no more than 3 to
5 feet away from her. And I believe Dick was right next to me as

well.
Interviewer: And do you know how they took her out? She was on
the gurney?
Leon: She was on the gurney. There were IVs.. .. I'm not sure-I
think she had some sort of a breathing apparatus. I'm not sure if
it was an Ambu bag or what it was.
Interviewer: And then where did they take her?
Leon: They took her downstairs to do an angiogram.
Interviewer: How?
Leon: They took her down in the gurney in the service elevator.
They didn't take her in a regular elevator. They took her aroundthe corner to the service elevator.
Interviewer: And did you see that whole process?
Leon: Yes, I did.
Interviewer: Did you see her go into the elevator?
Leon: Yes, I did because I walked around to watch her enter theelevator.
Interviewer: Was there any disturbance that you remember in getting her into the elevator?
Leon: I think there was a real sense of urgency on the staff. I've
worked in hospital emergency rooms as well and I can really relate
to that. I think somebody was, like, trying to get into the elevatorat the same time and there was some sort of a "Oh, I can't get in,
let's move this over a little bit," kind of adjusting before they could
get her into the elevator. But it was very swift.
Interviewer: Did you have a good look at her face?
Leon: Yeah, it really kind of shocked me. She was just really swollen.
She was totally unrecognizable. I mean, I knew it was her but-you
know, I was a medic in Vietnam and it was just like seeing a bodyafter a day after they get bloated. It was the same kind of look.

Leon's account accorded with Nancy's in virtually every significant
respect, despite the fact that he was very worried about her condi
tion, and could scarcely recognize her because of her edema when
he did see her. Yet, despite his evident state of shock at the time,
his interview appeared to corroborate her story, as much as any external witness could be expected to. It should be noted that this wit
ness has been separated from our participant for several years andJOURNAL OF NEAR-DEATH STUDIES

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they had not even communicated for at least a year before we interviewed him. Furthermore, even if Nancy had not been totally blindat the time, the respirator on her face during this accident would
have partially occluded her visual field and certainly would have prevented the kind of lateral vision necessary for her to view these men
down the hall. But the fact is, according to indications in her medical
records and other evidence we have garnered, she appeared alreadyto have been completely blind when this event occurred.
After a detailed investigation of this case and a review of all pertinent documentation, we have concluded that in all probability there
was no possibility for Nancy to see what she did with her physicaleyes which, in any event, were almost surely sightless at that time.
Yet the evidence suggests that she did see, and, as the corroborative
testimony we have quoted shows, she apparently saw truly.
The question, of course, is how she was able to do that, and not
only how Nancy saw, but how any of the blind persons in our study
saw what they certainly could not possibly have seen physically. Ourfindings in this section only establish a putative case that these vi
sions are factually accurate, and not just some kind of fabrication,
reconstruction, lucky guess, or fantasy; but they leave unexplained
the paradox of our discovery that the rumors some of us have been
hearing all these years, that the blind can actually see during their
NDEs, appear to be true. Whether and how this can be so is themystery we must next be prepared to probe.

Discussion
An Overview of Our Findings
Before tackling the perplexing and difficult questions we have just
posed, it will be helpful to summarize our principal findings. To doso, we will return to the three issues this study was designed toaddress. The first of these was whether blind persons do report NDEs
and, if they do, whether those NDEs are the same or different fromthose of sighted persons. Our findings here were unequivocal in theaffirmative. There is no question that NDEs in the blind do occur
and, furthermore, that they take the same general form and are com
prised of the very same elements that define the NDEs of sighted
individuals. Moreover, this generalization appears to hold across all
three categories of blindness that were represented in this study:

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those blind from birth, those adventitiously blind, and those severely
visually impaired.
The second issue, and the one that was the driving force of thisstudy, was whether the blind claim to have visual impressions during
their NDEs or OBEs. On this point, too, our data were conclusive.
Overall, 80 percent of our respondents reported these claims, mostof them in the language of unhesitating declaration, even when they
had been surprised, or even stunned, by the unexpected discovery
that they could in fact see. Like sighted experiencers, our blind re
spondents described to us both perceptions of this world and otherworldly scenes, often in fulsome, fine-grained detail, and sometimes

with a sense of extremely sharp, even subjectively perfect, acuity.
The last issue hinged on the second, and that had to do with attempting to corroborate these claims of sight in an effort to showthat they represented something other than fantasies or hallucinations. This was the weakest part of our study since, for a variety ofmethodological reasons, it was often not possible to locate relevant
witnesses or gain access to potentially helpful documentation. Nev
ertheless, we did offer two illustrative and highly suggestive casesthat seemed to indicate these claims are indeed authentic and not
explicable by conventional means.

Some Possible Explanations for Apparent Sight in the Blind
With this summary of our findings we are now ready to explore
the questions of central interest to us. The simplest way to frame
the issue might be to ask: "How is it that the blind can see during
these experiences?" But, however natural it might be to put the question in this form, doing so implies that we have already concluded
that we can reasonably infer from our data that the blind do in factsee. That is certainly possible, perhaps even plausible, but not all
readers would be prepared to concede the point. Indeed, we havealready implied that from an epistemological point of view, it might
be better to rephrase our basic question as: "If it can legitimately
be said that the blind in some sense do see, in precisely what sense
would that be?" Putting the question in this way, then, leaves open
the issue of the nature of apparent sight in the blind. However, even
before we can properly address this question, there is plainly still
another one that must exert a prior claim on our attention, and thatis: "Might there be some non-retinal-based mechanisms that could

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in principle account for the results of this study and thus demon
strate that vision in the blind is indeed only apparent and not actual?"
Thus, by a series of interrogative declensions, we find ourselvesfacing first the possibility of various alternative explanations thatwould avoid having to posit some kind of eyeless vision to subsume
our findings. Before resorting to possible unconventional theories
such as those rooted in New Paradigm science or even esotericthought to interpret our findings, we must first make sure that no
already recognized natural or prosaic mechanism cannot provide asuperior or more parsimonious explanation.

