Surviving Death (2021) s01e01 Episode Script
Near-Death Experience
1
[woman 1] At the moment of death.
are we actually just dead
or is something else going on?
[man 1] There's no one on the planet
who doesn't have a vested interest
in the question,
does life go on after death?
[man 2] Whatever this consciousness is
that we have in this life
it was also there in another life before.
[woman 2] He said, "Mom,
I think I need to tell you somethin'.
I think I used to be somebody else."
[woman 3] How many people here
have had a near-death experience?
Lotta dead people here today. Welcome.
We had to rethink everything
that we believed about death and dying.
[woman 4] There have
always been ghosts in history.
We continue to report them and see them.
To the spirits of the mansion,
help us connect more deeply to your world.
Is there a child on the other side
connected to you?
Yes.
[man 3] There are things
that science can't test.
It doesn't mean they don't happen.
Literally, I can feel him and I know
that he is there with me right now.
[woman 5] I could feel my spirit
sort of peeling away from my body.
How good would it be
to know there is life after death?
["Spirit in the Sky"
by Norman Greenbaum playing]
[woman] As a physician, I know that
most people don't think about death really
until they're forced to.
But 20 years ago,
I was not only physically dead,
I had been dead for a while.
And that experience radically changed
everything about what I am and who I am.
In 1999,
I arranged to go to Chile and kayak.
And I was looking forward
to this section of river
that's well known for its waterfalls.
[water rushing]
[waves crashing]
We put on the river and we went over
the first couple of drops.
This river has a very high flow.
So we decided to run this smaller part
of the first major waterfall.
And so I pulled out in the current.
There was another kayaker
who had sort of bobbled her way past.
And her boat was lodged sideways
at the entrance.
So I was forced over
to the main part of the waterfall.
[laughing] I mean, I--
I knew it was not gonna be good!
[water sloshing]
My boat became pinned and I was completely
submerged under ten feet of water.
I was not breathing.
My torso was absolutely plastered
to the front deck of the boat.
I could feel my bones breaking.
I thought I should be screaming,
but I wasn't.
I felt uh, no pain, no fear, no panic.
I felt more alive than I've ever felt.
I could feel my spirit
sort of peeling away from my body,
and my spirit was then released
up to the heavens.
[birds chirping]
I was immediately greeted
by a group of somethings.
I don't know what to call them.
People, spirits, beings.
I didn't recognize any of them.
But they had been important
in my life story somehow.
Like a grandparent
who died before I was born.
They were so overjoyed to welcome me
and greet me and love me.
These beings started taking me
down this pathway.
[heart pulsating]
The pathway was very thickly covered
with hundreds of thousands of flowers,
and the aromas of flowers.
It was exploding
with every color of the universe.
[thunder crashing]
There was an absolute shift
of time and dimension.
I experienced all of eternity
in every second,
and every second
expanded into all of eternity.
The pathway went
to this great domed structure.
I believe I was in heaven.
God's world, whatever you wanna call it.
I had an overwhelming sense of being home.
At the same time,
I could look back at the river,
where my body
was still submerged under water.
[man yells] You okay?
[woman] The group of kayakers
kept trying to get to me,
but they were never able to do it.
And after maybe 15 minutes,
they had given up rescue.
They had really shifted over
into a body recovery mode.
One of the guys saw my life jacket
pop up downstream
and thought that maybe my husband
would want it.
As he got that,
he felt my body hit his leg.
So he reached underwater
and was able to grab my wrist.
My body was bloated and purple
and I had fixed eyes.
There's absolutely no doubt
in my own mind that I was physically dead.
But I watched
from the entrance to the domed structure
as they started CPR,
and I could still hear them.
One of the guys kept calling to me
to come back and take a breath.
You know, "Please come back.
I know you're still here."
I had been without oxygen for 30 minutes,
and the statistical likelihood
of my survival should have been zero.
I did not want to go back down to my body.
I had a very, very physical sensation
of being held and comforted
and reassured that everything was fine.
[thunder crashing]
But the beings told me
that it wasn't my time,
that I had more work to do on Earth,
and that I had to go back to my body.
When I opened my eyes,
the guys that resuscitated me
were stunned.
I was in terrible shape.
[laughs] I mean, I had just drowned.
But I also had, uh
multiple broken bones
and torn ligaments in my legs.
And I was
on the side of a river
in the middle of nowhere.
The guys who resuscitated me
put my body on top of a boat
and then began
to try to get me up the hillside.
We emerged onto a dirt road.
They thought maybe someone would run
and get a tractor, a horse or something.
But when we emerged onto the dirt road,
exactly there was an ambulance, which
in 1999, in southern Chile,
didn't exist. [laughs]
It was inexplicable.
It took a number of hours,
but my friends got me to the hospital.
My husband was actually told that
I probably would not survive the night.
But I did.
I was in the hospital
for more than a month.
I had several operations.
Then many, many months of rehab
before I could walk again.
And statistically, I had zero likelihood
of surviving
without significant brain damage.
But I never actually had any brain damage.
[laughing] My kids might say
something differently, but
I
made a complete recovery.
As a physician,
I'm not really in a crowd of people
who want to talk about things
like near death experiences.
People in science often think you can't
possibly believe in anything supernatural.
When I went off to medical school,
I would have defined death as
death, meaning physical death.
But my near-death experience,
and then what happened
to my son ten years later,
changed my definition of death
significantly.
I don't believe that
we know everything. [laughs]
[somber music playing]
[man] A near death experience,
sometimes called an NDE,
is a profound experience
that many people have
when they come close to death.
Probably between ten and 20% of people
whose hearts actually stop
will report
these dramatic near-death experiences.
Here at the Division
of Perceptual Studies,
we study the possibility
that something about humans
may survive bodily death.
[man 2] The general mainstream,
materialist view of reality
is that physical matter is all there is.
So when the physical brain stops working,
then the consciousness ends.
So the idea that there might be
this consciousness piece
that could continue on
conflicts with a pretty basic principle.
But the question of what happens
after we die
is something that has intrigued humans
for as long as we've been around.
[Bruce] We've been doing this research
for almost 50 years now.
We study mediums,
people who think they can communicate
with the deceased.
We've studied deathbed visions
that happen to people as they die.
We've studied reincarnation
and a variety of other
spontaneously occurring experiences
on the border between life and death,
such as near-death experiences.
-[film ticking]
-[wind whistling]
If you look back in history,
there have been
what we now call near death experiences
since prehistoric times.
[somber music playing]
But the first collection
of near-death experiences
was put together in 1892 by Albert Heim,
a geologist in Switzerland.
While climbing in the Alps,
he had fallen
and had a beautiful experience
as he was falling down the mountain.
He described time expanding
as he went faster and faster.
And he was so struck by this experience
that he started asking
other mountain climbers,
and quickly collected
30 other cases like his
of people who had falls from great heights
who had blissful experiences.
And then in the 1960s and '70s,
resuscitation medicine really got started.
[man] External chest compression
is the best rescue technique
for artificial circulation.
[Bruce] Which means we were
bringing people back
from the brink of death
in larger and larger numbers.
Many people came back
and reported these blissful experiences
in which they left their bodies
and traveled to some other realm.
[wind whistling]
Patients say they become aware
of what's described as a tunnel
a passageway, a portal.
And they go into this tunnel
and when they come out,
they come out into a very brilliant,
warm, loving and accepting light.
[Bruce] In 1975, Raymond Moody
wrote his book Life After Life,
which caused many people, myself included,
to take near death experiences
more seriously.
[man] When Raymond Moody's book came out,
I thought that near death experiences
were rubbish.
