(whooshing noise)
- [Narrator] What happens
at the point of death?
- I knew that I was going to die.
- There was a drunk driving
in the T part of a road.
- [Narrator] Do you just disappear?
- I'm chanting this to myself,
"I've got to breathe, I've got to breathe.
"I've got to look up."
- So they put me into a drug-induced coma.
- It folded the boat in half
like a peanut butter sandwich.
- [Narrator] Some people
say there is a light.
- This tunnel began to close.
- [Narrator] Others describe
a love more profound
than any other.
- With my lungs filled with water.
That's when it happened.
- [Narrator] Most near death experiencers
say the other side was more
real than life on earth.
- When I let go, I let go of life.
- [Narrator] Consciousness
Continues seeks answers
to the question, what happens when we die?
(dramatic music)
(door squeaking)
(serene music)
- Hello, my name is P. M. H. Atwater.
I'm a near death researcher.
I began my work in 1978.
My research base is nearly 4,000
adult and child experiencers.
I had an experience myself.
It was because of that experience
that I became a researcher.
(light music)
And I've been doing it ever since.
(light music)
- My name is Sondra Boyd.
I decided to come and be
a part of this documentary
because in 2002 I had a
near death experience,
and afterwards I had
absolutely no one to talk to,
and had a very hard time
figuring out in the beginning
what had happened to me.
The type of person I was
before my near death experience
had a lot of ego to it.
Sales was a good game for me,
and it was all about the money.
I had been sick for about three months,
just lung infections
that wouldn't go away.
I woke up in the morning
and had this feeling
like I was dying.
About 3 o'clock in the afternoon
we raced to the emergency room.
The next thing I remember
is standing there
telling the woman at the
counter that I'm dying.
They raced me into one of the rooms.
My lungs were filling up while the doctors
hadn't even had a chance to intubate me.
I could hear the machine
that was hooked up to me
that was beeping.
There was a nurse standing next to me
who started to yell at me.
My lungs were filling completely up.
The doctor was screaming,
"The ship is sinking!"
I heard the machine crash.
They were still working
and I was above my body
looking down at everything going on.
(serene music)
- A near death experience is an experience
of otherworldiness that
happens at the edge of death.
People who almost die, close to death,
or to someone who has died and later
is resuscitated or revived.
Whether pleasant or
unpleasant, because we can have
the frightening ones as
well as the joyous ones.
(serene music)
(pensive music)
- My name is Paul.
In December 2010 I had
a near death experience.
I was having a severe
bout with depression,
and I drank a lot of
liquor, took a lot of meds.
Then I went upstairs at my home
and hung myself from the rafters.
(pensive music)
I went to what some
people would call a void.
(serene music)
- This experience is of such significance,
to the point of lifelong physiological
and psychological changes.
(serene music)
- My name is John.
I had a near death experience in 1998.
I was 23 years old.
At the time I was sort of a spiritual
or religious skeptic, I guess.
I've always been a very logical,
mathematical thinking person.
I think a lot more about
spirituality now, I guess.
(serene music)
I was at the time, and I still am now,
a laser artist and technician.
I had been very sick.
I had the flu.
I was also preparing to
take a trip to California
for the first time in my life.
The day I got on the plane,
I was still pretty sick.
We had a party to go to,
and there was going to be
lots of free food, catered.
I was just feeling well enough.
I was feeling like I
could eat some free food.
So I went to the party
and started to help myself
to the catered food.
At some point I started to
feel like I'd eaten a nut
and I'm allergic to nuts.
I tried to wash that
feeling out of my mouth.
I had this sort of scratchy feeling
and it sort of died down a little bit,
started to feel better.
So I just went on with the party.
Well, here I am in California
for the first time,
and I'm on the beach, and
I really wanted to go down
and see the Pacific Ocean.
My girlfriend and I went
down the side of the cliff
and were running around,
having a good time.
I started to get a
little bit out of breath.
I sat down on a rock.
I'm asthmatic as well, so
I had an inhaler with me.
I took a shot of that.
My girlfriend, she says, "Are you okay?
"Your eyes are bloodshot,
and your face is all pale."
