![]() NDEs can be either positive or negative experiences. Reduced blood flow to the visual periphery of the retina means vision loss occurs there first. There are some underlying physiological explanations for these perceptions, such as progressively narrowing tunnel vision. They might include meeting loved ones, living or dead, or spiritual beings such as angels a Proustian recollection or even review of lifetime memories, both good and bad (“my life flashed in front of my eyes”) or a distorted sense of time and space. They share broad commonalities-becoming pain-free, seeing a bright light at the end of a tunnel and other visual phenomena, detaching from one’s body and floating above it, or even flying off into space (out-of-body experiences). NDEs are not fancy flights of the imagination. These powerful, mystical experiences can lead to permanent transformation of their lives. Thousands of survivors of these harrowing touch-and-go situations tell of leaving their damaged bodies behind and encountering a realm beyond everyday existence, unconstrained by the usual boundaries of space and time. About one in 10 patients with cardiac arrest in a hospital setting undergoes such an episode. Near-death experiences, or NDEs, are triggered during singular life-threatening episodes when the body is injured by blunt trauma, a heart attack, asphyxia, shock, and so on. And then he knew that there was where he was going.” The description embraces elements of a classic near-death experience: the darkness, the cessation of pain, the emerging into the light and then a feeling of peacefulness. The two take off and fly together through a storm with rain so thick “it seemed like flying through a waterfall” until the plane emerges into the light: before them, “unbelievably white in the sun, was the square top of Kilimanjaro. Suddenly, his pain vanishes, and Compie, a bush pilot, arrives to rescue him. ![]() ![]() The protagonist, stricken by gangrene, knows he is dying. Years later Hemingway adapted his own experience-that of the soul leaving the body, taking flight and then returning-for his famous short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” about an African safari gone disastrously wrong. ![]() If I should have died it would have been very easy for me. A young Ernest Hemingway, badly injured by an exploding shell on a World War I battlefield, wrote in a letter home that “dying is a very simple thing. ![]()
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