Dancing Past the Dark ~ distressing near-death experiences

You are here: Home / Archives for Near-death experiences

Near-death experiences

Could DMT cause a near-death experience?

By 7 Comments

From Italy (hi, Valentino!) comes a question that is interesting on a couple of levels:

Have you ever read the book of Rick Strassman about the endogenous DMT’s role in producing NDEs? I think that a “bad trip” induced by DMT could be a possible explanation of negative NDEs. What do you think ?

Let’s start with what is “endogenous DMT”? DMT—full name dimethyltryptamine–is a naturally-occurring (endogenous) psychedelic compound, like the neurotransmitter serotonin, secreted in minute amounts by the brain. A Journal of Near-Death Studies review of Strassman’s book, DMT: The Spirit Molecule, describes DMT: “One of the constituents of snuffs and brews used by South American shamans for thousands of years (it is especially prevalent in South American plants), DMT was first isolated in 1946, and then briefly tested by Hungarian chemist and psychiatrist Stephen Szara in the 1950s. DMT gained a reputation as being a rather frightening substance, and lay scientifically fallow for several decades.”

In the early 1990s, however, psychiatrist Rick Strassman, a professor at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine was intrigued by the possibility that endogenous DMT plays a role in triggering mystical experience, and obtained permission from the U.S. government and University review boards to study the range of psychological experiences that result from ingesting DMT. Over the next five years, Strassman administered roughly 400 doses of DMT to sixty volunteer subjects.

The experiences they reported ranged from brief episodes that were like full-fledged psychotic episodes with paranoid fantasies to sessions that seemed to be mystical experiences—bliss, ineffability, timelessness. However, it was also evident that for individuals unprepared for the possible effects of DMT, the effects could be terrifying.  Almost half of Strassman’s sample encountered otherworldly beings, described as clowns, elves, robots, insects, E.T.-style humanoids, or “entities” that defied description. They were not always friendly. One of Strassman’s subjects claimed to have been eaten alive by insectoid creatures. In part out of concern about this negative experience, Strassman discontinued his research.

As the Journal article concluded, “Moreover, as the book goes on, it becomes increasingly clear that Dr. Strassman himself had come to the “undeniable realization that DMT was not inherently therapeutic,” and that ‘Risks were real, and long-term benefits vague,” and that despite the number of near-death and mystical sessions, there was an “ineffectiveness in effecting any real change.”

In partial response to Valentino’s question, notice how similar the images are, and note also how vastly different these effects are, compared to the effects of near-death experiences.  (Cue background music.)

A few years back, I came upon a quote that throws a curious and remarkable light on Strassman’s findings.

Shinzen Young is an American Buddhist teacher of mindfulness meditation, whose monthly day-long retreats I had been attending in Vermont. Before moving to North Carolina, I ordered his six-disk series of teaching sessions, The Science of Enlightenment. In one of them, he talks about the terrifying images that may appear in advanced meditation —insectoid, grotesquely otherworldly, demonic. (My italics.) Here is what Shinzen says about the images:

[T]hey are best interpreted as part of a natural process of release from the deep archetypal levels of the mind. Such upwelling visionary material is a natural function of human consciousness and should not be cause for the slightest concern:  You are not going crazy. You are not going to get weird. You are not going to be possessed by devils, assailed by Satanists, or devoured by monsters. You are not going to be sucked into another world. However, if you have a history of prior mental illness, you should discuss these phenomena both with your meditation teacher and a therapist.

From a naturalistic perspective, those are the images reported by  Strassman’s volunteers.  Unfortunately, Strassman had not heard Shinzen Young’s analysis, for it might have saved a worthwhile research project.

Over decades the work of Carl Jung and Stanislav Grof has demonstrated that something about the human psyche functions as a gigantic warehouse with the “deep archetypal levels” Shinzen mentions. The deepest levels are what Jung called the “collective unconscious,” the repository of  humanity’s symbols and icons and most moving images (and sometimes the most horrifying). But why? How? What do they mean? This blog exists because of questions like those. I hope we find answers as time goes on.