I thought for a second,
maybe she actually is seeing
something that I'm not
seeing or feeling here.
So I looked down at my fingernails,
and my fingernails were turning bluish.
To me, having asthma growing up,
that's a sign that I'm
not getting enough oxygen.
So I immediately just stood
up and started walking back.
I felt my body locking up.
It was getting harder for me to breathe.
I just turned to my girlfriend and I said,
"Get help."
She started to walk a
little faster in front of me
back toward the party.
Just before she was out of earshot,
I said to her, "Run."
I felt like I had to tell her before
she was too far away to hear me.
As soon as she was around the corner,
I sat down on the next
rock that I could find,
and I just tried to focus on breathing.
I just sat there and hunched over,
sort of chanting this to myself,
"I've got to breathe, I've got to breathe,
"I've got to breathe.
"You've got to look up."
That didn't make sense to me,
because my muscles are locking down here.
So I just kind of ignored it.
Went back to, "I've got to
breathe, I've got to breathe.
"I've got to look up."
It sort of came more like a voice to me
in my head this time.
So I decided, okay, this is crazy,
but I'm going to look up for a second.
I sat back and I looked up.
It was the most beautiful
sight I'd ever seen.
(serene music)
- Yes, we like the ones
that happen in accidents
and hospitals because
we have machinery there,
we have witnesses there,
we have all kinds of ways
of cataloging and measuring and checking.
But I think we need to
realize that they can happen
in all kinds of different ways.
(serene music)
- My name is Sharon.
I've had two near death experiences.
My first near death
experience was when I was 13.
I was taking swimming lessons.
My instructor wanted us to dive head first
into the 10-foot section of the pool.
I watched all the other kids do it,
but I had this strange fear.
I just couldn't do it.
My instructor told me
that if I didn't dive,
he was going to throw me
in, and he did throw me in.
I ended up sinking to
the bottom of the pool
with my lungs filled with water.
That's when it happened.
(serene music)
My second near death experience happened
when I was in my 40s.
I was sitting on my back steps.
My husband at the time was an electrician.
He had just got home and I had asked him
if it was okay for me to be
talking on a cordless phone.
He said that I would be all right,
and he went in the house.
That lightning just came
right down and hit my arm.
The phone went flying.
I've never felt such
searing pain in my life.
It knocked me to the ground.
After it hit my arm, it
traveled underneath the house,
and blew out the transformer that was
directly in front of our house.
It left char marks on the concrete steps
where I had been sitting.
That lightning just went right through me.
The next thing I know,
I see these beautiful
pink and gold clouds.
It was the most beautiful
thing I've ever seen.
(serene music)
- The pattern of a near death experience
is truly universal.
The components and aspects
of that pattern will vary,
but the pattern, the
overall pattern is the same.
How they describe that will
depend on language constraints,
it will depend on their culture,
their own belief system,
or what is acceptable
in the community around them.
(serene music)
- Hi, my name's Nola
Davis, and I had my NDE
between the years of 2 and 3 years old.
So to talk a lot about
how life was before then,
I guess is was just a
normal 2-3 year old child.
At 2 years old I got
extremely ill and had croup,
and this was in the mid '50s.
Where we lived in rural Washington,
they had not yet ever
done tracheotomies before.
I remember not being able to breathe,
and then being in a
hospital room above the bed.
The next thing I remember was this
incredible iridescent light.
(serene music)
- My name is Roland A. Webb.
I had a near death
experience August 9, 1988,
in the Philippines.
I was stationed in the military,
in the US Air Force at the time.
My mom and dad, they were Catholics.
They didn't push us to any church,
so they were pretty open minded,
and I remained open minded.
I went to the library on
base, and picked up a book
called Total Meditation.
In the Philippines, it's hot.
It's usually close to in the high 90s,
100, 102, 3, 4, 5, like that.
Humidity sky high.
I came out the library, had
a short sleeved shirt on,
and then I felt the sun prickling my skin.
I'm brown.
It's kind of odd for me to get sunburned.
We were running 12, 13,
14 hour shifts out there
on the hot tarmac,
working on the airplanes,
inspecting the airplanes and all that.
Came home tired, and sicker than a dog.