Had to be.
And they occurred in the United States,
in California and that's the end of it.
Would it ever cross to England?
No. We're far too sensible
to have experiences like this.
But I'm a neuropsychiatrist,
and, one day,
this guy walked into my consulting room.
He'd just had a cardiac catheter go wrong,
left his body,
watched the resuscitation process,
and had a full near-death experience.
And so there I was, confronted.
Did I believe or did I not?
Well, I thought that
before I could draw any conclusions,
that I ought to study them.
So I've been studying
near death experiences for about 40 years.
[heart pulsating]
The science we have,
which is a materialistic science,
says it's all brain.
All brain.
So when the brain stops functioning,
you can't be conscious.
But during a near death experience,
you get these very wide expansions
of consciousness,
even when the brain has ceased
to function.
So it can't be all brain.
[Bruce] Near death experiences are
subjective experiences
that are very difficult
to confirm objectively.
And that raises questions
in the minds of many scientists.
Some of the critics of this research
complain that this is just anecdotes.
Well, actually,
if you look at the history of science,
all science starts
as collecting anecdotes,
and then finding patterns
among those different stories.
And there are millions
of these experiences
being reported across the globe.
[woman 1] I was experiencing a really bad
asthma attack in my apartment.
[man] I was blown up by a bomb
in the Vietnam War
and then shot
through the arm, chest and neck.
[woman 2] I was hit broadside by a woman
who was texting while she was driving.
[man 2] I hit my head, broke my neck,
injured my spinal cord
and was paralyzed right away.
[Bruce] I've been doing this work
for four decades now,
and what I've found is that,
no matter how you come close to death
there are very consistent patterns
in the experience itself
and in how it affects people.
For example,
people all over the world will report
that their sense of time was distorted.
For me, there was no sense of time.
Moments or months or millennia.
I don't know.
I had no idea how fast it was going,
but it was light speed.
[Bruce] They also describe
this warm, loving being of light.
A sense of getting information
from some really high-frequency teachers.
Very embracing and warm
and-- and caressing.
A warm energy hug
to the brain.
[Bruce] And then there are things
that are paranormal or otherworldly.
Like your ordinary senses
becoming much more vivid.
All this grand music.
Jacques Cousteau. [laughs]
Being under the water and all these fish.
I started dissolving, or, like that drop
into the ocean, just disappearing.
If I could reach out and touch a leaf
I became an aspect of that leaf.
I was a tiny, tiny light,
a little tiny speck of light,
and then I'd become a great, big light.
[Bruce] You'll see the same phenomena
from all different cultures.
And they often come back feeling
that it profoundly changed them.
[woman 3] I see the beauty
in everything now.
[woman 4] A hundred percent turnaround
from being a hardcore, angry atheist.
[woman 2] I no longer have
any kind of a fear of death.
[Bruce] What is going on here
that has such power to change
a person's life in a fraction of a second?
[car horn honking]
[wind whistling]
[woman 1] Hi, everybody.
-[woman 2] Hi.
-[group] Hey.
This is the Seattle International
Association for Near-Death Studies.
How many people here, by show of hands,
have had a near death experience?
A lot of dead people here today.
Welcome! [laughs]
Near death experiences
are not just butterflies and flowers
and God and light and heaven.
You will find that you have difficulties
with materialism.
Maybe with employment.
Probably with your marriage,
if you're married.
Because the changes are so profound.
So I began counseling people
with near death experiences.
And I have the advantage
of having had a near death experience,
so I can honestly say,
"I know how you feel."
Mmm.
-I'm good.
-Yeah?
-Have a seat.
-Thank you.
[woman]
I didn't just go into cardiac arrest.
My electrolytes
flip-flopped.
I was basically poisoned.
And I was gone.
When I came back,
it pulled me away from a lot of people.
It's hard to even talk to my husband
because I feel that
somebody is going to bring a straitjacket
and throw away the key.
Because what I used to know
is not what I know now.
And I'm havin' a very hard time with it.
Yeah. Feeling crazy I'm validating you.
is part of the adjustment,
because everything gets so mixed up.
You died.
-[laughs]
-You had an experience.
You came back and now you have to live
in the same world,
but with a completely different
point of view.
And it's so hard when everybody else's
point of view hasn't changed.
Seattle IANDS is
a place of comfort and hope,
validation and support,
and I hope attending here
calms your heart and your emotions
and reminds you
that this is a very temporary situation.
Life.
People attend Seattle IANDS
because they've had
a near death experience.
People come because they're grieving
and want to hear that we go on.
And then people come
just to hear it's real,
it really happened,
and has happened to millions of people.
My experience started
incredibly enough, on a Wednesday evening.
And it was Thanksgiving
coming up the next day.
And we were running some electrical lines
on some poles
and I was up on a bucket truck.
We kind of said,
"We could save a couple of hours
if I stay up on the bucket
and you just maneuver the truck
from space to space."
[murmuring]
I hit the side of the bucket
and I broke all my ribs on my right side.
I wound up in n emergency room.
They gave me a medication for pain
and it had some kind
of an anti-inflammatory component.
Turns out I'm allergic to it.
So, ultimately, my lungs shut down,
I stopped breathing and my heart stopped.
[water rushing]
There was a tunnel, but not the way
that it's typically described.
I kind of fell into it.
And what I saw was just color
wrapped all around me, so that
I was completely integrated into it.
And I could hear this color talking to me.
Millions of voices.
-"Sssss." This chatter.
-[whispering voices]
Then I look down and I see the ocean.
And then I notice a man in the water.
He's about knee deep.
Then he turns around suddenly.
And, uh
the biggest surprise of my death,
my new life
was that it was my father.
[sniffles]
Me and my dad had
a very difficult relationship in life.
We couldn't even hug.
So when he died, I felt totally bitter
and really regretful of the fact
that we never were able to say
we love each other or we care.
So I'm lookin' at him here in this space,
and I'm saying, "Oh, my gosh.
This is my opportunity.
My second chance
to make peace with my dad."
[sobbing]
Something that I could never do in life.
So
we hugged.
[sniffles]
[exhales]
[crying] And we said we loved each other.
We loved each other.
That has changed my life in so many ways.
Just knowing that he did care.
That he did
love me.
He looked at me when he embraced me.
And he let go and he just looked at me.
He said, "Jose. You need to go back."
I'm lookin' at him, like,
"What? Are you kidding me?
[laughter]
I like it here. This is great.
I don't wanna go back."
And he said to me,
"No, you gotta go back."
Whilst I didn't want to, uh
we came to, kind of,
sort of an agreement, in a way.
We-- we agreed that, when my time came,
he would come get me and I said
"Well, that sounds like
a pretty good deal. Let me go with that."
And-- and I transitioned back.
I felt this sense of pull
and I wound up back in my body.
When I met my dad on the other side
I realized that
sometimes, we may not be able
to say something here
but
we're gonna be able
to say it somewhere else.
By having this opportunity
it truly healed my spirit.
Before, I just was moving through life.
I wasn't living.
-I was not alive.
-[applause]
Thank you.
[Bruce] There have been a number
of medical explanations
that have been proposed to explain
what causes near-death experiences.
I'm all in favor of that. Being a doctor,
I wanna understand
what causes these things.
Unfortunately, I don't think
any of the explanations
we've come up with so far
help us very much
in trying to understand things.
Some have said drugs given to people
as they're approaching death
may cause near death experiences.
And what we find is that
the fewer drugs people are given
the more likely they are
to report a near death experience.
That the drugs tend to inhibit
the near-death experience,
rather than causing it.
