Hallucinations полностью

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 me.

Tony Cicoria, a surgeon, was struck by lightning a few years ago and suffered a cardiac arrest. (I tell his whole, complex story in Musicophilia.) He recounted this to me:

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 Life After Life. Moody, culling information from many interviewees, delineated a remarkably uniform and stereotyped set of experiences common to many NDEs. A majority of people felt that they were being drawn into a dark tunnel and then propelled towards a brightness (which some interviewees called “a being of light”); and, finally, they sensed a limit or barrier ahead — most interpreted this as the boundary between life and death. Some experienced a rapid replay or review of events in their lives; others saw friends and relatives. In a typical NDE, all this was suffused with a sense of peace and joy so intense that being “forced back” (into one’s body, into life) might be accompanied by a strong sense of regret. Such experiences were felt as real — “more real than real,” as was often commented. Many of Moody’s interviewees favored a supernatural interpretation for these remarkable experiences, but others have increasingly tended to regard them as hallucinations, albeit of an extraordinarily complex kind. A number of researchers have sought a natural explanation in terms of brain activity and blood flow, since NDEs are especially associated with cardiac arrest and may also occur in faints, when blood pressure plunges, the face becomes ashen, and the head and brain are drained of blood.

Kevin Nelson and his colleagues at the University of Kentucky have presented evidence suggesting that, with the compromise of cerebral blood flow, there is a dissociation of consciousness so that, although awake, the subjects are paralyzed and subject to the dreamlike hallucinations characteristic of REM sleep (“REM intrusions”) — in a state, therefore, with resemblances to sleep paralysis (NDEs are also commoner in people prone to sleep paralysis). Added to this are various special features: the “dark tunnel” is correlated, Nelson feels, with the compromise of blood flow to the retinas (this is well known to produce a constriction of the visual fields, or tunnel vision, and may occur in pilots subjected to high g-stresses). The “bright light” Nelson correlates with a flow of neuronal excitement moving from a part of the brain stem (the pons) to subcortical visual relay stations and then to the occipital cortex. Added to all these neurophysiological changes may be a sense of terror and awe going with the knowledge that one is undergoing a mortal crisis — some subjects have actually heard themselves pronounced dead — and the wish that dying, if imminent and inevitable, should be peaceful and perhaps a passage to a life after death.