In the Philippines at that
time, you couldn't call 9-1-1.
All of the sudden
everything started spinning,
and spinning, and round
and round and round.
The more it spun, the
more nauseated I got,
the more I went to these cold sweats,
the more intense the headache.
Everything started caving in.
Then it got to the point where
I could not fight it anymore.
And I said, "Sayonara," and I let go.
When I let go, the most beautiful light
came somewhere around my eyes.
(pensive music)
- My name is Kathy McDaniel,
and I had my near death
experience the first part of 2000.
We're not sure when that
happened, because I was in a coma.
I was 53 years old, and
I had recently retired,
sold my property management business.
I was looking for a new life.
I had just finished a
long-term relationship.
One of my best friends was
going to come to Seattle
and have a bone marrow transplant
and needed a second caregiver.
So I came.
It was supposed to be a
three or four month ordeal,
but it turned into eight months.
By that time I was very run down.
I got pneumonia.
So I went into a doc in the
box place, and collapsed.
They put me in an ambulance,
and by the time I got to the hospital,
they said I'd gone into ARDS,
which is acute respiratory
distress syndrome,
and that I had about a
40% chance of making it.
So they called in my family from all over.
I got more and more in distress,
so they put me into a drug-induced coma.
I stayed there for about three weeks
fighting back and forth.
One day I was good.
One day I wasn't good.
At one point, they told my family
to come in and say goodbye,
that there was nothing
more that they could do.
So I'm not sure when I
slipped over, but I did.
I just was somewhere else.
(pensive music)
- Hi, I'm David Bennet.
I had a near death
experience back in 1983.
I was the chief engineer of
the research vessel Aloha.
It was off the California
coast in early March.
We were trying to outrun a storm.
But we didn't quite outrun the storm.
Instead, the storm caught up to us,
so we couldn't bring the
large ship into the harbor,
but we had some people on board
that needed to make some flights to LAX.
The captain thought it
would be a good idea
to put a rubber Zodiac into the water,
and we would bring these
people into the harbor.
As chief engineer, I
usually stay on the ship
till we hit the dock.
But because I was third officer,
I knew the harbor better than
anybody else on the boat.
Captain thought it would
be prudent if I went along
just to help navigate.
We went down, put on our life vests,
and we jumped on the Zodiac,
and we started heading in.
There were 20 foot swells
that night, 20-25 footers.
We would ride up on the top of a 25 footer
and try to get a bearing
on the harbor buoy,
and then quickly run down a trough
and up to the top of the next swell,
take another bearing, and keep doing that.
Well, it wasn't very long we lost track
of the harbor buoy all together.
The storm had blown us a
mile south of the harbor
and we ran into the sandbar area
where there were suddenly
25 foot breakers,
and we slid off of one within a second.
So we tried to turn her
about and take her back out
to sea where we knew it would be safer
and find a safer approach.
But just as we got the boat turned around,
above our head there was the next one,
and it came right down on top of us.
Catapulted me into the ocean.
I was being tumbled and
tossed like a rag doll.
I mean, this was a very ferocious sea
that we found ourselves caught up in.
I'm a commercial diver as well as being
chief engineer on a research vessel.
We wear a lot of different hats.
Spent a lot of my life
commercially as a diver.
So I didn't freak out,
but it was nighttime,
so I didn't know what was up and down.
I had lost total orientation by being
tumbled and tossed so
much by this violent sea.
I tried to blow some bubbles out to see,
but that was no good, because
everything was just turbulent.
I figured, well, I'll just
hang on to this life vest
and I'll just let it carry
me up to the surface.
But that didn't happen and I drowned.
Suddenly, I'm in this
peaceful, quiet, calm,
very comfortable place.
(serene music)
(pensive music)
- I'm Louisa, and I had a
near death experience in 1982.
I come from a family that had
a lot of good gifts in it.
We were taught that God was something
superstitious from the
past, that science had since
proven to be a bunch of silliness.
Any kind of spiritual
stuff was people's way
of comforting themselves because they were
afraid of reality.
I was also in an alcoholic home.
We learned to focus on all the good stuff,
and anything that you
didn't want other people
to know about just didn't exist.