People also suggest
lack of oxygen to the brain.
And that's appealing, because no matter
how you come close to death,
lack of oxygen to the brain
is the common factor.
However, we know,
from decades of research,
what happens when you get lack of oxygen.
People become frightened,
become belligerent,
become terrified
of what's happening to them.
Very much unlike the calm, consistent,
almost blissful experience
of a near death experience.
I'm frequently challenged
by people who say,
"Okay, he's had a cardiac arrest.
There's a little bit of brain
which is working,
which you guys have all missed."
But this says that they don't really
understand what consciousness is.
You cannot maintain consciousness
unless you have a highly-organized brain.
Believe you me,
when the brain loses its oxygen,
-it doesn't organize itself.
-[rhythmic bleeping]
[Bruce] When the heart stops,
-in 20 seconds or so
-[continuous bleep]
you get flatlining,
which means no brain activity.
And yet people have near death experiences
when they've been, quote,
"flatlined" for longer than that.
One of the most widely publicized cases
was that of Pam Reynolds,
who had an aneurysm,
which is a ballooning of a blood vessel
at the base of her brain.
And it was so large that, if it burst,
it would have killed her instantly.
The most that they could do for me
was try
a surgical process
which involved the stopping of the heart,
the lowering of the bodily temperature,
the emptying of the blood from the body,
thereby shrinking the aneurysm.
[Bruce] She was without any blood
going to her brain for about an hour.
[continuous bleep]
The EEG, or the brainwave,
goes totally flat.
There is no brain activity at all.
Which presumably means there's
no brain function at all during that time.
And yet, she reported
a blissful near-death experience
in which she saw and heard things
going on in the operating room
that she couldn't possibly
have seen or heard.
[Pam] My vantage point was rather like
sitting on the shoulder of the surgeon.
And I was free to move around at will.
While I knew what they were doing,
they didn't know what I was doing.
They thought I was
that thing lying on the table.
[Bruce] Now, her eyes were taped shut
for the entire procedure,
and she had molded earpieces in her ears.
But she described the tools
they were using to saw through her skull,
and it was something that she hadn't seen
before or after.
[whirring]
[Pam] I saw, in Dr. Spetzler's hand,
an instrument that reminded me
suspiciously of an electric toothbrush.
There was a case very close to it,
and it had bits
that looked like the
case that my father kept
his socket wrenches in.
[Bruce] Her neurosurgeon said he can't
understand how this could possibly happen.
If somebody asked me to describe
what the Midas Rex drill, uh, looked like,
I might very well use the term,
"Like an electric toothbrush."
And describing them, uh,
as if they were a socket wrench set,
uh, I think that's very appropriate.
Her ability to describe
what went on during surgery
is inconceivable to me,
considering the state that she was in.
Pam Reynolds was clinically dead.
[continuous bleep]
This really challenges the idea
that our consciousness, our minds,
are created by the brain,
because her brain was not functioning
and yet she had
the most vivid experience of her life.
[Peter] How can people be conscious
when they're unconscious?
It's an oxymoron. It's ridiculous.
But in fact, this is what
the data seemed to prove more and more.
Well, that, of course,
is going to have some significance
for our ideas about death.
I mean, is it possible
that there is an expansion
of consciousness when we die?
[wind whistling]
[somber music playing]
[woman 1] When one survives
something so catastrophic as death
there's a gaping hole in your soul.
Inside, you feel like crumbling,
and you wonder,
"How do I make sense of it?"
When people talk
about near death experiences,
they talk about it being so pleasant.
But it was not the case with me.
When I first met my husband, Jonathan,
we definitely wanted to have children.
We had our first, Adina.
No issues, no complications.
Delivered her
and back at work eight days later.
The second one was
after seven rounds of IVF.
And everything went swimmingly
until the 20-week ultrasound.
[heart pulsating rapidly]
They do the scan and they say,
"Oh. You have a placenta previa."
Jonathan was with me and I said,
"I don't know what this is,
but I've got a bad feeling about it."
And then I open the computer
and I start Googling.
Placenta previa can turn into an accreta,
which is when
the placenta marries itself to the uterus.
If that happens, you could hemorrhage,
and if that happens,
you and the baby could lose your life.
I sat back, and I said
"This is going to happen to us.
The only difference
is the baby's going to survive."
[woman 2] And what did you think?
Uh, that it was stereotypical
pregnancy hysteria.
Although I didn't quite put it
in those terms.
Earlier in my life,
I trained as an air force pilot,
got my PhD in economics.
Data is core to my being.
I like to joke that I don't like
to complicate things
with words and feelings.
I'd much rather go with the data.
And we didn't have any empirical data,
so I had
the stereotypical husband's response.
But I dressed it up in science,
so that made it more sophisticated.
[Stephanie] It was so difficult
trying to communicate about feelings
and this foreboding
when I didn't have
something tangible to show.
I told Jonathan,
"I do not know what to tell you,
other than the fact that I've got
this intense feeling around this
that something bad is about to happen.
If you saw me in Starbucks and you said,
"Oh, how's the pregnancy going?"
I would literally say, "I'm going to die."
And my premonitions kept coming.
I was walking in the park.
I saw a dry fountain.
In mind's eye, the fountain was flowing
and, all of a sudden, it turned to blood.
And I felt my body hemorrhage.
I called Jonathan, said
"Meet me at the emergency room."
He's frantic about it.
Doctors examining me, and they're like,
"No, you're actually fine."
[rhythmic bleeping]
Jonathan's like,
"Okay, it's a false alarm,"
and I'm like, "No, this is a warning."
[woman] I've had other patients
who've expressed concern,
but I would say Stephanie was
the first patient
that came forward and said,
"I'm seeing things very vividly
that are scaring me to death."
I tried to acknowledge her fear,
but also my role is to keep the calm.
So I was concerned,
but I wasn't necessarily panicked.
[Stephanie] The day
that I go into labor
I was in the kitchen,
giving Adina breakfast.
-All of a sudden, blood went everywhere.
-[kettle whistling]
My nanny was here and I said,
"Let's get in the car."
She jumped in the driver's seat.
I said, "Get out. I am driving."
And she's like,
"Are you crazy? You're bleeding."
I'm like, "I've had many premonitions.
Dying in a car accident was not one."
[horn blares]
Jonathan was in New York
on one of his business trips.
[Jonathan] My wife called to say
that she was on her way to the hospital
and to get to Chicago as fast as possible.
[Stephanie] I was acutely aware
that it was the day I was gonna die.
The last thing I texted Jonathan was
"You've made me the happiest woman
in the world and
please take care of this baby."
And then they wheel me into the room
that's going to give life to Jacob
and take mine.
[rhythmic bleeping]
They put a curtain right in front
of my face and prepare me for a C-section.
-[baby cries]
-They deliver Jacob.
He's healthy, happy.
Seconds later, I flatline.
[continuous bleep]
Everything came into a 3D movie
and I could actually see
outside of my body.
My point of view was above my body
and next to my body,
and I could see everything
that was going on in the operating room.
I see the anesthesiologist by my feet.
I see which nurse jumped on my chest
to give me CPR.
In this other dimension,
spatial relations break.
-There is no ceiling. There are no walls.
-[water rushing]
Everything is just moving around
in so many different directions.
I saw my daughter in a completely
different part of the hospital
with our nanny.
I saw what my husband was wearing
when he got off the plane.
And then I see spirits everywhere.
My grandmother,
who had passed when I was ten years old.
My mother's brother also appeared.
The last thing I heard was Julie,
Dr. Levitt,
saying, "This can't be happening.
This can't be happening."
