“I knew that I had left my body.”

Several people have told me that they’ve enjoyed my blog entries on near-death experiences, so, for that reason and also because doing so encourages me to extract the notes that I’ve made in various books, I think I’ll continue to post them here from time to time.

Here are a couple of accounts from P.M.H. Atwater, The Big Book of Near-Death Experiences: The Ultimate Guide to What Happens When We Die (Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads Publishing Company, 2007):

In another case, a young woman died on the operating table from injuries received in a car/truck accident, but was resuscitated.  Immediately and with great animation  she described meeting her father while he was dead.  She said her father had told her why he had been born, and why and how he had died.  He then told her why she had been born, and that she must return to the land of the living for she had not yet completed all that she must do.  She was so excited about her father’s “visit” that the surgical personnel had a tough time finishing the medical procedures she needed.

A gathering of relatives in the waiting room pooh-poohed her entire story when a physician told them about it, asserting that the father was healthy and robust.  One of them offered that he had spoken that very morning with the father on the phone.  After several more unsuccessful attempts to convince the woman she was hallucinating, the doctor returned to the waiting room and insisted that the father be called.  Many phone calls later, it was discovered that the father had died exactly as he had told his daughter he did — five minutes before she died.  No one could have known this in advance, much less the daughter.  (164)

In 1968, while filming Onassis: The Richest Man in the World in Madrid, actress Jane Seymour developed a bronchial infection.  While giving her an injection of antibiotics for the infection, a nurse missed the muscle and hit an artery or vein.  “My mouth and throat closed up, and I could feel myself losing consciousness,” recalls Jane.  “The next thing I knew, I had a view from the top of my room.  I could see a man crying and screaming on the phone and then trying to resuscitate me.  I knew that I had left my body.  I actually saw a white light.  I was very calm, but I remember thinking, ‘I have children that need me.'”  The actress had gone into prophylactic shock and had to be given shots of adrenaline and cortisone.  “The doctors told me later that I nearly died,” she says, “but I think I made it clear to whoever was listening that I was not ready to give up.”  (172)