You'd just get rid of it.
When I was a teenager, I developed
and obsessive compulsive disorder.
I just hid that from the world.
I hid it from everyone.
It haunted me, because I couldn't believe
when I was my normal integrated self
that I kept doing these things
that were so horrible to me.
So I made a big vault in my mind
where I could hide stuff
the world couldn't see.
I went to Vassar, and
I was Phi Beta Kappa,
lots of awards.
When that was over, I didn't
know how to keep excelling,
so I moved to New York City.
I hadn't had a date in high school.
In New York, I was going
to make up for all that,
and I was going to be the nightclub queen.
What I thought is if I
could just get high enough,
if I could just dance well enough,
it would come together,
and I would finally
fell like I was enough.
We went to this nightclub.
I felt like this was the night
I was going to get there.
I was going to be enough.
I felt like I was looking real hot,
and everything that was
very important to me then.
We did a whole lot of
cocaine, and drank a lot.
I was almost to the top.
I was almost where I wanted to be.
So we decided to buy some more.
There was this seedy guys,
and he said, "Yeah, I've got stuff."
So we bought it.
We did some of this, and
it did nothing, no high.
So being a good addict, I'm like,
"Well, I'll just do it all."
I didn't know it at the time, but that was
lidocaine, not cocaine.
I went in the bathroom, and I realized
I couldn't read the graffiti at all.
What lidocaine does is it shuts down
a lot of your automatic nervous system.
So my heart was beginning to shut down.
My breathing was beginning to shut down.
My brain wasn't getting enough oxygen.
So this tunnel began to close.
But I thought, "Wow,
there's a new effect of coke
"that I didn't even know about.
"Wow, I'm getting some
wicked tunnel vision here."
So I wasn't afraid,
until it started to get
so dark that I was having trouble seeing,
and it felt like I was suffocating.
I went out and I found
my friend, and I said,
"I can't breathe, I can't breathe.
"Something's wrong.
"There's no air down here."
He said, "We'll get you some water,"
which I didn't want.
And took me to the bar,
and the bartender said,
"Here, here's a glass of water."
I took it and I raised it to my lips,
and it was right at the
point when I took a sip
that I left my body.
(pensive music)
- My name is Lizabeth.
I had four near death
experiences in my lifetime.
Start with my last near death experience.
At 33 I had some major surgery.
I remember being all of a sudden out.
The next thing I knew I could hear
the doctor and the
anesthesiologist arguing.
They were saying, "I can't tell her family
"that she's not here anymore."
I saw a lot of blood.
The next thing I knew, I
was in this familiar place
that I had been many times before.
(serene music)
(light music)
- My name is David Beckman.
I had a near death experience
when I was 33 years old
in 1988.
I was selling word
processing equipment for IBM.
I was a suit guy, and since,
you wouldn't know it
today, but I haven't been.
(light music)
It was a nice, sunny day in July,
and I was going river rafting
with some friends of mine.
It was a period of my life when I felt
pretty much 10 feet
tall and indestructible
and I was ready for some
adventure and some adrenaline.
I wanted to get all the
splash and the adventure
and the drama coming at me first.
When we hit calm water, I
would dive out of the raft
and swim underneath.
Try to thrill and amaze all my friends.
When we had the opportunity
to hit some class 5 rapids
that the veterans in the raft said
we're better to portage around, I said,
"No, let's go for it."
I changed places with the guy
who was on the back of the raft.
We started going down the rapids.
We hit a big boulder that caused the raft
to go perpendicular and I
went out into the water.
Even when I went out I thought I was
in for a great adventure.
But within just moments, I
knew I was in big trouble.
It didn't take long.
Even though I was doing
everything I was trained to do,
I eventually wore out
and was beat up enough
from the rocks and not
getting enough oxygen
that I knew that I was going to die.
I waited for it to happen,
and it was just moments.
Suddenly, I was just somewhere else.
(pensive music)
- My name is Virginia Drake.
I live in Kentucky, and I had
four near death experiences.
I was my mother's seventh miscarriage.
I was 1 pound and 7 ounces in 1951.
I should never have survived that.
(light music)
Then I drowned twice at
the age of 11 and 16.