The Dream Hypothesis
One fairly obvious possibility that has often been advanced in con
nection with the NDEs and OBEs of sighted persons is that thisexperience is some kind of a dream, perhaps a lucid or exceptionallyvivid dream, which has such realistic properties that it is easily mis
interpreted and thus given an ontological status it does not deserve.
To evaluate this hypothesis, we first need to inquire into what is
known about normal oneiric processes in the blind. Fortunately, there
has been a great deal of research devoted to the dreams of the blind,some of it going back more than a hundred years. As a result of
these investigations, certain generalizations about the presence ofvisual imagery in dreams appear to stand up quite well. Among these"empirical cornerstones" (Kirtley, 1975) are that (1) there are no vis
ual images in the dreams of the congenitally blind; (2) individuals
blinded before the age of 5 also tend not to have visual imagery; (3)those who become sightless between the age of 5 to 7 may or may
not retain visual imagery; and (4) most persons who lose their sightafter age 7 do retain visual imagery, although its clarity tends tofade with time. In addition, various researchers have found that audi
tion tends to be the primary sense involved in dreams of the blind,with tactile and kinesthetic elements next (Kirtley, 1975).
In our interviews, we routinely asked our respondents about thenature of their dreams, and what we found in our sample accords

with the generalizations just described. In addition, however, andparticularly pertinent to the hypothesis under consideration, our respondents usually went on to say that not only were their NDEs
unlike their usual dreams, but in the case of those blind from birth,

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they stood out as radically different precisely because they contained
visual imagery, whereas their dreams had always lacked this ele
ment. Vicki, one of our NDErs blind from birth, provides a good casein point:
Interviewer: How would you compare your dreams to your NDEs?
Vicki: No similarity, no similarity at all.
Interviewer: Do you have any kind of visual perception in yourdreams?
Vicki: Nothing. No color, no sight of any sort, no shadows, no light,
no nothing.
Interviewer: What kinds of perceptions are you aware of in your typi
cal dreams?
Vicki: Taste-I have a lot of eating dreams [laughs]. And I havedreams when I'm playing the piano and singing, which I do for aliving, anyway. I have dreams in which I touch things.... I taste
things, touch things, hear things, and smell things-that's it.
Interviewer: And no visual perceptions?

Vicki: No.
Interviewer: So that what you experienced during your NDE wasquite different from your dreams?
Vicki: Yeah, because there's no visual impression at all in any dreamthat I have.

These remarks, along with similar asseverations from other par
ticipants in our study, make it abundantly clear that from our respondents' point of view, the NDE, especially its visual aspect, has
nothing in common with their usual dreams. It is instead something
in a class by itself and not to be conflated with dreams. Since there
is no support whatever from our interviews for the dream hypothesis
of NDEs, we may confidently reject it as a potential explanation for
our findings.

Retrospective Reconstruction
Another possibility, at least for the kind of visual perceptions respondents report during the out-of-body phase of NDEs, is that individuals are not really seeing at that time, but talking afterward
as if they did. Instead, according to this hypothesis, they have actu
ally reconstructed a plausible account after the fact of what might
be expected to have happened while they were close to death, although they may sincerely but erroneously believe that they wit
nessed it at the time. From a combination of prior expectations,familiarity with hospital routines, overheard conversations or other

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sensory cues at the time, information gleaned afterward, or even sim
ply by lucky guesses, it might be possible for an NDEr to constructimaginatively a pictorial representation of events during an NDE.
Thus, this hypothesis would contend that what appears to be vision
is in reality a product of the mind's inventiveness.
The chief proponent of this hypothesis is Susan Blackmore (1993),
who used it chiefly to discount some of the pioneering work by Mi
chael Sabom (1982), in his study of apparently veridical, thoughseemingly impossible, visual perception in a sample of NDErs. In
discussing, for example, how a patient could unconsciously use audi
tory information available during an operation, Blackmore indicatedhow naturally such a false representation could be generated:
It does not take much information from such sounds for a person
to piece together a very convincing and realistic visual impressionof what is going on. This will provide the best model they have andseem perfectly real. They may have no idea that the model wasconstructed primarily from things that they have heard.. .. It isvery hard to assess just how much information any patient would
have available. We can only remember the general point that people
who appear unconscious may still be aware of some of the things
going on around them and they can easily build these up into a
good visual picture of what was happening (1993, pp. 124-125).

Blackmore's reasoning is logical and her hypothesis has a certain
plausibility, but we have not been able to find any significant support
for it among our interviewees. In fact only one of our 31 respondents
even alluded to it, and at that merely as one theoretical possibility
among several. Furthermore, a review of our transcripts affords nobasis for arguing that retrospective reconstruction was likely to haveplayed a role in most or even some of our cases. This same conclusion
was reached by Sabom and independently by Scott Rogo (1989), inan evaluation of the former's work in regard to the possible relevanceof this hypothesis.
And there are additional reasons for finding it inadequate here.
For one, when one considers that it is an after-the-fact hypothesisthat virtually cannot be disproved, the almost complete lack of direct
evidence from our study in its behalf is particularly telling. Second,
this hypothesis clearly founders when it comes to accounting for instances where unusual objects, ones that could not easily have been
predicted or otherwise anticipated, such as the design and color ofFrank's tie, are described by the blind. Third, it is completely impo
tent when it comes to accounting for the otherworldly segments of

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NDEs, which is especially clear in visual form for many of our respondents.
On the basis of these considerations, we find scant evidence infavor of this hypothesis, and a number of cogent reasons not only toreject it, but to be tempted to regard it almost as a kind of all-pur
pose refuge for the skeptically-minded, rather like the "super-ESP"
hypothesis in parapsychology, which, in principle, is always capableof explaining away in a pseudoscientific fashion findings thatthreaten to disturb prevailing ideas of the possible.

