Can you share the death experience of others just by being in close proximity?
Not a new concept according to this article, but it was new to me.
BEYOND GOODBYE
Some people not only share their life but their moment of death with loved ones. Are these 'shared-death experiences' real or a mirage?
By John Blake
William Peters was working as a volunteer in a hospice when he had a strange encounter with a dying man that changed his life.
The man’s name was Ron, and he was a former Merchant Marine who was afflicted with stomach cancer. Peters says he would spend up to three hours a day at Ron’s bedside, talking to and reading adventure stories to him because few family or friends visited.
When Peters plopped by Ron’s beside around lunch one day, the frail man was semi-conscious. Peters read passages from Jack London’s “Call of the Wild” as the frail man struggled to hang on. What happened next, Peters says, was inexplicable.
Peters says he felt a force jerk his spirit upward, out of his body. He floated above Ron’s bedside, looking down at the dying man. Then he glanced next to him to discover Ron floating alongside him, looking at the same scene below.
“He looked at me and he gave me this happy, contented look as if he was telling me, ‘Check this out. Here we are,’ ’’ Peters says.
Peters says he then felt his spirit drop into his body again. The experience was over in a flash. Ron died soon afterward, but Peters’ questions about that day lingered. He didn’t know what to call that moment but he eventually learned that it wasn’t unique. Peters had a “shared-death experience.”
Most of us have heard of near-death experiences. The stories of people who died and returned to life with tales of floating through a tunnel to a distant light have become a part of popular culture. Yet there is another category of near-death experiences that are, in some ways, even more puzzling.
Stories about shared-death experiences have been circulating since the late 19th century, say those who study the phenomenon. The twist in shared-death stories is that it’s not just the people at the edge of death that get a glimpse of the afterlife. Those near them, either physically or emotionally, also experience the sensations of dying.
These shared-death accounts come from assorted sources: soldiers watching comrades die on the battlefield, hospice nurses, people holding death vigils at the bedside of their loved ones. All tell similar stories with the same message: People don’t die alone. Some somehow find a way to share their passage to the other side.
Raymond Moody coined the concept, "shared-death experiences" after spending over 20 years collecting stories about the afterlife.
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Raymond Moody introduced the concept of the shared-death experience in his 2009 book “Glimpses of Eternity.” He first started collecting stories of people who died and returned to life while he was in medical school. Skeptics have dismissed tales of the afterlife as hallucinations triggered by anesthesia or “anoxia,” a loss of oxygen to the brain that some people experience when they’re near death.
But Moody says you can’t explain away shared-death experiences by citing anoxia or anesthesia.
“We don’t have that option in shared-death experiences because the bystanders aren’t ill or injured, and yet they experience the same kind of things,” Moody says.
Skeptics, though, say people reporting shared-death experiences are not impartial observers. Their perceptions are distorted by grief. Joe Nickell, a noted investigator into the paranormal, says people who’ve watched others die sometimes experience their own form of trauma.
They don’t intend to, but some reinvent the moment of their loss to make it more acceptable.
“If you’re having a death vigil and your loved one dies, wouldn’t it be great to have a great story to tell that would make everyone happy and tell them that ‘Uncle John’ went to heaven, and I saw his soul leave and I saw him smile,” says Nickell, who is also an investigative writer for the journal Skeptical Inquirer, which offers scientific evaluations of extraordinary claims.
Nickell says shared-death experiences are not proof of an afterlife, but of a psychological truism.
“If you’re looking for something hard enough you’ll find it,” Nickell says. “This is well known to any psychologist or psychiatrist.”
Symptoms of a near-death experience
The term shared-death experience may be new, but it went by different names centuries ago. The Society for Psychical Research in London documented shared-death experiences in the late 1800s, dubbing them “death-bed visions” or “death-bed coincidences,” researchers say.
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Originally Posted by calikid
