For the first 25 years of my life, I have been a die-hard no-nonsense rationalist. The physical world, as I could see it around me, was the only valid reality. Talk about the metaphysical was met with my condescension and arrogance. My mom – a trained economist turned alternative medicine practitioner – always had an inclination toward the ethereal, but she avoided to discuss it with me for good reasons.
The first crack in my world view appeared when I had a dream unlike any other I ever had before. I was in a city I didn’t know to visit a woman I had met during a stay in Brazil several years before. At that point we hadn’t spoken for years, and I didn’t think about her at all during my daily life. But here I was in my dream, walking past the laboratory I knew she was working in, watching her going about her work from an elevated position through a street-level window. It was the most surreal experience and at the same time there was an intense quality to it that set it apart from any other dream I had had before.
When I woke up, I needed a couple of minutes to process what I had just experienced. Why was this dream so different? It felt like I had transgressed an invisible line between dream and reality which gave my experience a sense of directness and urgency that I had never felt before. Without hesitating, I picked up my laptop, looked up her email address and started to write about what had just happened to me.
It took less than a day for me to receive a reply. She had dreamt the same thing. I sat in front of my computer, dumbfounded and motionless. This couldn’t be true. Was she making fun of me? I barely knew her at that point, but she never struck me as someone who would joke about something like that. Ready to hit the reply button, I stopped myself midway. This didn’t seem to be something that needed to be dissected and discussed in detail. It was a shared experience that didn’t need any further exploration. In fact, trying to rationalize it might even take away the magic. We didn’t speak to each other after that for a long time.
Two years later I visited the place I had dreamt of. It was completely different from what I had seen in my dream, but one thing was exactly the same: my feelings for the woman who had invited me to come here. It was destined to happen for me to be here. The dream I had was nothing else than a representation of a reality that was destined to unfold. This made me question my concept of time. What we are perceiving as a sequential development could actually be an illusion. I started to think of dreams as portals to an all-encompassing sphere that comprises the here and now, but also the past and the future. Perhaps, I started to think, when we leave this world, we will become part of this ether and leave the restrictions that time and space impose on our earthly existence.
I came across this concept recently, when I read “After” by Dr. Bruce Greyson. He is considered one of the leading experts on so-called near-death experiences and spent his entire career researching cases of patients who have tread the line between life and death. His findings are remarkable. Not only are the stories that people are telling surprisingly similar, but they are also comparable across cultures and beliefs. This seems to exclude the possibility that our brains have been primed during our lives for certain experiences, which suggests that these experiences may not simply be the result of cultural conditioning or personal expectations. Instead, they point to something more universal and fundamental about the nature of consciousness and what might lie beyond.
One of the most common themes in near-death experiences are out-of-body experiences, during which people see themselves lying on an operating table while doctors are trying to save their lives. Most describe these experiences as “realer than real”, more detailed and intense than our earthly experiences. Most surprisingly, they can recount details that they could never have seen, like a stain on the doctor’s tie, or even the thoughts and conversations of people sitting in nearby rooms. Many remember a feeling of unwillingness or disgust when they were forced to re-enter their physical bodies.
Needless to say that the concept of a soul leaving the body at the time of death has been a constant in religious narratives for ages. Having been a life-long critic of the church, all discussions of an afterlife had always seemed somewhat reductive and cliché to me. Reading the book made me think that these experiences are most likely older than any religion, probably older than civilization itself. An important part of the scientific community dismisses near-death experiences as figments of the imagination, an illusion caused by a dying brain in distress. I do not want to discount that view. At the same time, I have become more and more convinced that there is more to life than what we can perceive with our physical senses or explain through science alone. One day, every one of us will find out.
Inner View 