Does this mean that NDEs are only drug responses? No! The point is that DMT, like being close to death, and LSD, and deep prayer and meditation, and hyperventilation, and…and…and…can in some instances give access to those deep, shared archetypal levels of consciousness. A DMT experience is not exactly an NDE, as indicated by their effects; but they share images.

For starters, it seems quite enough that we all join hands and circle ’round—near-death experiencers, pray-ers and meditators, DMT and LSD experiencers, holotropic breathers—and see that we’re on a common dance floor, sharing the same basement storage, and hauling mutually-held images up to the light of ordinary day. It’s quite enough for today to take in the possibility that the images in distressing visionary experiences can be understood as more than punishments from some external source, whether divine or malevolent. Some may be like potholes in the universe (a metaphor, you literalists; see my post last month); others like code, trying to tell us something. But first we have to learn the language of do-si-do. Grab your partner.

By the numbers, #4: 1%?

By Leave a Comment

Take a second look at the scatter chart in post #3 in this series. Notice how many red dots (studies with distressing near-death experiences) there are. Only three years after Moody and two years before Ken Ring’s Life at Death hit the bookstores, Maurice Rawlings had a book out about hellish NDEs. How can it be that for over two decades almost everyone has said that only 1% of NDEs are “negative”?

In 1982, pollster George Gallup, Jr. and his co-investigator William Proctor reported, “[O]ur major national poll of those who had a close brush with death showed that only one percent said that they ‘had a sense of hell or torment.’” That same paragraph continued,  “But … the picture is more complex than that …[I]t does seem clear that many of these people…were reluctant to interpret their experience in positive terms.” (p. 76)

In fact, as Gallup and Proctor make clear, the figure of those reluctant to call their NDE positive may have been as high as 28%.  But the figure that stuck in the minds of those who reported on it was the more agreeable 1%.

Why? I’ve done that myself, knowing that I didn’t believe the figure but not wanting to turn an audience away with nothing but their fears. Having nothing more authoritative to say, I would use the 1%, thinking, “One of these days we’ll know more.” That being the case, I think the primary reason for the sliding around was that saying 1% was more comfortable; it was less disturbing to hearers. Another, in my view, is that although speculation ran freely, no one knew quite what to say other than that the distressing events weren’t “real near-death experiences.”

In fact, we do know a bit more nowadays. According to a careful review of the book and journal literature from 1975-2005—the one that produced these nifty tables—in a total of 20 studies large and small, with a total of 1,910 NDEs of which 332 were distressing, the average percentage was something over the midpoint of Gallup’s 1%-28%: 17% distressing.

You will not be surprised that I keep thinking of those 332 people out there all on their own for all those years. I hope they’re online.

By the numbers, #3: Hospital studies

By 7 Comments

In the first post of this series, I posed the question, how can it be that in the hospital-based studies, where participants are closer to death, the reports of distressing NDEs are at zero percent, and percentages of pleasant NDEs are typically 20% lower than in studies of the general population? Shouldn’t all those rates be higher, or are healthy people making up stories? These are the academic researchers who know how to do studies expertly; should we trust their data more?

In hospitals, we assume, a fair number of patients are close to death. It only makes sense, then, that hospitals would be where most NDEs occur. A great many accounts bear that out, as experiencers describe their surgery-associated NDE or what they have seen of the ER during an out-of-body episode. That has certainly been the assumption on which the hospital-based studies were designed: Go where the subjects will be. For an even richer sample, if you want a population that is unequivocally near death, study NDEs of people in cardiac arrest. Makes sense.

Unfortunately, sometimes “sense” doesn’t pan out.

Consider the following scatter chart. (Please do. In near-death studies, where quantifiable data is so hard to come by, any piece of numerical information is downright thrilling.) I can hear some of you wailing with excitement; but don’t worry, the chart simply gives a useful sense of what was where, and when.

The red dots indicate reports of distressing NDEs published in reputable journals; black squares indicate studies reporting 0% distressing NDEs; the left column shows the approximate percentage of dNDE accounts in each study; and the bottom row shows the year the study was published. An “H” (which is registering here as a blob) below a black square indicates a hospital study. My apologies for the blurry translation from .jpg to WordPress image.