BlindsightIn the early 1970s, Lawrence Weiskrantz began to study a curious
phenomenon he was later to call "blindsight" (Weiskrantz, 1986), in
which patients suffering from extensive cortical blindness appeared
to be able to "see." In his experiments, for example, Weiskrantz wasable to show that in the absence of any visual sensation, patients,
if asked to reach for a nearby object about whose exact location they
were ignorant, tended to move in the right direction. Furthermore,when asked to grasp objects the nature of which was not disclosed
to them beforehand, their hands tended spontaneously to assume theappropriate form necessary to hold the object. Weiskrantz's work has
since been replicated by others (Humphrey, 1993) and the phenome
non has even been found in monkeys after extirpation of the visualcortex.

Is it possible, then, that what our respondents report is actuallya form of blindsight?
Further scrutiny of the results of research into blindsight shows
very quickly that although it seems to be a legitimate form of per
ception, it can by no means account for our findings. First of all,patients manifesting the effect typically cannot verbally describe theobject they are alleged to see, unlike our respondents who, as wehave noted, were usually certain about what they saw and could describe it often without hesitation. In fact, a cortically blind patient,even when his or her object identification exceeds chance levels, believes that it is largely the result of pure guesswork. Such uncer
tainties were not characteristic of our respondents. Second, evenwhen performance is better than chance would allow, even the bestof these patients still make many errors (Humphrey, 1993). While
we cannot of course provide an overall figure of accuracy of object

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identification in our study, it is not obvious from our findings thaterrors were made in regard to reports of visual perception in thoseportions of the environmental visual field where attention was fo
cused. Finally, and perhaps most crucially of all, blindsight patients,
unlike our respondents, do not claim that they can "see" in any sense.
As Humphrey wrote: "Certainly the patient says he does not havevisual sensation. . . . Rather he says, 'I don't know anything at all
but if you tell me I'm getting it right I have to take your word forit'" (1993, p. 90). This kind of statement is simply not found in thetestimony of our respondents who, on the contrary, are often con
vinced that they have somehow seen what they report.
Thus, the blindsight phenomenon, however fascinating it may bein its own right, cannot explain our findings. Indeed, the term itself
seems to be a bit of an unintentional misnomer, since in such patients
there does not seem to be any conscious sense of visual perception
at all.

Skin-Based Vision
The idea that we may have a kind of eyeless visual back-up system
based on dermal sensitivity is an old one, although at first blush thenotion may seem preposterous. Yet the retina itself is just a special
ized piece of skin, which through evolution has come to be the "vision
specialist" for the body. Therefore, it is certainly conceivable that in
our skin itself there might be a residual basis for visual detection,
which has simply atrophied and become nonfunctional through dis
use, like a vestigial organ.
In fact, when one begins to explore the empirical basis for thishypothesis, one finds considerable evidence for it. The earliest work
along these lines seems to have been done three-quarters of a century
ago by Jules Romains. In 1920, he published a now nearly forgotten
book called La Vision Extra-Retinienne et la Sens Paroptique, which
described his experiments in skin-based perception and became avail
able in 1924 in an American translation under the title of EyelessSight: A Study of Extra-Retinal Vision and the Paroptic Sense. Ro
mains' general purpose was to determine if individuals could "see"without the use of their eyes. To investigate this possibility, he firstblindfolded his subjects in such a way as to ensure that no light
could penetrate their eyes. He then ran them through a series ofexperiments to assess their visual capabilities under these conditions.

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In some, he would present them with a newspaper and ask them toread the headlines. In others, he would ask his subjects to "read" aset of numbers. In still others, as in modern blindsight experiments,
he would invite them to describe an object he placed in front of or
behind them, or ask his subjects to identify the colors of objects or
to distinguish the colors of papers under glass.
In general, and quite astonishingly, Romains reported that his sub
jects performed remarkably well, far exceeding what would have beenpossible by chance. Furthermore, these experiments were witnessedby many observers, some of them quite eminent, and therefore do
not depend solely on his own word. Romains found, however, thatseveral conditions affected the probability of correct identification.
First, even though the subjects were blindfolded, light had to be present in the room for them to be able to "see." Second, his subjects
could not perceive the object or "read" the number or letters on apaper when an opaque screen or door was placed between them andthe object. Finally, the greater the area of the skin actually exposed,
the more accurate subjects tended to be in their descriptions.
Romains developed some elaborate theories to explain his findings,
but however intriguing his discoveries were, for several distinct reasons they do not seem to have much bearing on what we found in
our study. To begin with, in Romains' experiments, shielding the ob
ject from view prevented it from being "seen." Yet, in our study, eventhe presence of walls or ceilings proved to be no impediment to our
respondents' apparent vision, as cases such as Vicki's and Brad's,among others, attest. In addition, whereas Romains found that thedegree of skin exposure was directly related to accuracy of perception,
there was no evidence of that in our study, and in fact some evidence
that would contravene it. Remember, for instance, that in some ofour cases the respondent's body was covered with bedsheets or wasclothed at the time of an NDE or OBE, yet vision seemed to occur
without difficulty. Most telling of all, however, is that Romains' subjects generally took a long time to achieve whatever degree of visual
accuracy they did demonstrate. Indeed throughout his book, Romains
frequently commented that the kind of eyeless vision he obtained
from his subjects was piecemeal, gradual, with the elements of per
ception coming together slowly, as a result of laborious effort, at leastat the beginning. Eyeless vision, he wrote, is successive, a matter oftrial-and-error, and tends at first to discern only objects near at hand.
In our study, visual perception seemed to be immediate, unlearned,
and was not restricted to objects close to the individual. Therefore