At 46, I was a teacher.
I had two sons.
We looked like a wonderful, happy family.
We had the big house with the cars.
We had the pool.
We all should have been
happy, and none of us were.
The week before my heart attack,
I just literally had sat down to watch TV.
Nobody was there.
I think it was like an
Oprah Winfrey thing,
and I couldn't understand
why the guy was on there.
He kept saying, "I take 90 pills a day.
"Don't get a heart transplant."
I'd even look around thinking,
"Is he talking to me?"
And I would go on, and
then he'd say it again,
"Don't get a heart transplant."
In the middle of this
conversation I raised my hand
and I said, "I will not
get a heart transplant.
"I'm 46 years old.
"What are you trying to say?"
I just thought, is it in my mind?
What's going on?
Literally, a week later, I'm
laying in an emergency room,
and they're saying, "She's
having a heart attack."
That was the first day of summer break.
I had my son and a couple other kids,
and I kept getting really sick.
I felt a pain in my chest.
It felt like an anaconda
and an elephant sat on me,
but I didn't think anything about it,
because I'd just been
three weeks prior to that
in the emergency room
while I was teaching.
I had acid reflux.
They said, "You're going to feel
"like you're having a heart attack."
I was cleaning out trash,
and I was putting it
in the trash can, and I leaned over,
and the trash can filled up with water
where I was perspiring so
much from this heart attack.
I knew that wasn't correct.
So I went down to the principal's office,
and that's where my secretary Mary was.
They called my son and got
him to come take me home.
When I got there, I went straight upstairs
thinking, "I must have pulled a muscle,"
and went straight into the hot tub.
I vomited before I ever got there,
and I thought, "That's a little odd.
"Why would I vomit?"
I ran back up three more flights of steps
thinking, "Well, I'll
just lie down a minute."
Then my cats are the ones
that were the indicators.
They just kept staring at me.
I thought, "There's something wrong."
I heard a voice literally say,
"You need to go to the mirror
and look at the mirror."
When I went into my bathroom,
and I was very ashen gray,
and I heard a voice say,
"You need to go to the
emergency room now."
That voice was the same
voice that warned me
about having a car accident
almost 30 years before.
So I went on down the steps and I said,
"We need to go to the emergency room."
He got me in the car.
He dropped me off at the emergency room
in our little hospital.
I remember the lady at the desk said,
"Uh uh," and she kept looking at me.
I said, "Well, I'm
having some chest pains.
"I think I'm having acid reflux."
She said, "You need to go back there now."
I thought, "Well, see, it's a small town.
"They recognize me."
I'm really all about myself then.
I'm laying there, and I had a friend there
that I went to high school
with, who was a nurse.
She looked at me and she
said, "You need to lay down."
I said, "Okay."
That's when I left my body.
That's really when something inside of me
pulled me inside of myself.
I was viewing everything
through my solar plexus.
(serene music)
- My name is Judith White.
I actually had three
near death experiences,
one at 4 1/2, one at 5 1/2, and one at 35.
The two when I was really young,
I had to go to a hypnotherapist
to pull those out.
But I had read some books about children
who have had these experiences.
It was, "Oh my gosh,
that's me, that's me."
So that led me to go to a hypnotherapist
who pulled out the information.
It was due to illness,
both at 4 1/2 and 5 1/2.
At 35 I went on a ski trip with a friend.
We were on our way home and I was driving.
I could see that there was a drunk driving
in the T part of a road.
My part of the road ended in a stop sign.
I had slowed way down to 5 miles per hour.
I passed out before my car was hit.
I was hit as the driver.
Later I was told that there were five ways
I should have been killed instantly,
according to the doctors.
The seatbelt broke, and the steering wheel
did a different angle that's not common.
But the weird part of it was that
it was like I fell asleep,
but I didn't fall asleep.
The body somehow knew what was coming.
My ski partner was not hurt at all.
He said it took the ambulance
about an hour to get to us,
because we were way out in the country.
They'd keep trying to wake me up,
ask me who my dad and my mom.
I had a bad head concussion, obviously.
Then when we got to the hospital
they were cutting all
the clothes off of me
to see what kind of damage
they had to deal with.