[continuous bleep]
[Julie] This was about as serious
as it gets.
Stephanie was having
an amniotic fluid embolism.
Many patients will die
from this condition,
because they bleed to death.
And I, with my hands across my chest,
with my gloves on, looked up, and I said,
under my breath,
"This cannot be happening."
She called it.
She knew that this was going to happen.
[Stephanie] After I heard Dr. Levitt,
there was just this pulling in my stomach,
and then I was back in my body.
I was clinically dead for 37 seconds.
[rhythmic bleeping]
I was in a medically-induced coma
for six days.
I had kidney failure.
I had to learn how to walk again.
I had to learn how to talk.
It took me a long time
to physically recover.
When I was clinically dead, I knew
that something extraordinary had happened.
But it ultimately had to go to the people
who were present that day to validate it.
[Julie] Stephanie and I met
to talk about what had happened that day.
I almost couldn't breathe.
There was absolutely no way
that she was aware
of who was standing to her left,
who was standing to her right,
what I said, what other people said
in the operating room.
[intense rhythmic bleeping]
It makes me
believe in more
than just what we know as art and science.
My medical mind turns more
to a spiritual place,
which I don't think
I was ever really aware of in the past.
It was a very
real lesson that day.
-[Jonathan] How old was Jacob there?
-[Stephanie] Not even a year.
-[Jonathan] Yeah.
-[Stephanie] Not even a year.
[Stephanie] All of the doctors were like,
"I don't have a medical explanation
for the near-death experience
or the premonitions."
But I look at them as a knowing.
This knowing comes from someplace.
[Jonathan] I'm not in the category
of true believer.
But I accept
that there's something else going on here,
some extra dimension of knowledge
or cognition, uh that my wife has.
So I believe-- I believe that she knew.
[woman] Stephanie.
It would have been much
um, easier to go along those three months
prior to flatlining if he had said that.
I just felt I wasn't believed
by the one person I need to believe me.
By the one person who matters.
Everybody else can call me crazy,
hormonal and stressed out and everything,
but it's the one person
that I needed to protect me.
And it was-- it was hard.
All of us who are researchers
or scientists,
and professors,
academics and the like, um,
are engaged in research
because we don't know everything.
And what this is telling me
is that there's--
Whether it's God or spirits
or some sense that we have
that is not yet identified
there is something like that
that was operating here.
-[Bruce] Sit right there.
-[Stephanie] Okay, great.
Right before flatline,
I was perpendicular.
I know people talk about, like, floating
-and being above their body.
-[Bruce] Yeah.
[Stephanie] I didn't have that.
So it's almost like
you were in both places at once.
Part of you was still in the body
-and part of you was out there.
-Yeah.
[Bruce] Most people
who share their experiences with us
do so because they're struggling
with how to understand it.
It doesn't make sense in terms of science
or their particular religious background
and they're looking for some way
to come to terms with it.
I just would like to understand
-a little bit more about the mechanics.
-Yeah.
And is there a pattern that you're seeing
in people that have had
near death experiences?
Yeah. Well, some things
that you told-- told me about
are very common, but some are not.
Frankly, the premonitions
that came before it are not common.
It's more common to have
these premonitions after the experience.
What struck me most
about Stephanie's experience
is she was having premonitions
about dying for months before it happened.
And these were not imaginations.
They were things she could not deny.
There are all these things
going on around us all the time
that we sort of block out.
It's like our brain has a filter
that filters out things that don't help us
get along in this world.
And when something
like a near death experience happens,
that opens up the filter.
The door's been opened for you.
And once it's open,
it's-- it's hard to shut it.
[Stephanie] My visions and my premonitions
have become more intense
since my near-death experience.
I believe it's a blessing.
But spiritually,
it's a challenge, because
I see things that people don't see
a lot of the time.
Most of the visions I get
are from complete strangers.
Just people who are in my line of sight.
I feel like I'm gonna have a heart attack.
But I know it's not mine.
We all have this ability
to perceive things, especially danger.
Um, we just don't take it seriously.
What do you suggest to those
who sit in this chair across from you
and explain their near-death experiences?
What do you normally advise them?
I can just tell you what I've learned
from the thousands of people who
have sat in that chair and talked to me.
And what seems to be
most comforting to them
is knowing, one, you're not alone.
Many people have had
near death experiences.
And if we can't understand it,
we can at least have faith
that there's a purpose to it.
And you don't have to be in control of it,
because, in fact,
we're not in control of it.
Something else is.
Thank you.
I used to be more easy-going
before this all happened. Um
I used to laugh more. Uh
And
I used to not take things so seriously.
Um
I-- I think Jonathan misses
that part of me.
I think I'll be asking questions
probably until the day I die.
Again.
[car horn honking]
[Jose] The experience
is very, very difficult to process.
The dying is very difficult.
A few years after my experience,
I started painting.
Had no idea. I'd never painted in my life.
Initially, it was just a desire
to reproduce what I saw
where I was in a ball of color
and these colors were all moving,
and I become the color.
That's how I wound up doing art.
Just a desire to try to create
that three-dimensional feeling with color.
But as I kept doing it more and more,
I began to realize
that it's a lot deeper than that.
It was healing.
It was healing me.
Dying is traumatic.
And it's difficult to integrate
and-- and get past that.
This world of art and color
brought a lot of peace and calm
into my life,
and it made me feel a sense of knowing.
People ask me
if the experience was real or not.
At the end of the day,
I can't prove to you.
I can only share my experience with you.
[birds chirping]
[Mary] I had more motivation
than any other person on this planet
to disprove my account.
Because during my near-death experience,
when I was with these beings
they told me about the coming
and unexpected death
of my oldest son, Willie,
who was only nine years old
at the time of my accident.
I knew that if I could come up
with any other plausible explanation,
that I would be able to discount
everything I'd been told.
I wasn't given details in terms
of the date and time of his death,
but it was very concrete information
that made me think
he would never live to be 18.
And
[sighs]
I asked why.
You know, why
Why Willie? Why my son?
And I was told
that beauty comes of all things.
[thunder rumbling]
You can imagine how difficult it was
to wake up every day wondering
if that would be the day that my son died.
I did not tell anyone about that
until shortly before
Willie's 18th birthday.
We were at a ski race
and I knocked on Willie's hotel room door
at about four in the morning
and told him.
[laughing]
And he thought-- he thought I was crazy.
Um
But I told him and he
took it in stride.
So when he reached his 18th birthday,
I relaxed.
I sort of thought
the plan for his life had changed.
About two years later
Willie was at a ski camp in Maine.
He was roller-skiing,
which is a cross-country,
dry landform of skiing
with a friend of his,
and a
car missed her and hit him
and killed him instantly.
The world stopped.
My experience, uh, did not
and does not protect me from grief.
Um
I love
I loved my son and continue to love him
uh
more than I can imagine.
[sad music playing]
But my near-death experience changes
how I understand death.
Death is not the final word
and it's not the end.
Death is just the physical loss.
I know my son is
somewhere. [laughs]
And I know that I'll see him again.
[Bruce] If it is true that consciousness
is not solely dependent on the brain
that raises the question,
"What happens to consciousness
after we die?"
Can a consciousness continue
after the death of the body
and communicate
with people who are still alive?
When I was four, I used to see spirits.
I'd get messages from them.
So I'm hopin'
you're gonna enjoy this evening.
There will be some laughter,
there may be some tears,
and I'll do my best to get
as many messages out as is possible.
I would see people
that other people couldn't see.
But I didn't realize
that they were not living people.
[woman] As mediums,
we open ourselves up to the spirit world.
We create a meeting space
for both worlds to be united.