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we conclude, as we did with the later experiments in blindsight, that
Romains' findings, even if valid, have no relevance for ours and must
depend on entirely different mechanisms.
Incidentally, the insight underlying Romains' work, that there may
be non-retinal mechanisms that afford a kind of vision, has been fol
lowed up by a succession of modern researchers (Bach-y-Rita, 1972;
Duplessis, 1975; Grinberg-Zylberbaum, 1983), but their findings, although generally consistent with Romains', fail to explain ours. In
general, this more modern research parallels Romains' observationthat it takes a considerable amount of time and training for subjects
to show even a modest proficiency of object recognition. That fact
alone disqualifies the hypothesis of skin-based vision as a possible
explanatory vehicle for our results.
The rejection of this hypothesis also implies that similar views,
such as V. Krishnan's (1983), which contend that the vision reported
in NDEs and OBEs may be a function of some kind of obscure physi
cal mechanism are without support. For instance, Krishnan's position
requires that congenitally blind persons, on seeing for the first time,
have inchoate perception, as do those whose sight is restored throughan operation (Gregory, 1966; Sacks, 1993; Valvo, 1970; von Senden,1960). But, clearly, that is not the case. The brief surprise or disorientation a blind NDEr may experience when confronted with visual
impressions before adjusting to them does not begin to compare withthe hours of training that a newly sighted individual needs to undergo in order to transform visual information into meaningful pat
terns. Relatively speaking, then, sight is virtually immediate in ourblind NDErs, and although there may be some confusion over thefact of sight and uncertainty about color, object perception seems sta
ble from the outset. Moreover, when never-before-seeing NDErs findthemselves in the transcendental portions of their experience, someof them remark that seeing was perfectly natural in that state; it
was if they could always see. Any mechanism that could explain thatbaffling fact is, to us, truly obscure. In any event, the hypothesisthat it might be rooted in some kind of skin-based vision, as Krishnan has also suggested, is without a shred of evidence.

An Assessment of the Evidence for Alternative Explanations
Our search for a non-retinal-based mechanism that could in principle account for the results of this study and thus demonstrate that

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vision in the blind is indeed only apparent and not actual has con
sidered theories and data relating to dreams, retrospective recon
struction, blindsight, and skin-based vision, and has come up empty.
Of course, it would be absurd to claim that we have exhausted thelist of naturalistic or conventional possibilities or eliminated all con
ceivable artifacts, but we believe we have ruled out some of the mostobvious candidates for explanatory honors. At the very least, we have
perhaps managed to cast some doubt on the tenability of this typeof explanation for our findings, and consequently increased the likelihood that however they might be accounted for, we would do best
to seek elsewhere for our answers.

In any case, having addressed this basic issue, we can now revert
to the question we posed earlier about whether or in what sense it
can be said that the blind do see. Clearly, before any explanation forvision in the blind can be accepted, it must first be established that
their reports reflect the operation of something that can legitimately
be called "true sight." That assumption has of course been implicit
throughout this article and may perhaps appear to some to be self
evident by now. But it is not, and our next task is to demonstrate
just why it is not.

Apparent Vision in the Blind: Is It Really Seeing?
We as researchers can never have access to the NDE or OBE in
itself. Rather, every such experience is coded in a certain way as it
occurs and afterward, and comes to us only later as a report in alinguistic form. Therefore, by the time we interview our respondents,
the original experience has already been processed through several
distinct filters and necessarily undergone a series of virtually uncon
scious transformations until it reaches us as a distinct and coherent
narrative. Therefore, it will prove helpful to discern how this narra
tive comes to be shaped, and how the experience may be coded in
the first place. Doing so will in turn shed light on the pivotal questionof this section, namely: is what we discovered in our blind respon
dents truly a form of seeing? That is, is it in any sense somethingthat might be conceived of as analogous to physical sight?
To answer these questions, we reviewed our transcripts as sedu
lously as possible for insights into the formative processes that ulti
mately gave rise to the verbal report of the NDE or OBE. And what
we discovered in a finer reading of these documents were a brace of134

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factors that together sounded a tocsin against an overly literal in
terpretation of these reports as indicative of "seeing" as such. For
one thing, our scrutiny of these transcripts frequently revealed amultifaceted synesthetic aspect to the experiencer's perception that
seemed to transcend simple sight. A number of our interviewees, forexample, were hesitant to assert that what they were able to describe
was incontestably visual, either because they were blind from birthand did not know what vision was like or because they knew they
could not possibly be seeing with their physical eyes. The following
comments were typical of this vein:
It wasn't visual. It's really hard to describe because it wasn't visual.
It was almost like a tactile thing, except that there was no way I
could have touched from up there. But it really wasn't visual because I just don't have vision any more. . . . It [was] sort of a tactile
memory or something. It's not really like vision is. Vision is moreclear, but it's also more tied down.
I think what it was that was happening here was a bunch of synes
thesia, where all these perceptions were being blended into some
image in my mind, you know, the visual, the tactile, all the inputthat I had. I can't literally say I really saw anything, but yet I wasaware of what was going on, and perceiving all that in my.mind....
But I don't remember detail. That's why I say I'm loath to describe
it as a visual.
What I'm saying is I was more aware. I don't know if it's throughsight that I was aware.. .. I'm not sure. All I know is ... somehow
I was aware of information or things that were going on that I
wouldn't normally be able to pick up through seeing. . . . That's
why I'm being very careful how I'm wording it, 'cause I'm not sure
where it came from. I would say to you I have a feeling it didn't
come from seeing, and yet I'm not sure.

Even Brad, whose initial testimony seemed so clear on this point,
in a subsequent interview eventually qualified and clarified his ear
lier remarks about his memory of seeing snow on the streets outside
his school:
I was quite aware of all the things that were physically mentioned
in there [i.e., his earlier description]. However, whether it was seenvisually through the eyes, I could not say. .. . I mean, you have toremember, being born blind, I had no idea whether those images
were visual. . . . It was something like a tactual sense, like I could
literally feel with the fingers of my mind. But I did not remember
actually touching the snow. . . . The only thing I can really state
about those images was that they came to me in an awareness andKENNETH RING AND SHARON COOPER

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that I was aware of those images in a way I did not really understand. I could not really say that they were visual per se because I
had never known anything like that before. But I could say that all
my senses seemed to be very active and very much aware. I wasaware.