Black = 0% dNDE (of 331 NDE)  Red = % dNDE (148 of 1024 NDE)  ?*= May be as high as

Studies: 1975, Moody; 1978, Rawlings; 1979, Garfield; 1980, Ring; 1981, Evergreen; 1982, Gallup, Sabom; 1983, Bush; 1985, Grey; 1987, Sutherland;  1992, Atwater;  1993, Rawlings; 1995, Serdahely; 2000, Rommer; 2001, Knoblauch, Parnia, vanLommel; 2003, Greyson; 2005, Schwaninger  Note: Total of dNDEs and the average percentage given here differ from those on the previous tables because not all those studies reported percentages.

* The Gallup study reported 1% hellish NDEs but as many as 28% in some way unpleasant.

This chart is what I mean about how sometimes questions absolutely jump off a chart. Why, with all those red dots indicating the existence of distressing NDEs (332 of them in those studies), did no hospital study report finding a single one? For that matter, why is it that the reported incidence of any NDE is lower in the hospital studies than in studies of the general population?

I believe that four principal issues can explain the disparity. First, why do hospital studies report so many fewer NDEs than general studies?

1) Research design and stringency of study criteria. The general studies (non-hospitalized participants, often self-selected) have largely been designed to answer questions like, “What is an NDE?” They provided the original first-person testimony establishing the existence of near-death experience, with some attention to demographic information. The general studies have been retrospective (including NDEs both recent and decades in the past), inclusive of all reported circumstances. What they may indicate is the prevalence of NDEs; that is, how many people are likely to have an NDE over the course of their lifetime no matter what the circumstances.

By contrast, the hospital studies have observed much stricter research protocols. They are prospective studies (catching any NDEs shortly after they occur). As described by Bruce Greyson (The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences), what these studies have reported is what the medical field terms the incidence of NDEs: that is, the number of NDEs reported by a specific group (the study participants) who were admitted to the study according to their recent experience of predefined medical conditions, so that it is possible to be relatively certain that the NDEs being reported occurred in the context of that condition. In other words, how many people in a strictly defined medical condition are likely to report having an NDE.

It’s like tea strainers: Prospective studies have a finer “mesh” than general studies. The finer the mesh (the tighter the study requirements), the fewer tea leaves in the cup (and the fewer the experiences in the study).

2. The nature of the population being studied. However ardently the participants in a general study believe they were close to death—and not all do—there is usually no objective information to say their perception is correct. Many of them were basically healthy, although perhaps injured or with a temporary illness.

By contrast, in the five hospital studies here, the study participants are known to have been clinically dead and resuscitated, many of them with multiple serious health conditions. Contrary to what TV shows routinely indicate, cardiopulmonary resuscitation, or CPR, is hardly a cure-all. One recent study in the United Kingdom reported that even with optimum conditions, following CPR the immediate survival rate was 38.6%, with 24.7% surviving 24 hours later, 15.9% alive to be discharged, and 11.3% surviving at 12 months. American Heart Association figures show that of witnessed in-hospital cardiac arrests, 48% survived immediate CPR, with 22% surviving long enough to be discharged.

In short, these are desperately ill folks, many of whom die well before survey interviewers can get to them. Of those who survive to participate, well under one in five is still alive a year later, around the time the study is concluding its follow-up interviews. They have not lived long enough for a researcher to report their experiences. And this brings us to the third reason and fourth reasons I believe there are so few distressing near-death experiences in the hospital studies:

3. As has been reported consistently, it takes a long time for people who have had a distressing NDE to be ready to talk about it. But given the statistics above, by the time people with an NDE coincident with cardiac arrest might be ready to reveal their distressing experience, most of them have died.

4. Going with this disclosure issue is one more, which is the matter of trust. The most satisfactory information appears to come under four circumstances: a) when NDErs are interviewed well after the experience, b) in an informal setting, c) with no time constraints, and d) by a person they trust. Cherie Sutherland was clear in Transformed by the Light that trust is essential for the revelation of intensely personal confidences. That empathy enabled the charismatic physician Barbara Rommer to report that even in her early interviews she was already finding “accounts that were very frightening.” The hospital studies, on the other hand, a) initiated questioning shortly after the cardiac arrest, b) were in a formal clinical setting, c) in circumstances that could not afford leisurely questioning, d) by people with whom most patients had no genuine personal relationship. It is worth remembering Carol Zaleski’s quoting the comment of a hospitalized NDEr: “I’ll be damned if I share my feelings about death and dying with anyone who makes 2-minute U-turns at the foot of my bed.”