[closing theme playing]
[woman 1] At the moment of death.
are we actually just dead
or is something else going on?
[man 1] There's no one on the planet
who doesn't have a vested interest
in the question,
does life go on after death?
[man 2] Whatever this consciousness is
that we have in this life
it was also there in another life before.
[woman 2] He said, "Mom,
I think I need to tell you somethin'.
I think I used to be somebody else."
[woman 3] How many people here
have had a near-death experience?
Lotta dead people here today. Welcome.
We had to rethink everything
that we believed about death and dying.
[woman 4] There have
always been ghosts in history.
We continue to report them and see them.
To the spirits of the mansion,
help us connect more deeply to your world.
Is there a child on the other side
connected to you?
Yes.
[man 3] There are things
that science can't test.
It doesn't mean they don't happen.
Literally, I can feel him and I know
that he is there with me right now.
[woman 5] I could feel my spirit
sort of peeling away from my body.
How good would it be
to know there is life after death?
["Spirit in the Sky"
by Norman Greenbaum playing]
[woman] As a physician, I know that
most people don't think about death really
until they're forced to.
But 20 years ago,
I was not only physically dead,
I had been dead for a while.
And that experience radically changed
everything about what I am and who I am.
In 1999,
I arranged to go to Chile and kayak.
And I was looking forward
to this section of river
that's well known for its waterfalls.
[water rushing]
[waves crashing]
We put on the river and we went over
the first couple of drops.
This river has a very high flow.
So we decided to run this smaller part
of the first major waterfall.
And so I pulled out in the current.
There was another kayaker
who had sort of bobbled her way past.
And her boat was lodged sideways
at the entrance.
So I was forced over
to the main part of the waterfall.
[laughing] I mean, I--
I knew it was not gonna be good!
[water sloshing]
My boat became pinned and I was completely
submerged under ten feet of water.
I was not breathing.
My torso was absolutely plastered
to the front deck of the boat.
I could feel my bones breaking.
I thought I should be screaming,
but I wasn't.
I felt uh, no pain, no fear, no panic.
I felt more alive than I've ever felt.
I could feel my spirit
sort of peeling away from my body,
and my spirit was then released
up to the heavens.
[birds chirping]
I was immediately greeted
by a group of somethings.
I don't know what to call them.
People, spirits, beings.
I didn't recognize any of them.
But they had been important
in my life story somehow.
Like a grandparent
who died before I was born.
They were so overjoyed to welcome me
and greet me and love me.
These beings started taking me
down this pathway.
[heart pulsating]
The pathway was very thickly covered
with hundreds of thousands of flowers,
and the aromas of flowers.
It was exploding
with every color of the universe.
[thunder crashing]
There was an absolute shift
of time and dimension.
I experienced all of eternity
in every second,
and every second
expanded into all of eternity.
The pathway went
to this great domed structure.
I believe I was in heaven.
God's world, whatever you wanna call it.
I had an overwhelming sense of being home.
At the same time,
I could look back at the river,
where my body
was still submerged under water.
[man yells] You okay?
[woman] The group of kayakers
kept trying to get to me,
but they were never able to do it.
And after maybe 15 minutes,
they had given up rescue.
They had really shifted over
into a body recovery mode.
One of the guys saw my life jacket
pop up downstream
and thought that maybe my husband
would want it.
As he got that,
he felt my body hit his leg.
So he reached underwater
and was able to grab my wrist.
My body was bloated and purple
and I had fixed eyes.
There's absolutely no doubt
in my own mind that I was physically dead.
But I watched
from the entrance to the domed structure
as they started CPR,
and I could still hear them.
One of the guys kept calling to me
to come back and take a breath.
You know, "Please come back.
I know you're still here."
I had been without oxygen for 30 minutes,
and the statistical likelihood
of my survival should have been zero.
I did not want to go back down to my body.
I had a very, very physical sensation
of being held and comforted
and reassured that everything was fine.
[thunder crashing]
But the beings told me
that it wasn't my time,
that I had more work to do on Earth,
and that I had to go back to my body.
When I opened my eyes,
the guys that resuscitated me
were stunned.
I was in terrible shape.
[laughs] I mean, I had just drowned.
But I also had, uh
multiple broken bones
and torn ligaments in my legs.
And I was
on the side of a river
in the middle of nowhere.
The guys who resuscitated me
put my body on top of a boat
and then began
to try to get me up the hillside.
We emerged onto a dirt road.
They thought maybe someone would run
and get a tractor, a horse or something.
But when we emerged onto the dirt road,
exactly there was an ambulance, which
in 1999, in southern Chile,
didn't exist. [laughs]
It was inexplicable.
It took a number of hours,
but my friends got me to the hospital.
My husband was actually told that
I probably would not survive the night.
But I did.
I was in the hospital
for more than a month.
I had several operations.
Then many, many months of rehab
before I could walk again.
And statistically, I had zero likelihood
of surviving
without significant brain damage.
But I never actually had any brain damage.
[laughing] My kids might say
something differently, but
I
made a complete recovery.
As a physician,
I'm not really in a crowd of people
who want to talk about things
like near death experiences.
People in science often think you can't
possibly believe in anything supernatural.
When I went off to medical school,
I would have defined death as
death, meaning physical death.
But my near-death experience,
and then what happened
to my son ten years later,
changed my definition of death
significantly.
I don't believe that
we know everything. [laughs]
[somber music playing]
[man] A near death experience,
sometimes called an NDE,
is a profound experience
that many people have
when they come close to death.
Probably between ten and 20% of people
whose hearts actually stop
will report
these dramatic near-death experiences.
Here at the Division
of Perceptual Studies,
we study the possibility
that something about humans
may survive bodily death.
[man 2] The general mainstream,
materialist view of reality
is that physical matter is all there is.
So when the physical brain stops working,
then the consciousness ends.
So the idea that there might be
this consciousness piece
that could continue on
conflicts with a pretty basic principle.
But the question of what happens
after we die
is something that has intrigued humans
for as long as we've been around.
[Bruce] We've been doing this research
for almost 50 years now.
We study mediums,
people who think they can communicate
with the deceased.
We've studied deathbed visions
that happen to people as they die.
We've studied reincarnation
and a variety of other
spontaneously occurring experiences
on the border between life and death,
such as near-death experiences.
-[film ticking]
-[wind whistling]
If you look back in history,
there have been
what we now call near death experiences
since prehistoric times.
[somber music playing]
But the first collection
of near-death experiences
was put together in 1892 by Albert Heim,
a geologist in Switzerland.
While climbing in the Alps,
he had fallen
and had a beautiful experience
as he was falling down the mountain.
He described time expanding
as he went faster and faster.
And he was so struck by this experience
that he started asking
other mountain climbers,
and quickly collected
30 other cases like his
of people who had falls from great heights
who had blissful experiences.
And then in the 1960s and '70s,
resuscitation medicine really got started.
[man] External chest compression
is the best rescue technique
for artificial circulation.
[Bruce] Which means we were
bringing people back
from the brink of death
in larger and larger numbers.
Many people came back
and reported these blissful experiences
in which they left their bodies
and traveled to some other realm.
[wind whistling]
Patients say they become aware
of what's described as a tunnel
a passageway, a portal.
And they go into this tunnel
and when they come out,
they come out into a very brilliant,
warm, loving and accepting light.
[Bruce] In 1975, Raymond Moody
wrote his book Life After Life,
which caused many people, myself included,
to take near death experiences
more seriously.
[man] When Raymond Moody's book came out,
I thought that near death experiences
were rubbish.
Had to be.