They kept trying to wake me up,
and so I was brought back again.
But after that I went
into a coma, finally,
and was able to experience paradise.
(serene music)
- My name is Kimberly Clark Sharp.
I had a near death experience in 1970.
My life, before my near death experience,
was rock solid, stuck in
place, never going to change,
and that's how I wanted it.
I grew up in Kansas, lazy
Lutheran, and wealthy.
My dad was senior partner in a law firm
that represents, to this day,
all the tobacco companies
in the United States and Canada.
So we were materialistic, nonspiritual.
Loving family.
Coming to our home was like
checking in to a nice hotel.
I would easily describe myself
as shallow, materialistic,
nervous, anxious about society,
about how I was perceived,
self-aware, and really hated change.
Hated change so much
that I planned to marry
a boy I'd known since the 7th grade
because his last name was Clark,
and my last name was Clark.
I wouldn't have to change
the monograms on the towels.
I was stuck, and happily so.
One day while getting
my first auto license,
I was with my dad, in perfect health,
I would have to share
my father's perspective,
because I have no memory
from the day I died,
none at all.
According to my father, we were at the
Shawnee Mission, Kansas,
Department of Motor Vehicles.
Great place to have a
near death experience.
You saw my license photo,
you too would almost die.
There's just like so many
jokes I could think of.
Dead at the DMV.
It's just ridiculous.
But there I was, literally
waiting for my number to come up,
when I said to my father
that I was feeling funny
and I wanted to sit down.
There weren't any chairs apparently.
Got through the wait time.
Signed all the papers appropriately.
We were leaving the building,
we were at the doorway,
and he noticed that my
complexion was white on white.
Then I fell into and through
his arm, onto the sidewalk.
A uniformed nurse
happened to be passing by.
She saw that I had collapsed, ran over,
determined that I didn't have a heartbeat,
that I wasn't breathing.
So two phone calls were made,
one to a Kansas City, Missouri, hospital,
and the other to the Shawnee Mission
department of volunteer firefighters.
The firefighters arrived first.
They had a brand new portable ventilator.
It had two features.
One, of course, to ventilate,
which is what you want
when someone isn't breathing.
But sometimes people stop breathing
because their airways are
blocked with food in particular.
This portable ventilator
had a second function,
and that was to vacuum out
an object, clear the airway.
Then a switch could be
flipped and air would go in.
Ta da! Patient saved.
So they slapped this
airtight device to my face,
turned it on, and it was on vacuum mode.
So it violently sucked out whatever oxygen
was left in my body.
Already I hadn't been
breathing for a few minutes.
They knew immediately what had happened
because according to my father
even the ends of my
fingers turned blue black.
They flipped the switch,
started pumping the air in.
Well, my lungs had sufficiently collapsed,
our lungs being sticky suckers,
there needs to be a steady
pressure to unglue them.
A blast of air is not a steady pressure.
It's an insult at that point.
The air had to go somewhere.
My lungs couldn't take it all,
and I literally inflated
like a flesh balloon.
So then the firefighters gave up and said,
"I'm sorry, there's
nothing more we can do."
From the back of this now growing crowd,
a man came, bent down,
and did what we now call
citizen CPR.
He looked at my father and said,
"I'm not getting a," fill
in the blank expletive.
My father's memory ends there.
His memory picks up
again when the ambulance
had somehow arrived.
Apparently, I was breathing on my own.
I was still unconscious.
Body went into the back of the ambulance.
Off we went.
By medical report, my health sunk again
in the emergency room.
But by the end of the day,
I was out of the woods.
That's what my dad's report is.
I remember nothing of that day,
but everything that was within that day,
and that's what we now call
a near death experience.
(serene music)
- It's just not the near death experience,
or the aftereffects.
When you put the two together,
then you have a phenomenon,
a very unique phenomenon that
happens to a lot of people.
So obviously, a lot of
people don't have them.
But a lot of people do.
So we're talking about millions
and millions of people here.
We're not just talking about
a few hundred thousand.
- [Narrator] Coming up in Episode Two:
Out of body, the arrival, and the light.
(light upbeat music)
