Abstract
The term “near-death experiences,” in the sense in which it is used today, was introduced by the American physician Raymond Moody in the mid-1970s. Moody offered a standard description, a synthesis that combined all those elements that he could identify in a significant number of personal reports. Several elements of Moody’s description, such as movement through darkness or a tunnel, an encounter with deceased loved ones and other entities, or visions of light, played a prominent role in pre-modern deathbed visions. Other elements, such as the “life review” or an extracorporeal-autoscopic perception of one’s own body, seem to be of growing importance in near-death reports of the twentieth century. For almost 40 years now, near-death experiences have played a major role in legitimizing “experience-based” spiritual worldviews. Though forming a considerable part of those experiences, the life review experience has usually not had the same prevalence as, for example, out-of-body experiences, the tunnel experience, the “(being of) light,” or meeting with the deceased. Nevertheless, several scholars have integrated it in their framework of near-death experiences as supernatural postmortem revelations. This chapter proposes to analyze the life review feature with a hermeneutics of wake-up dreams, which will allow us to navigate carefully between the Scylla of reductionism, ignoring the existential meaning of these experiences, and the Charybdis of esotericism, ignoring the structure of human consciousness.
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come ….
—William Shakespeare, Hamlet (III.1)
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Notes
- 1.
The use of the concept “near-death experience” presupposes some kind of coherent “experience,” which is, actually, a problematic assumption. More accurately, we should speak of “near-death reports.” I will, however, stick to the term “near-death experience” due to convention. I would like to thank Andrea Rota, Birk Engmann, and Janina Hofer for helpful comments.
- 2.
The life review has been regarded as an “essential” element, despite the fact that its prevalence in terms of statistics seems to vary. Sabom, for example, conveys that in his study only around 3% reported a life review (1982, p. 74).
- 3.
A very valuable summary of this discussion, which was unfortunately neglected in near-death research, can be found in Le Maléfan (1995).
- 4.
“In response to the threat of death, the endangered personality appeared to seek the safety of the timeless moment. There death ceased to exist as the person immersed himself in his experience. For that purpose, past experiences of a relatively timeless quality were restored to consciousness, especially blissful ones. Such moments were drawn largely from early childhood, when life was experienced with greatest intensity, and when time had only begun to impose its dictates” (Noyes and Kletti 1981, p. 192).
- 5.
“Could it be that the casting of the NDE into such a narrative form serves a function within the dying process itself, either by increasing the very possibility of survival or by securing some other crucial objective? As we have noted, above, […] it seems that in order to live we must render intelligible the actions and intentions—friendly or hostile—of others. This, as we have also seen, is accomplished through a narrative ordering of the events of our lives. But what of those apparently private episodes near-death, where the only companion (or adversary) is death itself? Could a narrative ordering of experience have some survival value here […]?” (Fox 2003, p. 194).
- 6.
Figures given are: series I (63 accounts from literature): “sudden”: 84%, “gradual”: 16%; series II (54 persons submitting their reports to the researchers, informed by media reports on the project): “sudden”/“gradual”: 50%.
- 7.
A more detailed outline of my interpretation of wake-up dreams can be found in Schlieter (1998).
- 8.
An interesting example can be read in Baker (2003, pp. 42–43): “I have a general theory about bad dreams which I think is revolutionary. My theory is that they are most often simply the result of the body’s need to wake up the mind using the only tools it has available, most often in order to pee. The mind is unconscious, in a near coma […]. The body is getting insistent calls […], passing it up to the low-brain, and the low-brain is putting in calls to the high-brain, but the high-brain’s phone is unplugged because it is asleep. What is the low-brain to do? It has three options: laughter, arousal, or fear. All three will elevate the heart rate, but laughter and arousal are, especially if the high-brain really wants to keep sleeping for a last ten or fifteen minutes, less dependable. Fear it must be, then. The low-brain looks on the monitor at the images that float by in an unstoppable stream […]. He seizes one at random—it happens to be of a small faun-colored pig in the yard—and he injects a special fear-chemical into it and lets it go, and suddenly it is a frightening dark-purple pig with murderous eyes.”
- 9.
For reasons we will not be able to explore here, Freud acknowledges another “institution” with the same working scheme, an internal mechanism of the “dreaming consciousness.” He calls it an “institution with regard to representation” (Rücksichtnahme auf Darstellbarkeit). Simply speaking, the dreamer will follow in his dreams a certain (prescribed) scheme. If Freud did not assume the existence of an “objective” schema in dreams (symbols, chiffres, signs, and images), he could not claim the psychoanalytical method of interpretation (and therapy) to be viable and valid. Psychoanalysis, however, has been confronted with methodological doubts concerning its validity right from its beginnings.
- 10.