And they occurred in the United States,
in California and that's the end of it.
Would it ever cross to England?
No. We're far too sensible
to have experiences like this.
But I'm a neuropsychiatrist,
and, one day,
this guy walked into my consulting room.
He'd just had a cardiac catheter go wrong,
left his body,
watched the resuscitation process,
and had a full near-death experience.
And so there I was, confronted.
Did I believe or did I not?
Well, I thought that
before I could draw any conclusions,
that I ought to study them.
So I've been studying
near death experiences for about 40 years.
[heart pulsating]
The science we have,
which is a materialistic science,
says it's all brain.
All brain.
So when the brain stops functioning,
you can't be conscious.
But during a near death experience,
you get these very wide expansions
of consciousness,
even when the brain has ceased
to function.
So it can't be all brain.
[Bruce] Near death experiences are
subjective experiences
that are very difficult
to confirm objectively.
And that raises questions
in the minds of many scientists.
Some of the critics of this research
complain that this is just anecdotes.
Well, actually,
if you look at the history of science,
all science starts
as collecting anecdotes,
and then finding patterns
among those different stories.
And there are millions
of these experiences
being reported across the globe.
[woman 1] I was experiencing a really bad
asthma attack in my apartment.
[man] I was blown up by a bomb
in the Vietnam War
and then shot
through the arm, chest and neck.
[woman 2] I was hit broadside by a woman
who was texting while she was driving.
[man 2] I hit my head, broke my neck,
injured my spinal cord
and was paralyzed right away.
[Bruce] I've been doing this work
for four decades now,
and what I've found is that,
no matter how you come close to death
there are very consistent patterns
in the experience itself
and in how it affects people.
For example,
people all over the world will report
that their sense of time was distorted.
For me, there was no sense of time.
Moments or months or millennia.
I don't know.
I had no idea how fast it was going,
but it was light speed.
[Bruce] They also describe
this warm, loving being of light.
A sense of getting information
from some really high-frequency teachers.
Very embracing and warm
and-- and caressing.
A warm energy hug
to the brain.
[Bruce] And then there are things
that are paranormal or otherworldly.
Like your ordinary senses
becoming much more vivid.
All this grand music.
Jacques Cousteau. [laughs]
Being under the water and all these fish.
I started dissolving, or, like that drop
into the ocean, just disappearing.
If I could reach out and touch a leaf
I became an aspect of that leaf.
I was a tiny, tiny light,
a little tiny speck of light,
and then I'd become a great, big light.
[Bruce] You'll see the same phenomena
from all different cultures.
And they often come back feeling
that it profoundly changed them.
[woman 3] I see the beauty
in everything now.
[woman 4] A hundred percent turnaround
from being a hardcore, angry atheist.
[woman 2] I no longer have
any kind of a fear of death.
[Bruce] What is going on here
that has such power to change
a person's life in a fraction of a second?
[car horn honking]
[wind whistling]
[woman 1] Hi, everybody.
-[woman 2] Hi.
-[group] Hey.
This is the Seattle International
Association for Near-Death Studies.
How many people here, by show of hands,
have had a near death experience?
A lot of dead people here today.
Welcome! [laughs]
Near death experiences
are not just butterflies and flowers
and God and light and heaven.
You will find that you have difficulties
with materialism.
Maybe with employment.
Probably with your marriage,
if you're married.
Because the changes are so profound.
So I began counseling people
with near death experiences.
And I have the advantage
of having had a near death experience,
so I can honestly say,
"I know how you feel."
Mmm.
-I'm good.
-Yeah?
-Have a seat.
-Thank you.
[woman]
I didn't just go into cardiac arrest.
My electrolytes
flip-flopped.
I was basically poisoned.
And I was gone.
When I came back,
it pulled me away from a lot of people.
It's hard to even talk to my husband
because I feel that
somebody is going to bring a straitjacket
and throw away the key.
Because what I used to know
is not what I know now.
And I'm havin' a very hard time with it.
Yeah. Feeling crazy I'm validating you.
is part of the adjustment,
because everything gets so mixed up.
You died.
-[laughs]
-You had an experience.
You came back and now you have to live
in the same world,
but with a completely different
point of view.
And it's so hard when everybody else's
point of view hasn't changed.
Seattle IANDS is
a place of comfort and hope,
validation and support,
and I hope attending here
calms your heart and your emotions
and reminds you
that this is a very temporary situation.
Life.
People attend Seattle IANDS
because they've had
a near death experience.
People come because they're grieving
and want to hear that we go on.
And then people come
just to hear it's real,
it really happened,
and has happened to millions of people.
My experience started
incredibly enough, on a Wednesday evening.
And it was Thanksgiving
coming up the next day.
And we were running some electrical lines
on some poles
and I was up on a bucket truck.
We kind of said,
"We could save a couple of hours
if I stay up on the bucket
and you just maneuver the truck
from space to space."
[murmuring]
I hit the side of the bucket
and I broke all my ribs on my right side.
I wound up in n emergency room.
They gave me a medication for pain
and it had some kind
of an anti-inflammatory component.
Turns out I'm allergic to it.
So, ultimately, my lungs shut down,
I stopped breathing and my heart stopped.
[water rushing]
There was a tunnel, but not the way
that it's typically described.
I kind of fell into it.
And what I saw was just color
wrapped all around me, so that
I was completely integrated into it.
And I could hear this color talking to me.
Millions of voices.
-"Sssss." This chatter.
-[whispering voices]
Then I look down and I see the ocean.
And then I notice a man in the water.
He's about knee deep.
Then he turns around suddenly.
And, uh
the biggest surprise of my death,
my new life
was that it was my father.
[sniffles]
Me and my dad had
a very difficult relationship in life.
We couldn't even hug.
So when he died, I felt totally bitter
and really regretful of the fact
that we never were able to say
we love each other or we care.
So I'm lookin' at him here in this space,
and I'm saying, "Oh, my gosh.
This is my opportunity.
My second chance
to make peace with my dad."
[sobbing]
Something that I could never do in life.
So
we hugged.
[sniffles]
[exhales]
[crying] And we said we loved each other.
We loved each other.
That has changed my life in so many ways.
Just knowing that he did care.
That he did
love me.
He looked at me when he embraced me.
And he let go and he just looked at me.
He said, "Jose. You need to go back."
I'm lookin' at him, like,
"What? Are you kidding me?
[laughter]
I like it here. This is great.
I don't wanna go back."
And he said to me,
"No, you gotta go back."
Whilst I didn't want to, uh
we came to, kind of,
sort of an agreement, in a way.
We-- we agreed that, when my time came,
he would come get me and I said
"Well, that sounds like
a pretty good deal. Let me go with that."
And-- and I transitioned back.
I felt this sense of pull
and I wound up back in my body.
When I met my dad on the other side
I realized that
sometimes, we may not be able
to say something here
but
we're gonna be able
to say it somewhere else.
By having this opportunity
it truly healed my spirit.
Before, I just was moving through life.
I wasn't living.
-I was not alive.
-[applause]
Thank you.
[Bruce] There have been a number
of medical explanations
that have been proposed to explain
what causes near-death experiences.
I'm all in favor of that. Being a doctor,
I wanna understand
what causes these things.
Unfortunately, I don't think
any of the explanations
we've come up with so far
help us very much
in trying to understand things.
Some have said drugs given to people
as they're approaching death
may cause near death experiences.
And what we find is that
the fewer drugs people are given
the more likely they are
to report a near death experience.
That the drugs tend to inhibit
the near-death experience,
rather than causing it.
People also suggest
lack of oxygen to the brain.
