Another friend, Hazel R., a chemist, told me of an experience she had many years ago, also when she was in labor. She was offered heroin for her pain (this was common in England in those days), and as the heroin took effect, she felt herself floating upwards, coming to rest beneath the ceiling in the corner of the delivery room. She saw her body beneath her, and she had no pain whatever—she felt that the pain had stayed in the body below her. She also had a sense of great visual and intellectual acuity: she felt that she could easily solve any problem (unfortunately, she said wryly, no problem presented itself). As the heroin wore off, she returned to her body and its violent contractions and pain. When her obstetrician told her she could have a further dose, she asked if it could affect the baby adversely. Once she was reassured that it would not, she assented to a second dose, and again she enjoyed a detachment from her body and its labor pains, as well as a feeling of supernal mental clarity.73 Although this occurred more than fifty years ago, Hazel still remembers every detail.
It is not easy to imagine such detachment from the body if one has never experienced it. I have never had an OBE myself, but I was once involved in a remarkably simple experiment which showed me
how easily one’s sense of self can be detached from one’s body and “reembodied” in a robot. The robot was a massive metal figure with video cameras for
“eyes” and lobsterlike claws for “hands,” designed for training astronauts to operate similar machines in space. I donned goggles connected to the video cameras, so that in
effect I was seeing the world through the robot’s eyes, and I inserted my hands into gloves with sensors that would register my movements and transmit them to the robot’s claws. As soon
as I was connected, looking out through the robot’s eyes, I had the odd experience of seeing, a few feet to my left, an oddly small figure (did it seem small because I, embodied in the robot,
was now so large?) sitting in a chair and wearing goggles and gloves, a vacated figure who I realized, with a start, must be
Tony Cicoria, a surgeon, was struck by lightning a few years ago and suffered a cardiac arrest. (I tell his whole, complex story
in
I remember a flash of light . . . hit me in the face. Next thing I remember, I was flying backwards . . . [then] I was flying forwards. I saw my own body on the ground. I said to myself, “Oh shit, I’m dead.” I saw people converging on the body. I saw a woman . . . position herself over my body, give it CPR.
Cicoria’s OBE became more complex. “There was a bluish-white light . . . an enormous feeling of well-being and grace”; he felt he was being drawn into heaven (his OBE had evolved into a “near-death experience,” which is not the case with most OBEs), and then—it could have been little more than thirty or forty seconds from the moment he was struck by lightning—“Slam! I was back.”
The term “near-death experience” (NDE) was introduced by Raymond Moody in his 1975 book
