- Near-death experiences are triggered during singular life-threatening episodes when the body is injured by a heart attack, shock, or blunt trauma such as an explosion or a fall.
- These events share broad commonalities: becoming pain-free, seeing a bright light at the end of a tunnel, or detaching from one’s body and floating above it and even flying off into space.
- Why the mind should experience the struggle to sustain its operations in the face of a loss of blood flow and oxygen as positive and blissful rather than as panic-inducing remains a mystery.
A young Ernest Hemingway, badly injured by an exploding shell on a World War I battlefield, wrote in a letter home that “dying is a very simple thing. I’ve looked at death, and really I know. If I should have died it would have been very easy for me. Quite the easiest thing I ever did.”
Years later Hemingway adapted his own experience—that of the soul leaving the body, taking flight and then returning—for his famous short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” about an African safari gone disastrously wrong.
The protagonist, stricken by gangrene, knows he is dying. Suddenly, his pain vanishes, and Compie, a bush pilot, arrives to rescue him. The two take off and fly together through a storm with rain so thick “it seemed like flying through a waterfall”
until the plane emerges into the light: before them, “unbelievably white in the sun, was the square top of Kilimanjaro. And then he knew that there was where he was going.” The description embraces elements of a classic near-death experience: the darkness, the cessation of pain, the emerging into the light and then a feeling of peacefulness.
