The case for hallucination
Could these experiences be mere hallucinations? That certainly seems a reasonable conclusion. Dr. Osis did his utmost to prove that this was all that was happening. He tried to think of every possible cause of hallucinations among the dying, and carefully checked for each one of them against his data. What did he find?
Anoxia
If you're suffering from "cerebral anoxia," your brain isn't getting enough oxygen to operate normally. Cerebral anoxia was often mentioned by doctors and nurses as one of the likeliest explanations for deathbed visions. To see whether this condition was the real cause, Osis separated all of the dying people who had had visions into two groups: those who, in the opinion of doctors and nurses, were suffering from cerebral anoxia, and those who weren't. It turned out that anoxia made no difference. The visions of dying patients with cerebral anoxia were indistiguishable from those of other patients.37
Cerebral anoxia could not, therefore, be the cause of these experiences.
Drugs
People who are dying sometimes receive large doses of drugs. As some drugs are known to cause hallucinations, could drugs be the explanation for these experiences? Osis looked into this possibility, with interesting results. Only a small minority of those who had deathbed-visions had been given drugs which could cause hallucinations. Furthermore, this minority had visions no more frequently than did other dying patients.38 Drugs could not be the cause of these experiences.
Fever
People with high fevers often become delirious and begin to hallucinate. Could this be the explanation?? Osis found that the majority of patients who had deathbed visions had normal temperatures, and only a small minority had fevers high enough to cause delirum.39 Fever cannot explain the experiences.
A "sick brain"?
Disease which affect the brain, or injuries to the brain, can cause hallucinations. Could this be the explanation for deathbed experiences? The answer turned out to be no, because only a small minority of those who had deathbed visionsー10-13 percentーhad such diseases or injuries in the first place.40 And this small group was, on the whole, less likely to have the kinds of deathbed experiences we've been talking about. Therefore such experiences are definitely not caused by sick brains.
The hallucinogenic index
Dr. Osis, a cautious man, decided to make a final decisive check before coming to any conclusions. From the group of dying patients who had had visions, he selected all who had any medical condition which might cause hallucinations, and compared these with the rest. (They included patients affected by drugs, or fever, alcoholism, senility, mental illness, kidney disease, brain disease or injury, or any condition, such as stroke, circulatory disease, hemorhage, bodily injury, or surgery, which might in any way reduce the supply of oxygen to the brain.)41 These patients did not have more experiences of "afterlife" visions than the others.42 In fact, Osis found some evidence that they had fewer: medical conditions that reduced clarity of mind tended instead to produce ordinary hallucinations that had nothing to do with death, such as reliving past memories.43 Medical factors do not cause afterlife visions.
Psychological and cultural factors
Does this mean, then, that afterlife visions are real? Not at all. Maybe people see, on their deathbeds, what their minds want them to see, or what their religious or cultural backgrounds have taught them to expect. Dr. Osis investigated these possibilities.
Stress
People who are under severe stress sometimes hallucinate. As dying patients may be under great stress in coping with their impending deaths and enduring intense pain, might not stress, rather than psychic perception of another existence, be the real cause of their afterlife visions? Osis gathered information from doctors and nurses on the patients' mood the day before the visions. He felt that patients who were in positive or normal moods were probably not under much stress, whereas those who were anxious, angry, or depressed, probably were. The results are interesting. Patients suffering from stress saw the same number of afterlife visions as patients who were not.44 Therefore stress cannot be the cause of such experiences.
Desire
Perhaps, then, the dying person's desires are responsible for the visions, and patients see what they want to see, just as someone dying of thirst in the desert might "see" water where it didn't really exist. To investigate this, Osis asked doctors and nurses the identifies of those people the patients had wanted to see the day before the hallucination. In some cases, there had been a very strong desire to see a particular person. But only 3 percent of the apparition cases involved such a person. In other words, such desires did not create the vast majority of afterlife visions.