Brad, too, seemed to be telling us now that he could not be certain
his representation of the snow was in any definitive sense "visual"as such, especially since he had no real understanding of what a
visual image was. Instead, as with others in our study, a complex
multisensory awareness seems to have been involved, and, in a remarkable similarity with one of the respondents quoted above, Brad
made an almost identical statement to hers about the tactile qualityof his impression, again suggesting that this modality may be a key
feature in the coding of these experiences by the blind, as it certainly
is in their daily life.
Vicki as well, in recent exchanges with us, eventually clarified her
previous statements concerning whether her experiences could beproperly thought of as examples of pure seeing. In our interview withher on May 27, 1994, she allowed, "It was scary at first. . . . I had
trouble relating things to one another, what I was seeing and perceiving versus what I had touched and known the way I had known
things all my life." And in a telephone conversation the following
year, on July 18, 1995, when one of us (K. R.) asked her whether in
her opinion it was a matter of seeing or knowing in her experience,
she unhesitatingly replied, "It's both, Ken, it's both seeing and knowing."
As this kind of testimony builds, it seems more and more difficult
to claim that the blind simply see what they report. Rather, it isbeginning to appear it is more a matter of their knowing, througha still poorly understood mode of generalized awareness based on avariety of sensory impressions, especially tactile ones, what is hap
pening around them. The question that immediately confronts us
now, however, is as unavoidable as it is crucial: Why is it that thesereports, when casually perused, nevertheless often seem to imply
that the blind do see in a way akin to physical sight?
As we have already observed, however these experiences may havebeen coded originally, by the time we encounter them they have longcome to be expressed in a particular linguistic form. And that form
is a language of vision, since our ordinary language is rooted in theexperiences of sighted persons and is therefore biased in favor ofvisual imagery. Because the blind are members of the same linguistic

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community as sighted persons, we can certainly expect that they will
tend, and indeed will be virtually compelled, to phrase their experi
ences in a language of vision, regardless of its appropriateness to
the qualities of their own personal experience.
And there is another clue from our transcripts that mitigatesagainst an overly literal interpretation of our data on apparent visionin the blind. Examination of language usage by our respondents reveals that they tend to use vision verbs far more casually and looselythan do sighted persons, a finding that other researchers who havestudied language in the blind (Cook, 1970; Rathna, 1962) have con
firmed. Vicki, for example, said that she loves to "watch" televisionand uses phrases, such as "look at this," that clearly cannot be taken
literally. Although this observation does not necessarily invalidate thetestimony in our reports, it does send up another amber flag of cau
tion when it comes to the interpretation of the narratives of our blind
respondents.
In summary, what we have learned from our respondents is that
although their experiences may sometimes be expressed in a lan
guage of vision, a close reading of their transcripts suggests something closer to a multifaceted synesthetic perception that seems to
involve much more than an analog of physical sight. This is not to
say that as part of this awareness there cannot be some sort of pic
torial imagery as well; it is only to assert that this must not be taken
in any simplistic way as constituting vision as we normally understand it.

Eyeless Vision and Transcendental Awareness
Even if we cannot assert that the blind see in these experiencesin any straightforward way, we still have to reckon with the factthat they nevertheless have access to a kind of expanded supersen
sory awareness that may in itself not be explicable by normal means.
Furthermore, notwithstanding the cases of indistinct and nebulous"sight" we have just reviewed, we must not overlook the ineluctableand very unequivocal claims on the part of most of our respondents
that they did seem to possess a type of vision that was very keen,
detailed, and even "crystal clear" at times. Even if these reports may
not be analogous to retinal vision as such, they clearly represent
something that must be directly addressed. Thus, it remains for us

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to grapple with the question of what these reports represent, if notvision.
To pursue this line of inquiry, the first point we must note is thatthe blind simply represent a kind of limit case in research dealing
with alleged perceptions while in a near-death or out-of-body state.
If blind persons report what they cannot possibly see, since they haveno physically-mediated sight, or what they cannot know by other nor
mal means, as seems to be so in at least some instances in our study,
then we have clearly identified a phenomenon that threatens to casta dark shadow on the house of conventional science. But it is equallyplain that whenever we can show that such perceptions are physi
cally impossible, whether with blind persons or not, the same kindof shadow appears, as indeed it already has, many times, in otherresearch dealing with NDEs and OBEs. So to begin to focus moreclearly on precisely what it is we need to explain here, let us look
for a moment at a few illustrative cases one step removed from those
we have considered in this report where "impossible perceptions" ofgreat acuity are described by the poorly sighted.
One type of case that has long intrigued us is when such individu
als are seemingly able to report such fine and improbably noticed
features as, for example, "dust on the light fixtures" in an operating
room when, from the location of their physical body at the time aswell as their eyesight, such perceptions would manifestly be impos
sible. Here, then, are a couple of such instances from our previous

research.
One of them came from a woman interviewed in the early 1980s
who was 48 years old at the time (Ring, 1984). She had had her
NDE in connection with a surgical procedure in 1974. What was es
pecially noteworthy about her account at the outset, however, was
her mention of her unusually garbed anesthesiologist. As she explained, he was a physician who often worked with children. And
because he had found that his young patients often were confusedby a team of similarly clad green-garmented doctors, he had taken

to wearing a yellow surgical hat with magenta butterflies on it sohe, at least, could easily be recognized. All this will, of course, behighly relevant to this woman's account of her experience which will
now be described in her own words. She had gone into shock when
she heard her physician exclaim, "This woman's dying!" At that point:
Bang, I left! The next thing I was aware of was floating on theceiling. And seeing down there, with his hat on his head, I knew
who he was because of the hat on his head [i.e., the anesthesiologist

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with the magenta butterfly cap].. . it was so vivid. I'm very nearsighted, too, by the way, which was another one of the startling
things that happened to me when I left my body. I see at fifteen
feet what most people see at four hundred.... They were hooking
me up to a machine that was behind my head. And my very firstthought was, "Jesus, I can see! I can't believe it, I can see!" I could
read the numbers on the machine behind my head and I was justso thrilled. And I thought, "They gave me back my glasses. . ."(Ring, 1984, p. 42)

