Since the horror of the slaughter in a Connecticut elementary school, it has been difficult to know what to say about almost anything. Unreality is not limited to the so-called supernatural or paranormal, and hell walked into that school as surely as it is said to exist in any terrible afterlife.
What can one say? What could I say? At last it dawned on me that the voices which might be helpful are those of children about their near-death experiences.
Back in the olden days, when NDEs were still relatively fresh as a phenomenon, there was a certain amount of disbelief that children could have such an experience. For sure, there was curiosity about the possibility. At the time, because I spent my days in the IANDS office and saw the mail and processed entries into the archives, it was a simple matter to see what could be found. The result, which took about six months of research and correspondence, was an article in one of the early volumes of what would become the Journal of Near-Death Studies.
So far as I know, none of the experiences of the children in that study originated from being shot. At the same time, I have heard more than a few accounts of NDEs from teens and adults associated with criminal assault, combat, sexual attack, physical abuse, and other types of violence. They sound the same as NDEs related to ordinary illness and misadventure. And all of them sound the same as reports of deathbed visions.
This post, then, offers a link to a slightly edited version of that original article about how children experience being close to death or, in some instances, believing themselves on the other side.
The Near-Death Experience in Children