Interview with Subject of Near Death Experience
Q: Tell us a little bit about yourself. Where did you grow up and did you believe in God or any kind of religion before your experience?
1A: I grew up in the southwestern part of the United States. Texas and Oklahoma. I was raised in a very conservative Christian family. Very religious, we were in church all the time. But, as I got older, I began to reject it. So by the time I was twenty I began looking at other religions. And by twenty-five, I had given up my quest. I thought all religions were stupid. And I really had no interest personally in religion. I just studied religion as an academic subject and had no personal interest at all.
Q: What do you do at work?
2A: I am a professor of history at the University of Illinois in Chicago. My fields that I teach are history of the Middle Ages, history of religions, and mysticism. Courses like that are what I teach.
Q: So you had near death experience. What happened?
3A: Yes, this was in 1988. I was in London to give a paper at a conference. But at the time, I had very severe asthma and it was a day when the air quality was very bad in London. They were giving warnings repeatedly that people with pulmonary diseases should not go out. But, as visitors, of course you don't get those kinds of warnings. And I was out anyway. And my asthma began to get worse and worse and worse. Before long, I was in very serious difficulty.
I think that an ambulance was called to my hotel. And I was taken to a nearby hospital in London. By the time I got there, my lungs were in pulmonary arrest. My lungs were blocked with mucous so I couldn't breathe. So I was put on a respirator. I was in a coma for two weeks. So, sometime in that two week period, as I was just at the point of death, this happened.
And it was very serious. When I went back to London a year later and talked to the nurses and doctors they told me that they fully expected me to die at any moment. My family back in Oklahoma was contacted about my condition and was told that someone should come and pick up my body and take it back. And the nursing strategy was based on the assumption I would die. So I was in very serious condition. So for one week my lungs were completely blocked. I was in a respirator.
But even then sometimes the respirator was shut down because of the blockage of my lungs. And then they would have to put the bag on me by hand and squeeze me by hand, just to keep me alive. After a week, my lungs started working again but there was some other problem. I had a terrible fever and so they put me in cold towels to try to cool my body off. I had some kind of seizure during that time. And so I was still very close to death during the second week.
But then, after the second week was over, my symptoms seemed to be better except that they didn't notice that, I think they described it, there was no spontaneous movement. As it turned out, during the two-week period I ended up paralyzed from my neck down and that was a major health problem when I came out of coma. But the experience itself was somewhere in that two-week period. I don't know. I was away (unconscious) so I don't know when.
Q: So, what did you see on the other side? Just describe it for us, what did you feel?
4A: All right. If you study much about near death experiences, you know about the tunnel and all that. I don't remember anything like that. My experience starts deeper into
the death experience as they are typically described. It really revolved around what is called life review. So the first thing that I remembered was just being in a place; it was a featureless place where everything was in the same color, sort of a blue-gray color. Well, it might be the sky, it might be the land; everything was all one color.