She went on to describe further details of her operation, including
how her body looked, the shaving of her belly, and various medical
procedures that her surgical team were performing upon her, andthen found herself looking at another object from a position highabove her physical body:
From where I was looking, I could look down on this enormous fluo
rescent light. . . and it was so dirty on top of the light. [Could you
see the top of the light fixture?] Yes, and it was filthy. And I remember thinking, "Got to tell the nurses about that." (Ring, 1984,
p. 43)

One of the striking features of this case is this woman's observationthat she was able to see so clearly during her NDE despite the fact
that, as she averred, she was very nearsighted. In this respect, too,
this woman's testimony is far from unique in our records. Anothervery similar story was told, for example, in a letter from an audi
ologist who likewise reported seeing dust on the light fixtures of theoperating room where his NDE took place. This incident occurred ina Japanese hospital during the Korean war. In addition, this sameman, who became interested in NDEs as a result of his own expe
rience, also learned of another case, involving a nurse at the same
hospital, which had a remarkable correspondence to his. On thispoint, as he wrote in his letter:
The odd thing about both of our experiences is that we are both
extremely myopic, i.e., thick glasses and blind as bats 6" from ournoses. And yet we were both able to describe accurately events, dials,
details, expressions in our OBEs, without our glasses.

Such highly acute visual perceptions on the part of the poorly
sighted are hardly limited to those who are apparently hovering
above their bodies during NDEs. Other nonordinary states of con
sciousness, such as meditation, can also sometimes evoke them. Hereis a particularly compelling example from a book by an optometrist
whose uncorrected eyesight was 20/200:

KENNETH RING AND SHARON COOPER

139[At this time] I was meditating every day. . . . During one of thesedeep meditative states, I had a very profound and startling experi
ence. Although my eyes were closed, I could suddenly see every
thing-the whole room and myself in it-and I couldn't tell where
I saw seeing from! I wasn't seeing from my eyes or from any single
point of view. I seemed to be seeing everything from everywhere.
There seemed to be eyes in every cell of my body and in every particle surrounding me. I could simultaneously see from straight on,
from above, from below, from behind, and so on. . . . There seemed
to be no observer separate from what was seen. There was simply
awareness. (Liberman, 1995, p. 47)

Here we have an important clue about the nature of this kind of"seeing." It may not be limited to the kind of concentrated focus wesometimes encounter in cases of NDEs, where one's perceptual attention sometimes seems restricted to the physical body. Instead, as
this account shows, one's awareness can be omnidirectional. In fact,
this type of perception is sometimes reported by those having NDEs
or OBEs, and it is precisely this feature that suggests that "awareness" is a more appropriate term for this experience than is "seeing,"as the writer just quoted also implied. In this new context, then,consider this account from an NDEr whose experience occurred as aresult of pneumonia during her second pregnancy. During this crisis,
the woman was rushed to the hospital by her husband and, upon
arrival, lost consciousness. Still, she was able to hear the nurses talking about her, saying that she was "dead meat." Nevertheless, sheherself was elsewhere at the time. As she related her experience:
I was hovering over a stretcher in one of the emergency rooms at
the hospital. I glanced down at the stretcher, knew the bodywrapped in blankets was mine, and really didn't care. The room
was much more interesting than my body. And what a neat per
spective. I could see everything. And I do mean everything! I could
see the top of the light on the ceiling, and the underside of thestretcher. I could see the tiles on the ceiling and the tiles on thefloor, simultaneously. Three hundred sixty degree spherical vision.
And not just spherical. Detailed! I could see every single hair andthe follicle out of which it grew on the head of the nurse standing
beside the stretcher. At the time I knew exactly how many hairs
there were to look at. But I shifted focus. She was wearing glittery
white nylons. Every single shimmer and sheen stood out in glowing
detail, and once again I knew exactly how many sparkles there were.

In this narrative, we notice again not only this astonishing featureof omnidirectional awareness, but also a type of knowledge thatstretches our concept of ordinary "vision" beyond the breaking point.

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Clearly, this is not simple "vision" at all as we are wont to understandit, but almost a kind of seeming omniscience that completely tran
scends what mere seeing could ever afford. Indeed, what we appear
to have here is a distinctive state of consciousness, which we would
like to call transcendental awareness. In this type of awareness, it
is not of course that the eyes see anything; it is rather that the mind
itself sees, but more in the sense of "understanding" or "taking in"than of visual perception as such. Or alternatively, we might say that
it is not the eye that sees, but the "I."Celia Green, in an important survey of OBEs (Green, 1968), foundevidence for much the same concept as we are calling transcendental
awareness among her respondents, too. To cite one brief relevant instance, she quoted one of her subjects as saying, "having no eyes, I'saw' with whole consciousness" (Green, 1968, p. 70). Indeed, her sur
vey is full of cases showing many of the features we have found in
our study of the blind, including instances of keenly detailed percep
tions, which some of her subjects, like ours, characterized as "crystal
clear," saying things like, "I could see the room in great detail, eventhe specks of dust" (Green, 1968, p. 72). Green also reported exam
ples of apparent sight through physical obstacles and multisensory
or synesthetic experiences. Therefore, what students of OBEs tend
to call extrasomatic vision seems to be identical to what we havelabeled here transcendental awareness.
Still another domain of research that appears to involve this typeof awareness is that of pre- and perinatal psychology. In some inves
tigations of early childhood memories, for example, there are reports
by adults of events they appeared to have witnessed prior to birth(Chamberlain, 1977; Cheek, 1986). In a popular book David Chamberlain (1988) wrote on apparent birth-related memories, he recounted a story that came from a 3 1/2-year-old boy named Jason.
Riding home one night, Jason spontaneously said that he remem

bered being born. He told his mother that he had heard her crying
and was doing everything he could to get out. He said that it was"tight," he felt "wet," and he felt something around his neck andthroat. In addition, something hurt his head and he remembered his
face had been "scratched up." Jason's mother said she had "nevertalked to him about the birth, never," but the facts were correct. The
umbilical cord had been wrapped around his neck, he had been moni
tored by an electrode in his scalp, and he had been pulled out by
forceps. The photograph taken by the hospital showed scratches on
his face (Chamberlain, 1988).