Fear
Another powerful cause of hallucinations might be fear of dying. Patients who expected to die might try to relive their fear of death by creating otherworldly fantasies, whereas patients who expected to live would not. But the facts did not support this theory. Dying patients who expected to die and those who thought they would recover were equally likely to see landscape visions of the next world.45 The same proved true of apparitions: both kinds of patients were equally likely to see apparitions who had come to take them into death.46 And often, these apparitions contradicted expectations of both patients and doctors: patients who expected to live, with doctors who also expected them to live, would die after seeing apparitions calling them to another existence. The meaning of these findings id clear: fear cannot have been the cause of these visions.
Religious beliefs
It seems reasonable to expect that religious beliefs could be the cause of afterlife visions, and Osis looked into this possibility carefully, by comparing the deathbed experiences of Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Hindus, Muslims, and those who were not members of any religious group. All were equally likely to have afterlife visions. Religion, in other words, has no effect on these experiences.47 Interestingly, these religions hold very different views of the nature of life after death. Therefore, if religious ideas about "heaven" are the real cause of deathbed visions of the "next world," these visions should imitate such ideas. But this didn't happen. Only a small minority of landscape visions showed any influence from religious ideas. The great majorityー5 out of 6ーdid not.48
Are those who are very religious more likely to have deathbed visions? According to Osis, they aren't.49 How about belief in a life after death? Again, the answer is no.50 The conclusion is inescapable. Religious beliefs do not cause these experiences.
Osis found himself running out of "explanations," but he still had a couple of possibilities up his sleeve.
Education
How about education? Perhaps these experiences are caused by various superstitious beliefs about death. If so, relatively uneducated people should have most of them. They didn't though. The educated and the uneducated were equally likely to have afterlife visions.
Observer bias
Then isn"t it possible that the doctors and nurses who reported these experiences might be biased by their own beliefs? If, for example, they believed in life after death, or were religious, wouldn't this cause them to misinterpret what was happening to the patient so that it supported their own beliefs? This was carefully checked, but in vain. Osis discovered that the beliefs of doctors and nurses did not influence the kinds of experiences they reported.51
Cultural background
Cultural background can have a powerful influence on human attitudes and behavior. Therefore, if deathbed visions are merely delusions created by the human mind, we would expect them to be heavily affected by cultural back-ground. If, on the other hand, deathbed experiences are real, we would expect them to be relatively unaffected by this background. With this in mind, Osis gathered data on deathbed experiences from two radically different culturesーthe United States and India. His findings will give skeptics and unpleasant shock. Although there were some relatively minor differences between deathbed experiences of Americans and Indians, the core phenomena were the same. In both India and the United States:
- most of the apparitions seen by the dying were "other-worldly"ーdead close relatives and religious figures;
- most of them were there "to take the dying away to another existence";
- most of the dying were eager to accept the invitation and "go"ーby dying;
- most landscape visions were of "otherworldly" scenery of such compelling beauty that the dying did not wish to remain in this world;
- medically-inexplicable mood elevation occurred in some patients shortly before death.52
What can we conclude?
Our efforts to "explain" deathbed experiences by finding normal, ordinary causes for them have ended in complete failure. They cannot be explained by the medical condition of the dying person, nor by the state of his mind, nor by his religious or cultural background. How, then, can we explain them?
The only remaining possibility is that these are genuine psychic experiences. Being close to death can apparently create an altered state of consciousness, making the dying temporarily psychic and enabling the to see what normally, only mediums, psychics, and clairvoyants can see. Psychics have always claimed they can "see" the dead, who appear as vividly real to them as any person with a body. Some of them have "seen" the dead at deathbeds, waiting to guide the dying into the world in which they now live. In addition, some psychics claim to have seen the dead standing in the landscpe of this next world. The dying describe their apparitional visitors and their visions of otherworldly landscapes in the sae terms.
If we can accept these experiences as glimpses into the life beyond deathーand Osis's research strongly suggest that we have no alternativeーthen we are ready to venture further into this astounding world.