In the news these days: CNN quotes Dr. Nelson, who claims that near death experiences can be explained through mechanisms of REM sleep. The story features a woman who had recently experienced a near death episode, and then a short interview with Dr. Kevin Nelson, a neurologist from Louisville, Kentucky.
In 2007 Dr. Nelson published an interesting paper in the prestigious journal Neurology titled “Out-of-body experience and arousal”. He found that people who have experienced near death also had a tendency for other state dissociations such as out-of-body experiences, as well as other REM intrusions, most notably, sleep paralysis.
I find it fascinating that REM sleep mechanisms seem to be interwoven and present to varying degrees in all other brain states, even outside of sleep. However, if we equate all dream-like activity with REM, it is inevitable that we will find it everywhere. After all, REM state is not all that different from waking state, and phenomenologically, we can think of numerous examples of dream-like experiences in waking life, ranging from intense hypnagogic hallucinations to more subtle forms of day-dreaming, fantasizing and deja vu.
Near-death experiences are an integral part of many cultural beliefs about soul, afterlife and transitional spaces. Dreaming too is a vast repository of beliefs and practices. In fact, I wonder if such a sharp separation between dreaming and waking, between ‘normal’ and ‘altered’ states of consciousness is not a product of Cartesian dualism enhanced by radical materialism of our machinic age… ?
Finally, just because we can describe the function of our visual system it does not follow that we can understand what we see. Similarly, by describing mechanisms of dreaming or near death experiences we don’t necessarily come closer to understanding its real causes.