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141

Another girl, not quite 4, in speaking of her own birth, knew a"family secret" that had never been divulged to her. In this case, afriend of the mother and later an occasional babysitter named Cathy
had been present at the birth, assisting the midwife. After the birth,the midwife had been busy and the mother had by then been helped
into a bath, leaving Cathy temporarily alone with the baby. As thebaby began to whimper, Cathy reflexively let the baby suck from her
own breast. By the time the mother had returned, the baby was al
ready asleep, and Cathy, feeling somewhat guilty about being thefirst person to nurse the child, elected to say nothing to the motherabout it.
Nearly four years later, Cathy was babysitting this same child,and, just out of curiosity, happened to ask the child if she remem
bered being born. As Chamberlain related what Cathy later told him,
She answered, "Yes!," and proceeded to give an accurate account of
who was present and their roles during labor and delivery. She described the dim light of the womb and the pressures felt duringbirth. Then the child leaned up close and whispered in a confidential
tone, "You held me and gave me titty when I cried and Mommy
wasn't there." At that, she hopped up and went off to play. Says
Cathy, "Nobody can tell me babies don't remember their birth!"(Chamberlain, 1988, pp. 103-104)

Hearing such suggestive anecdotes as these, Chamberlain felt
obliged to see whether he could confirm such reports through sys
tematic research into the question. For this purpose, he eventuallystudied a paired set of 10 mothers and children and independently
hypnotized them, asking them for details about the birth from theirseparate perspectives. Only mothers who could assure Chamberlainthat they never shared details about the birth with their child were
eligible for the study. For the purposes of evaluation, Chamberlain
assumed that the report given by the mother would be at least an
approximately accurate description of the circumstances of the birthagainst which the child's testimony could then be measured.
When comparing these independent accounts, Chamberlain foundthat in general the respective stories of mother and child agreed impressively, corresponding on specific points of detail in an almost un
canny fashion:
Mother and child reports were coherent with each other, contained
many facts that were consistent and connected, and were appropri
ately similar in setting, characters, and sequences. The independent
narratives dovetailed at many points like one story told from two

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142

points of view.. .. Generally, reports validated each other in many
details like time of day, locale, persons present, instruments used(suction, forceps, incubator) and type of delivery (feet or head first).
Sequences of receiving bottled water, formula, or breast milk, ap
pearance and disappearance of fathers, and moving in and out ofdifferent rooms were often consistent.... Considering all the facts,
objectively gathered birth memories appear to be genuine recollec
tions of experience. (Chamberlain, 1988, pp. 106 and 120)

In all the areas we have mentioned-studies of NDEs, OBEs, medi
tation, and pre- and perinatal psychology-a single unified concept
such as transcendental awareness can provide the basis for a parsi
monious explanation for the entire and seemingly diverse array of"impossible perceptions" that research into these phenomena has dis
closed. Furthermore this term seems more faithful to the nature ofthese experiences than one that emphasizes only the visual compo
nent.

Returning now to its specific application to our research, the reason
we prefer to invoke the concept of transcendental awareness hinges
on our previous discussion about the ubiquity of the language of vi
sion. In effect, we argue that the blind, like other persons reporting
OBEs and NDEs, have entered into a state of transcendental aware
ness, which confers access to a realm of knowledge not available in
one's normal waking state, but then are forced, again just like others,
to translate their experiences into visual metaphors. Thus, the su
persensory kind of knowing that the experience provides becomesseeing when it undergoes the necessity of linguistic transformation.
That is why NDErs and OBErs, including some of our blind respon
dents, speak as if they have seen, even though, we conclude, it isan almost unavoidable distortion required by common language us
age.
Thus, in answer to our earlier question as to what these individu
als experience, if not seeing, we submit that it is transcendental
awareness, a distinctive state of consciousness and mode of knowing
in its own right, which is operative in blind and sighted persons alikeduring their experiences and which now stands in need of explanation. But at least we have, we believe, finally identified the phenome
non itself that seems to underlie and make possible the claims thatthe blind can "see" during their NDEs and OBEs, and why it is that
their apparent "vision" can sometimes be so extraordinarily detailed
and fine as to be, in their mind, "perfect." Since transcendental
awareness by definition must transcend the limitations of the senses,

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it is possible, at least at times, for one to have access to a state ofconsciousness in which, with "the doors of perception cleansed,"things present themselves in true Blakean fashion, "as they are, infinite."Theories of Transcendental Awareness
When confronted with the evidence for transcendental awarenesswe have presented in this paper, both from our own study and fromthe research of others, it is obvious that the generally accepted theories of human perception and cognition that derive from mainstream
science will not, without some extraordinary extrapolations, be able
to account for such findings. If, however, we turn instead to somerecent theoretical developments in New Paradigm Science we canquickly discern the shape of the explanation we need to seek.
In recent years, a number of thinkers, influenced by developments
in modern physics, have elaborated a variety of theories of conscious
ness which, despite their somewhat different basic postulates, alleither predict or imply that blind persons should be able to havesomething like visual perception during NDEs and OBEs. In addition, all of these theories explicitly address the phenomenon of the
NDE in general and also posit the existence of a state of conscious
ness that corresponds to what we have called here transcendental
awareness. Among such formulations are Kenneth Arnette's "Theoryof Essence" (Arnette, 1992, 1995a, 1995b), Larry's Dossey's "Nonlo
cality Theory of Consciousness" (Dossey, 1989), Amit Goswami's"Quantum Theory of Consciousness" (Goswami, 1993, 1994), Michael
Talbot's "Holographic Theory of Consciousness" (Talbot, 1991), andJenny Wade's "Holonomic Theory of Consciousness" (Wade, 1996).
As indicated, the ground philosophic assumptions of these theories
vary. For instance, Arnette's position is one of explicit dualistic interactionism, Goswami's, a monistic idealism that nevertheless isable to incorporate some of the insights of dualistic theories without
having to resort to dualism per se, while Wade's approach represents
an uncompromising nondualism. Nevertheless, these theorists all
agree about certain properties of consciousness itself, and on thisbasis they can serve as a kind of collective expression of the pointof view we believe best articulates our own theoretical convictions.
Let us examine next, then, this list of the common postulates of these
theories having to do with the nature of consciousness.