To repeat: Even the best-designed study cannot draw out an NDE, particularly a distressing one, if the person is not ready or able to talk.

Please note: These are my opinions. Clinicians or NDErs who have an alternative to any part of my explanation are invited to post their views.

And a P.S.: The dots and squares on that chart show all the reputable journal-published studies of near-death experiences over the 30 years 1975-2005. You may wonder “Why so few?” There is a short answer: No funding. We’ve come a long way, baby, but it’s an even longer way to mainstream acceptance.

By the numbers, #2

By 5 Comments

Maybe you have to be a numbers geek to be interested in the previous post, but I find the numbers fascinating. Not the numbers themselves, but what they suggest (and some seem to shout). That post was simply tables showing the incidence of distressing NDEs in studies published in responsible journals between 1975 and 2005. Questions nearly jump off the pages. For instance:

1. The early attention. Where were the distressing experiences in the early reports of near-death experience? Were the major researchers hiding something? Did the distressing NDEs only start later?

2. Hospital studies. How can it be that in the hospital-based studies, where participants are closer to death, the reports are of zero dNDEs and percentages of pleasant NDEs are typically 20% lower than in studies of the general population? Shouldn’t all those rates be higher, or are healthy people making up stories? These are the academic researchers who know how to do studies expertly; should we trust their data more?

3. Why that 1% rumor? With a thorough literature review showing that on average almost one in five reported NDEs has been distressing, why is it that for over two decades almost everyone has said that only 1% of NDEs are “negative”?

I’ll start with the first question now and deal with the second and third in the next two posts.

Where were distressing experiences in the early studies of near-death experience?

They were there but invisible. The reasons for the silence are relatively simple and understandable.

Researchers. Nowadays, we are pretty much used to NDEs. Although the great majority of them are still wonderful and life-shaping, and they bring comfort to millions of people who hear about them, today’s pleasure and reassurance seem pale compared to the stunning sense of hope and mystery when people were first hearing about them. Audiences and researchers alike were simply transfixed. Researchers are certainly not immune to the same hopes and anxieties as the rest of humanity, and what these researchers wanted to know about specifically were the glorious NDEs, the peaceful ones, the ones that sounded like heaven.

One answer, then, about why dNDEs were invisible comes from this: what questions did the researchers ask? Their eyes were so intently fixed on happily transformative experiences, it didn’t occur to them to ask about anything unpleasant; and if it did occur to them to wonder, it seemed they didn’t really want to know enough to add those inquiries. This can be considered humanly understandable or, less kindly, as researcher bias.

Further, it was still so early in the NDE research game, interviewers weren’t quite certain how far it was all right to probe. As many of the experiencers being  interviewed were in fragile health, no responsible investigator wanted to go in like a SWAT team, asking challenging questions that might be harmful. What if  tough questions precipitated another experience and this time the person actually died?

Experiencers themselves. In the years we’re talking about, roughly 1975 to 1982, NDEs were still considered “iffy” in terms of mental health. For psychotherapists and physicians, one big question was whether these were psychotic events. Experiencers often contacted the IANDS office anonymously, afraid of being too self-revealing. No matter what the method of communication, an experiencer’s most common opening statement was, “I hope you won’t think I’m crazy, but…”

The days of wide-open websites were far in the future; reporting an NDE was considered so intensely private that in setting up the first NDE account archive, IANDS promised three different levels of security to safeguard contributor confidentiality. And all these cautions were about the pleasurable experiences! If blissful experiences were considered so hush-hush, imagine the secrecy and anxiety, not to mention the shame, around a frightening experience!

Even today, put yourself in the experiencer’s place: Knowing what people speculate and wonder about dNDEs, would you want to go public with a terrifying near-death account? The reluctance of experiencers to describe their dNDEs is why, when psychiatrist Bruce Greyson and I began pulling together experience accounts for the first study of distressing NDEs, it took ten years to collect the 50 narratives that made up our study sample. Even the best -designed study will not bring out experience accounts until people are ready to talk about them.