Kant’s remark concerning a “second world” is not applicable in the case of wake-up-dreams, because the latter—and this is part of their definition—finally end with a revulsion and sudden “awakening.” Moreover, as the dream is instantly seen as induced by an external stimulus, the dreamt narrative will turn up as an invention. This wake-up situation perfectly fits as metaphor for the paradigm of one philosophical goal, namely, “enlightenment” and the “destruction of illusions.” Indeed, “to wake up from sleep/to wake up from dreaming” (in some languages, the same word designates “sleep” and “dream,” cf. Latin somnus/somnium, Spanish sueño, Sanskrit svapna) is a famous metaphor for the recovering of consciousness, or even the gain of a “higher consciousness.” One may point to the epithet “Buddha,” which means literally “Awakened One” (p.p. of Sanskrit budh): clearly a metaphor of “higher awareness” that identifies ordinary, wake consciousness and its contents as a “secondary” dream.
- 11.
Neuroscientists Detlef Linke and Martin Kurthen offer an explanation of this phenomenon by means of the “functional asymmetry” of the left and right hemispheres of the brain. In their view, time reversal in dreams is reduced to a specific inter-hemispherical communication disability. See Linke and Kurthen (1988, pp. 8–9).
- 12.
I want to thank Prof. Jason W. Brown, New York, for an instructive conversation concerning these aspects.
- 13.
We seem to approach the ambiguities of infinity here: the concepts have a borderline in common, where a clear decision is impossible: “absolute” acceleration of serial time experience fuses with parallel co-presence.
- 14.
“Diese Zeitumkehrung findet immer statt, auch im Wachen” (Nietzsche 1980, vol. 11, pp. 157, 26 [35]).
- 15.
German original: Nietzsche (1980, vol. 6, p. 92).
- 16.
Compare here Ludwig Wittgenstein’s argument: “I cannot seriously suppose that I am at this moment dreaming. Someone who, dreaming, says ‘I am dreaming,’ even if he speaks audibly in doing so, is no more right than if he said in his dream ‘it is raining,’ while it was in fact raining. Even if his dream were actually connected with the noise of the rain” (Wittgenstein 1969, § 676).
- 17.
As mentioned above, this process will need some time, let us suppose some milliseconds. Should we conclude, then, that we are not now—and never—living in the present, but in a “presence” we have (unconsciously) motivated and allowed to be present? At least Nietzsche comes to this conclusion: “Time reversal: we believe in the real world as the cause for its effects on us, but we have transformed its real and unconsciously progressing effects to an outer world: this, what happens to stand before us, is our own work, that is now re-effecting on us. It needs time to build her [the world, J.S.]—yet this sequence is very short” (Nietzsche 1980, vol. 11, pp. 159, 26 [44]; my translation). Indeed, some psychological case studies on motion perception argue that we permanently live in some kind of “subjective delay”—e.g., the projection of single pictures in a film that create the illusion of motion: it seems to be we that have filled in the movement a posteriori, which can only happen smoothly if the experienced time is delayed; cf. Dennett (1991, pp. 120–121), Goodman (1978), Kohlers (1972), Wertheimer (1912).
- 18.
- 19.
Cf. van Lommel (2006, p. 141): “Monitoring of the electrical activity of the cortex (EEG) has shown that the first ischemic changes in the EEG are detected an average of 6.5 s from the onset of circulatory arrest, and with prolongation of the cerebral ischemia always progression to isoelectricity occurs within 10–20 (mean 15) seconds” (with references).
- 20.
My translation. Cf. Splittgerber (1866, pp. 337–338): “[J]ene Visionen schildern uns das Jenseits und die erhebenden oder erschütternden Vorgänge desselben im Wesentlichen unter denselben Bildern und Symbolen, in denen sich die Seher dieselben wachend vorzustellen pflegten, also mit anderen Worten: genau nach dem religiösen Standpunkt, welchen sie im gewöhnlichen Leben einnahmen; ja selbst die spezifisch-confessionellen Unterscheide ihrer religiösen Denkweise machen sich in ihren Schilderungen des Himmels oder der Hölle unverkennbar geltend.” We owe Birk Engmann the rediscovery of Splittgerber’s remarkable thoughts—cf. Engmann (2014, pp. 44–45).
- 21.
- 22.
The blissful quality has been reported in the earliest sources, cf. the cases of the nearly drowned, of severe illness, etc., in Splittgerber (1866, p. 317). In contrast, some more recent empirical studies also point to a considerable amount of negative emotion in NDEs: “In terms of the specific emotions experienced, 50% of the NDErs reported positive emotions, and 43% negative emotions” (Knoblauch et al. 2001, p. 23).
- 23.
One might, for example, ask how the autobiographical report of Siddhārtha Gautama (the Buddha-to-be) on his “awaking” (Sanskrit: bodhi), that consists (among other elements) in a “life review” of his former lives, relates to his experience of being “nearly dead” through radical fasting, a question that will be dealt with on another occasion.
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Schlieter, J. (2018). “Death-x-Pulse”: A Hermeneutics for the “Panoramic Life Review” in Near-Death Experiences. In: Blamberger, G., Kakar, S. (eds) Imaginations of Death and the Beyond in India and Europe. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-6707-5_10
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