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JOURNAL OF NEAR-DEATH STUDIESThe first postulate on the nature of consciousness that these diverse theories share is that consciousness itself is primary and is
the ground of all being. Goswami's statements are indicative of thisposition and sum it up succinctly:
all events are phenomena in consciousness. Beyond what we see as
immanent reality, there is a transcendent reality; ultimately all reality is comprised of consciousness. The division of reality into tran
scendental and immanent is an epiphenomenon of experience.
(Goswami, 1994, p. 1)

The second common postulate is that consciousness is nonlocal.
What this assertion implies is that the mind, rather than being located in the individual and bounded by time (that is, birth and death)is fixed neither in time nor in space. In fact, in this view, it is notreally appropriate, except as a shorthand convenience, to speak of
the mind; instead there is, as our first proposition implies, only Mind.
This insight, though derivative from a nonlocality position, may bestated as a separate assumption, namely, the third common postu
late: that consciousness is unitive. That is, there is only one con
sciousness, which we call Mind, and the notion of individual minds
is at bottom nothing more than a useful fiction that Dossey pointedly
called "the illusion of a separate self and the sensation of an egothat possesses a separate mind" (Dossey, 1989, p. 98).
The fourth common postulate is that consciousness may and indeed
must sometimes function independently of the brain. This is a key
assumption, especially for understanding how the blind may becomeaware of something that seems like visual perception. Dossey again
stated the matter concisely:
if the mind is nonlocal, it must in some sense be independent of
the strictly local brain and body. . . . And if the mind is nonlocal,
unconfined to brains and bodies and thus not entirely dependent on
the physical organism, the possibility of survival of bodily death isopened. (Dossey, 1989, p. 7)

Of course, as Dossey elsewhere pointed out and as all of the othertheorists under consideration would agree, although Mind is neither
confined to the brain nor a product of it, it may of course workthrough the brain to give us our representation of the phenomenal
world. According to Goswami, our ordinary perception of time andspace comes about as a result of a quantum-mechanical process
whereby consciousness self-referentially "collapses" what are called"possibility waves" so as to give rise to actuality: "In the process of

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collapse, one undivided consciousness sees itself as apparently divided into dualities such as life and environment, subject and object"(A. Goswami, personal communication, 1995).
Thus, what we have here is an adumbration of a process that begins with Mind fully independent of brain becoming self-referential,that is, becoming identified with consciousness itself, and then converting this noumenal consciousness into a dualistic modality thatgenerates the familiar phenomenal world. What we have called tran
scendental awareness is at least the beginning of the reversal of thatprocess by which, even though the traces of an everyday dualism
remain, the individual is enabled, however temporarily, to experience
the world from a perspective independent of brain functioning andthe operation of the senses. Each of these theories formally entails
such a state of awareness, and specifically in blind persons, during
NDEs or OBEs; we direct the interested reader to the citations wehave provided in order to confirm our assertion that these New Paradigm theories are perfectly capable of elegantly subsuming our findings as derivations from their stated premises.

Conclusion
In the introduction to this paper, we alluded to an account of an
NDE of a blind woman who afterward reported that she could see
during her experience. At first blush, because this case was recounted
by a well-known physician, we were probably inclined to take it atface value, perhaps also influenced by our desire to believe in the
miraculous. Almost immediately, however, we learned that the story
that had so beguiled us into entertaining such an appealing possi
bility was fictitious. But by the end of our inquiry, we came to un
derstand that in this tale there resided still another paradox besides
the one it seemed initially to represent: namely, that this was a story
that was simultaneously true and false. Or perhaps we might bettersay it was a fictitious story that turned out to be true after all, justas the author all along had felt it just had to be. In this sense, atleast, perhaps this author has received a measure of justification af
ter the fact for his convictions, even if we cannot embrace, in thisone instance, his penchant for prematurely converting belief into ap
parent fact.

Nevertheless, as we have seen, there is still another level of sub
tlety in this story, because although in a sense it is true, it is not

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JOURNAL OF NEAR-DEATH STUDIES

entirely true. The story of Sarah implied that she really could see
during her NDE, in the way that a sighted person might. We haveshown this is an unwarranted inference. What seemed like an analog
to physical sight really was not when examined closely. It is a dif
ferent type of awareness altogether, which we have called transcen
dental awareness, that functions independently of the brain but thatmust necessarily be filtered through it and through the medium of
language as well. Thus, by the time these episodes come to our at
tention, they tend to speak in the language of vision, but the actual
experiences themselves seem to be something rather different alto
gether and are not easily captured in any language of ordinary dis
course. Indeed, our work has shown the need to exercise criticaldiscernment before taking these reports at face value. To be sure,they make good stories, in books or in tabloid headlines, as the casemay be, but they are not always necessarily what they seem. They
are more remarkable still.
What the blind experience is more astonishing than the claim thatthey have seen. Instead, they, like sighted persons who have had
similar episodes, have transcended brain-based consciousness alto
gether and, because of that, their experiences beggar all description
or convenient labels. For these we need a new language altogether,
as we need new theories from a new kind of science even to begin
to comprehend them. Toward this end, the study of paradoxical andutterly anomalous experiences plays a vital role in furnishing thetheorists of today the data they need to fashion the science of the
21st century. And that science of consciousness, like the new millen
nium itself, is surely already on the horizon.

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