And that's appealing, because no matter
how you come close to death,
lack of oxygen to the brain
is the common factor.
However, we know,
from decades of research,
what happens when you get lack of oxygen.
People become frightened,
become belligerent,
become terrified
of what's happening to them.
Very much unlike the calm, consistent,
almost blissful experience
of a near death experience.
I'm frequently challenged
by people who say,
"Okay, he's had a cardiac arrest.
There's a little bit of brain
which is working,
which you guys have all missed."
But this says that they don't really
understand what consciousness is.
You cannot maintain consciousness
unless you have a highly-organized brain.
Believe you me,
when the brain loses its oxygen,
-it doesn't organize itself.
-[rhythmic bleeping]
[Bruce] When the heart stops,
-in 20 seconds or so
-[continuous bleep]
you get flatlining,
which means no brain activity.
And yet people have near death experiences
when they've been, quote,
"flatlined" for longer than that.
One of the most widely publicized cases
was that of Pam Reynolds,
who had an aneurysm,
which is a ballooning of a blood vessel
at the base of her brain.
And it was so large that, if it burst,
it would have killed her instantly.
The most that they could do for me
was try
a surgical process
which involved the stopping of the heart,
the lowering of the bodily temperature,
the emptying of the blood from the body,
thereby shrinking the aneurysm.
[Bruce] She was without any blood
going to her brain for about an hour.
[continuous bleep]
The EEG, or the brainwave,
goes totally flat.
There is no brain activity at all.
Which presumably means there's
no brain function at all during that time.
And yet, she reported
a blissful near-death experience
in which she saw and heard things
going on in the operating room
that she couldn't possibly
have seen or heard.
[Pam] My vantage point was rather like
sitting on the shoulder of the surgeon.
And I was free to move around at will.
While I knew what they were doing,
they didn't know what I was doing.
They thought I was
that thing lying on the table.
[Bruce] Now, her eyes were taped shut
for the entire procedure,
and she had molded earpieces in her ears.
But she described the tools
they were using to saw through her skull,
and it was something that she hadn't seen
before or after.
[whirring]
[Pam] I saw, in Dr. Spetzler's hand,
an instrument that reminded me
suspiciously of an electric toothbrush.
There was a case very close to it,
and it had bits
that looked like the
case that my father kept
his socket wrenches in.
[Bruce] Her neurosurgeon said he can't
understand how this could possibly happen.
If somebody asked me to describe
what the Midas Rex drill, uh, looked like,
I might very well use the term,
"Like an electric toothbrush."
And describing them, uh,
as if they were a socket wrench set,
uh, I think that's very appropriate.
Her ability to describe
what went on during surgery
is inconceivable to me,
considering the state that she was in.
Pam Reynolds was clinically dead.
[continuous bleep]
This really challenges the idea
that our consciousness, our minds,
are created by the brain,
because her brain was not functioning
and yet she had
the most vivid experience of her life.
[Peter] How can people be conscious
when they're unconscious?
It's an oxymoron. It's ridiculous.
But in fact, this is what
the data seemed to prove more and more.
Well, that, of course,
is going to have some significance
for our ideas about death.
I mean, is it possible
that there is an expansion
of consciousness when we die?
[wind whistling]
[somber music playing]
[woman 1] When one survives
something so catastrophic as death
there's a gaping hole in your soul.
Inside, you feel like crumbling,
and you wonder,
"How do I make sense of it?"
When people talk
about near death experiences,
they talk about it being so pleasant.
But it was not the case with me.
When I first met my husband, Jonathan,
we definitely wanted to have children.
We had our first, Adina.
No issues, no complications.
Delivered her
and back at work eight days later.
The second one was
after seven rounds of IVF.
And everything went swimmingly
until the 20-week ultrasound.
[heart pulsating rapidly]
They do the scan and they say,
"Oh. You have a placenta previa."
Jonathan was with me and I said,
"I don't know what this is,
but I've got a bad feeling about it."
And then I open the computer
and I start Googling.
Placenta previa can turn into an accreta,
which is when
the placenta marries itself to the uterus.
If that happens, you could hemorrhage,
and if that happens,
you and the baby could lose your life.
I sat back, and I said
"This is going to happen to us.
The only difference
is the baby's going to survive."
[woman 2] And what did you think?
Uh, that it was stereotypical
pregnancy hysteria.
Although I didn't quite put it
in those terms.
Earlier in my life,
I trained as an air force pilot,
got my PhD in economics.
Data is core to my being.
I like to joke that I don't like
to complicate things
with words and feelings.
I'd much rather go with the data.
And we didn't have any empirical data,
so I had
the stereotypical husband's response.
But I dressed it up in science,
so that made it more sophisticated.
[Stephanie] It was so difficult
trying to communicate about feelings
and this foreboding
when I didn't have
something tangible to show.
I told Jonathan,
"I do not know what to tell you,
other than the fact that I've got
this intense feeling around this
that something bad is about to happen.
If you saw me in Starbucks and you said,
"Oh, how's the pregnancy going?"
I would literally say, "I'm going to die."
And my premonitions kept coming.
I was walking in the park.
I saw a dry fountain.
In mind's eye, the fountain was flowing
and, all of a sudden, it turned to blood.
And I felt my body hemorrhage.
I called Jonathan, said
"Meet me at the emergency room."
He's frantic about it.
Doctors examining me, and they're like,
"No, you're actually fine."
[rhythmic bleeping]
Jonathan's like,
"Okay, it's a false alarm,"
and I'm like, "No, this is a warning."
[woman] I've had other patients
who've expressed concern,
but I would say Stephanie was
the first patient
that came forward and said,
"I'm seeing things very vividly
that are scaring me to death."
I tried to acknowledge her fear,
but also my role is to keep the calm.
So I was concerned,
but I wasn't necessarily panicked.
[Stephanie] The day
that I go into labor
I was in the kitchen,
giving Adina breakfast.
-All of a sudden, blood went everywhere.
-[kettle whistling]
My nanny was here and I said,
"Let's get in the car."
She jumped in the driver's seat.
I said, "Get out. I am driving."
And she's like,
"Are you crazy? You're bleeding."
I'm like, "I've had many premonitions.
Dying in a car accident was not one."
[horn blares]
Jonathan was in New York
on one of his business trips.
[Jonathan] My wife called to say
that she was on her way to the hospital
and to get to Chicago as fast as possible.
[Stephanie] I was acutely aware
that it was the day I was gonna die.
The last thing I texted Jonathan was
"You've made me the happiest woman
in the world and
please take care of this baby."
And then they wheel me into the room
that's going to give life to Jacob
and take mine.
[rhythmic bleeping]
They put a curtain right in front
of my face and prepare me for a C-section.
-[baby cries]
-They deliver Jacob.
He's healthy, happy.
Seconds later, I flatline.
[continuous bleep]
Everything came into a 3D movie
and I could actually see
outside of my body.
My point of view was above my body
and next to my body,
and I could see everything
that was going on in the operating room.
I see the anesthesiologist by my feet.
I see which nurse jumped on my chest
to give me CPR.
In this other dimension,
spatial relations break.
-There is no ceiling. There are no walls.
-[water rushing]
Everything is just moving around
in so many different directions.
I saw my daughter in a completely
different part of the hospital
with our nanny.
I saw what my husband was wearing
when he got off the plane.
And then I see spirits everywhere.
My grandmother,
who had passed when I was ten years old.
My mother's brother also appeared.
The last thing I heard was Julie,
Dr. Levitt,
saying, "This can't be happening.
This can't be happening."
[continuous bleep]
[Julie] This was about as serious
as it gets.
