Near-death experiences are indeed the only more or less straightforward glimpse of life after death. Unfortunately, we will now be discussing just that phenomenon. “Unfortunately” because you will have to examine its nature from a completely different point of view. Simply put, it is clear that both out-of-body experience and lucid dreaming are of the same nature as near-death experiences at clinical death (remspace.net). However, the first two somehow fail to prove the existence of an afterlife. They even refute some commonly advanced claims. Before examining the issue, I would like to start by saying upfront that I am not trying to prove that there is no afterlife. I would only like to demonstrate that one of the phenomena associated with the life-after-death issue may possibly be of a wholly other essence and significance. 

Perhaps we could start by saying that from a purely logical point of view, it would be incorrect to consider “near-death” experiences to happen near the moment of actual death, as accounts of them are always related by living people… Maybe this all has more to do with life than death. I would also like to note that Raymond Moody, whose book we will be citing, did not go so far as to state that the accounts he gathered were unambiguously conclusive evidence of the survival of the soul and life after death. He merely made a hypothesis and backed it up using the excellent testimonies he collected. 

You’ll have to admit that if you hadn’t known beforehand that the following accounts belonged to people who were at the edge of death, it would have been easy to assume that they were written by alive-and-well practitioners of out-of-body experience (OBE) or lucid dreams: 

(“Life after Life”, Raymond A. Moody) 

…I could feel myself moving out of my body and sliding down between the mattress and the rail on the side of the bed-actually it seemed as if I went through the rail-on down to the floor. Then, I started rising upward, slowly… 

(“Life after Life”, Raymond A. Moody) 

… At that point, I kind of lost my sense of time, and I lost my physical reality as far as my body is concerned-I lost touch with my body. My being or my self or my spirit, or whatever you would like to label it-I could sort of feel it rise out of me, out through my head. And it wasn’t anything that hurt, it was just sort of like a lifting and it being above me… 

(“Life after Life”, Raymond A. Moody) 

… I was above the table, and I could see everything they were doing. I knew that I was dying, that this would be it. Yet, I was concerned about my children, about who would take care of them. So, I was not ready to go… 

Conversely, when reading the experiences of lucid dreams, one might simply assume that they are descriptions of situations experienced at the moment of death, especially considering the fact that the feeling of imminent death is one of the most common sensations experienced while out-of-body. 

During an uncontrolled exit from the body, that which you fear or expect the most is exactly what will happen to you. And that’s where reports of gods, flights of the soul, and UFOs come from. To put it simply, exit from the body occurs when the conscious mind is “on”, but the body is “off”. Apparently, the same thing can happen while under anesthesia or dying, and often does. That is, people fall into the same state that practitioners of out-of-body travel do. If you happened to find yourself in such a situation while on the operating table or during a serious illness, in the overwhelming majority of cases your thoughts would turn to God, angels, and a tunnel with a bright light at the end – which is exactly what you would get.