Almost seven years ago, I suffered what doctors call "a widow maker." It's a heart attack that almost always ends up killing the patient.
I don't remember much. I was in and out of consciousness. I barely knew what was happening. I was taken to the Prompt Care facility less than five minutes from my house.
Fortunately, modern medical science was able to stabilize me. They put a mask over my face that forced air into my lungs with enormous pressure. My heart stopped twice, which resulted in me being shocked to get the heart back into rhythm.
Eventually, I was helicoptered to one of the finest cardiac facilities in the Midwest. I was unconscious for four days. I was told I had other cardiac "events" that nearly killed me.
After I woke up, I thought I was on the mend. They moved me from the intensive care cardiac unit to a critical care unit. That's where I suffered my second heart attack. Once again, they had to resuscitate me (my ribs hurt for weeks from the doctors massaging my heart).
My first heart attack, I had no clue that I was anywhere near death. I experienced no near-death experiences (NDEs), no dreams, no out-of-body experience, no meeting dead relatives, nothing.
I don't even remember my second heart attack. One minute, the nurse said he was going to get me a Tylenol for my headache, the next thing I remember is waking up again in the ICU.
This time, I remembered something.
I was lying on a hospital bed, and nurses were changing sheets on other beds or something. It's very fuzzy, but I'm sure I asked the doctor, "Am I going to die?" The doctor, looking very annoyed, scowled at me and snapped, "Of course not."
Was that an NDE?
"Some common traits of NDEs have emerged over nearly 50 years of research: intense emotions of peace and joy, out-of-body experiences (OBEs), encounters with dead relatives, altered perceptions of time, and elevated lucidity, among others," writes Darren Orf in Popular Mechanics.
In truth, I experienced none of those. However, some scientists are delving into what happens after an NDE, specifically, the dreams of those who experience an NDE
Nicole Lindsay of Massey University in New Zealand has been studying NDEs since 2018, and in two new studies, Lindsay and her team delve deep into the profound effects NDEs can have on individuals throughout their lives, particularly in the realm of dreaming. In the first study, published in journal Dreaming, the researchers interviewed 138 people who’ve experienced an NDE, 45 people who came close to death but didn’t experience an NDE, and 129 people who’ve experienced neither. Using the Mannheim Dream Questionnaire, or MADRE, a well-known psychological tool used to assess aspects of dreams such as recall, emotional intensity, and lucidity, Lindsay’s team discovered that people who experienced NDEs have greater dream recall and intensity and, interestingly, more positive dreams compared to the non-NDE groups.
“I have always been interested in unusual states of consciousness from a very young age, having experienced a number of exceptional or extended conscious states myself,” Lindsay, lead author of the study, told the website PsyPost. “Near-death experiences (NDEs) provide insight into how consciousness operates under extreme conditions, including, potentially, in the absence of a functioning physical body.”
Will NDEs give us insight into some of the mysteries of consciousness? The "subjective consciousness," or the feeling of being you, is still a mystery, and Lindsay thinks that studying NDEs will help answer some of the more penetrating questions about the nature of consciousness.
Lindsay and her colleagues reveal details of how individuals’ dreams changed drastically following an NDE. In one example, a participant named Basil said he could confidently recall one dream every week or two, but after his near-death experience, that recall became a nightly occurrence. Others reported that dreams become intensely vivid after an NDE and that the separation between dreaming and waking was much more ambiguous than it was before.
The article goes one to explore reports of extreme incidences of lucid dreaming, OBEs, past-life dreams, and even in some cases, precognition.
“The changes described by participants reflected broader shifts in personal identity, spirituality, and perceptions of reality—a process seemingly initiated by the NDE itself and then maintained and enhanced through dream states,” the authors write. “Dreams, therefore, may potentially serve as a continuation or extension of the state of consciousness accessed during the NDE.”
Unfortunately, the researchers who authored these studies were unable to pinpoint the exact "mechanism" that led to the altered states of consciousness described by survivors of NDEs. In that sense, the research only added to the mystery of the human mind and the unknown depths from which our thoughts are born.