The audience and media. In that first decade, the Big Four of researchers were Raymond Moody, Kenneth Ring, Michael Sabom, and George Gallup. Their books dominated the scene. Maurice Rawlings did well in conservative Christian circles with his books about hell, but they did not hit the mainstream as the others did. And the media, riding high on stories of blissful NDEs, were in no hurry to stop the torrent. The few other mentions of difficult NDEs were in journal articles, not books, and never claimed much in the way of public attention.

Overall, the result is what we have seen: mystery and invisibility surrounding distressing near-death experiences.

Next time: The hospital studies.

NDEs = dreaming?

By 8 Comments

Over at the Aciste website, a commenter has observed, “It seems to me a distressing NDE could be the same as the nightmares we have when we dream. The soul  projecting its fears.”

This points to one of the basic questions about NDEs in general, and their relationship to dreams. If a distressing NDE could be the same as a nightmare, then by the same token one could say—as many people have–that a pleasant NDE is the same as a happy dream, perhaps the soul’s projecting its hopes.

The response in either case is that the commonality between dream and NDE is limited: both occur during a period of unconsciousness, and both involve imaginal content, that is, content that is not consciously made up, deliberately imagined. That’s pretty much where the similarity stops, for whereas dreaming is a routine and necessary part of sleep for everyone, most NDEs and similar episodes are once-in-a-lifetime events that occur to a minority of people. Whereas the content of dreams is idiosyncratic and personal, NDEs tend to follow a loose pattern of similar elements–out-of-body experience, movement through space, intense emotional quality, and so on. Further, even strongly felt dreams miss the intensity factor of NDEs by several magnitudes; they rarely remain in memory the way NDEs do, typically for a lifetime, and they are not marked by transcendent content. More needs to be said about the dream/NDE imaginal connection, but that must wait for a later post.

Another factor, more difficult to address, is the extent, if any, to which people’s imaginal life (whether dreaming or NDE-like) is a projection of their ordinary mode of functioning in daily life. There is a widespread assumption that a person who has a distressing NDE must either have a guilt-and-fear-ridden past or operate from a state of persisting negativity, controlled by fears and anxieties which are then reflected by the NDE.  However, distressing NDEs do not necessarily typify the general psychological or emotional modality of the individuals reporting the experience, many of whom have found great difficulty in reconciling the circumstances of their lives, beliefs, and behaviors with the content of their NDE.

Similarly, on the other side of the NDE world, it is clear from thousands of detailed experience accounts that people who have reported extremely pleasant NDEs had often not been functioning from a positive emotional base that would be expected to attract affirming experiences. Many glorious NDEs have been reported after suicide attempts and/or by individuals who say (supported by family members) that they were angry, repressed, fearful or hostile individuals whose lives were subsequently transformed by the event. The element of randomness in NDE types has not even begun to be studied.

In short, although every type of human experience is felt and interpreted through the filters of an individual’s existing conceptual framework, temperament, and memories, it seems clear that the explanation for any NDE type of event will be a good deal more complex than projection or simple dreaming–as if any dreaming were simple!

 

Disturbing near-death experience–a pothole?

By 2 Comments

My first experience with debilitating arthritis came while I was still working as a technical writer for a software company in Connecticut. I’d finished a document, sent it to the distant printer, and stepped out of my cubicle to go retrieve it. Maybe two steps into the corridor, and WHAM! Excruciating pain, and my left knee buckled, unable to support weight. So there I stood, hanging onto the top of the cubicle corridor wall, wondering how to get back to a chair and how long it might be possible to seem casual out there with my white-knuckled fingers clamped over the top of someone else’s cube, unable to move.

An orthopedist later explained what had happened: “You hit a pothole in the cartilage.”

This is a metaphor with many uses, applicable also to distressing NDEs and their relatives. It’s certainly more helpful than the conventional judgments about deservingness or attraction. The cosmos is a violent place as well as tranquil, terrible darkness alongside glorious light. Neither dark nor light is the whole.

Why shouldn’t the spiritual road have potholes? They’re not forever.