Some patients tell of floating out of their bodies, watching themselves on the operating table and then plunging through darkness and toward an intense light. Others report meeting deceased loved ones, having their lives reviewed or encountering an energy they describe as a loving being or God. They all recount the fascination with another world, somewhere between life and death. He didn't see his own body or see a light. Previous studies, including one by a cardiologist in 1980, indicate that about one-third of people who come close to death have transcendental or mystical encounters.
Medical technology allows doctors to resuscitate more clinically dead patients than ever.
But some of them, fearing they will be called crazy or told they are imagining things, won't discuss their experiences, Dr. Greyson said. There are enough survivors who are willing to talk that they've formed an association with regional support groups. The International Association of Near-Death Studies has been established at the University of Connecticut. Stevenson and Greyson say most of their colleagues in medicine believe such experiences are hallucinations produced either by drugs, metabolic disturbances or brain malfunctions. Nevertheless, the stories they tell are so real to them and so consistent that the medical community now finds them difficult to ignore, Dr. Greyson wrote in a section on near-death incidents in Encyclopaedia Britannica.