Stephanie was having
an amniotic fluid embolism.
Many patients will die
from this condition,
because they bleed to death.
And I, with my hands across my chest,
with my gloves on, looked up, and I said,
under my breath,
"This cannot be happening."
She called it.
She knew that this was going to happen.
[Stephanie] After I heard Dr. Levitt,
there was just this pulling in my stomach,
and then I was back in my body.
I was clinically dead for 37 seconds.
[rhythmic bleeping]
I was in a medically-induced coma
for six days.
I had kidney failure.
I had to learn how to walk again.
I had to learn how to talk.
It took me a long time
to physically recover.
When I was clinically dead, I knew
that something extraordinary had happened.
But it ultimately had to go to the people
who were present that day to validate it.
[Julie] Stephanie and I met
to talk about what had happened that day.
I almost couldn't breathe.
There was absolutely no way
that she was aware
of who was standing to her left,
who was standing to her right,
what I said, what other people said
in the operating room.
[intense rhythmic bleeping]
It makes me
believe in more
than just what we know as art and science.
My medical mind turns more
to a spiritual place,
which I don't think
I was ever really aware of in the past.
It was a very
real lesson that day.
-[Jonathan] How old was Jacob there?
-[Stephanie] Not even a year.
-[Jonathan] Yeah.
-[Stephanie] Not even a year.
[Stephanie] All of the doctors were like,
"I don't have a medical explanation
for the near-death experience
or the premonitions."
But I look at them as a knowing.
This knowing comes from someplace.
[Jonathan] I'm not in the category
of true believer.
But I accept
that there's something else going on here,
some extra dimension of knowledge
or cognition, uh that my wife has.
So I believe-- I believe that she knew.
[woman] Stephanie.
It would have been much
um, easier to go along those three months
prior to flatlining if he had said that.
I just felt I wasn't believed
by the one person I need to believe me.
By the one person who matters.
Everybody else can call me crazy,
hormonal and stressed out and everything,
but it's the one person
that I needed to protect me.
And it was-- it was hard.
All of us who are researchers
or scientists,
and professors,
academics and the like, um,
are engaged in research
because we don't know everything.
And what this is telling me
is that there's--
Whether it's God or spirits
or some sense that we have
that is not yet identified
there is something like that
that was operating here.
-[Bruce] Sit right there.
-[Stephanie] Okay, great.
Right before flatline,
I was perpendicular.
I know people talk about, like, floating
-and being above their body.
-[Bruce] Yeah.
[Stephanie] I didn't have that.
So it's almost like
you were in both places at once.
Part of you was still in the body
-and part of you was out there.
-Yeah.
[Bruce] Most people
who share their experiences with us
do so because they're struggling
with how to understand it.
It doesn't make sense in terms of science
or their particular religious background
and they're looking for some way
to come to terms with it.
I just would like to understand
-a little bit more about the mechanics.
-Yeah.
And is there a pattern that you're seeing
in people that have had
near death experiences?
Yeah. Well, some things
that you told-- told me about
are very common, but some are not.
Frankly, the premonitions
that came before it are not common.
It's more common to have
these premonitions after the experience.
What struck me most
about Stephanie's experience
is she was having premonitions
about dying for months before it happened.
And these were not imaginations.
They were things she could not deny.
There are all these things
going on around us all the time
that we sort of block out.
It's like our brain has a filter
that filters out things that don't help us
get along in this world.
And when something
like a near death experience happens,
that opens up the filter.
The door's been opened for you.
And once it's open,
it's-- it's hard to shut it.
[Stephanie] My visions and my premonitions
have become more intense
since my near-death experience.
I believe it's a blessing.
But spiritually,
it's a challenge, because
I see things that people don't see
a lot of the time.
Most of the visions I get
are from complete strangers.
Just people who are in my line of sight.
I feel like I'm gonna have a heart attack.
But I know it's not mine.
We all have this ability
to perceive things, especially danger.
Um, we just don't take it seriously.
What do you suggest to those
who sit in this chair across from you
and explain their near-death experiences?
What do you normally advise them?
I can just tell you what I've learned
from the thousands of people who
have sat in that chair and talked to me.
And what seems to be
most comforting to them
is knowing, one, you're not alone.
Many people have had
near death experiences.
And if we can't understand it,
we can at least have faith
that there's a purpose to it.
And you don't have to be in control of it,
because, in fact,
we're not in control of it.
Something else is.
Thank you.
I used to be more easy-going
before this all happened. Um
I used to laugh more. Uh
And
I used to not take things so seriously.
Um
I-- I think Jonathan misses
that part of me.
I think I'll be asking questions
probably until the day I die.
Again.
[car horn honking]
[Jose] The experience
is very, very difficult to process.
The dying is very difficult.
A few years after my experience,
I started painting.
Had no idea. I'd never painted in my life.
Initially, it was just a desire
to reproduce what I saw
where I was in a ball of color
and these colors were all moving,
and I become the color.
That's how I wound up doing art.
Just a desire to try to create
that three-dimensional feeling with color.
But as I kept doing it more and more,
I began to realize
that it's a lot deeper than that.
It was healing.
It was healing me.
Dying is traumatic.
And it's difficult to integrate
and-- and get past that.
This world of art and color
brought a lot of peace and calm
into my life,
and it made me feel a sense of knowing.
People ask me
if the experience was real or not.
At the end of the day,
I can't prove to you.
I can only share my experience with you.
[birds chirping]
[Mary] I had more motivation
than any other person on this planet
to disprove my account.
Because during my near-death experience,
when I was with these beings
they told me about the coming
and unexpected death
of my oldest son, Willie,
who was only nine years old
at the time of my accident.
I knew that if I could come up
with any other plausible explanation,
that I would be able to discount
everything I'd been told.
I wasn't given details in terms
of the date and time of his death,
but it was very concrete information
that made me think
he would never live to be 18.
And
[sighs]
I asked why.
You know, why
Why Willie? Why my son?
And I was told
that beauty comes of all things.
[thunder rumbling]
You can imagine how difficult it was
to wake up every day wondering
if that would be the day that my son died.
I did not tell anyone about that
until shortly before
Willie's 18th birthday.
We were at a ski race
and I knocked on Willie's hotel room door
at about four in the morning
and told him.
[laughing]
And he thought-- he thought I was crazy.
Um
But I told him and he
took it in stride.
So when he reached his 18th birthday,
I relaxed.
I sort of thought
the plan for his life had changed.
About two years later
Willie was at a ski camp in Maine.
He was roller-skiing,
which is a cross-country,
dry landform of skiing
with a friend of his,
and a
car missed her and hit him
and killed him instantly.
The world stopped.
My experience, uh, did not
and does not protect me from grief.
Um
I love
I loved my son and continue to love him
uh
more than I can imagine.
[sad music playing]
But my near-death experience changes
how I understand death.
Death is not the final word
and it's not the end.
Death is just the physical loss.
I know my son is
somewhere. [laughs]
And I know that I'll see him again.
[Bruce] If it is true that consciousness
is not solely dependent on the brain
that raises the question,
"What happens to consciousness
after we die?"
Can a consciousness continue
after the death of the body
and communicate
with people who are still alive?
When I was four, I used to see spirits.
I'd get messages from them.
So I'm hopin'
you're gonna enjoy this evening.
There will be some laughter,
there may be some tears,
and I'll do my best to get
as many messages out as is possible.
I would see people
that other people couldn't see.
But I didn't realize
that they were not living people.
[woman] As mediums,
we open ourselves up to the spirit world.
We create a meeting space
for both worlds to be united.
[closing theme playing]