Saturday 3 September 2011

Near Death Experiences

Out of Body or Near Death Experiences
Not quite ready yet?
From time immemorial people have claimed to have had out of body experiences – many at the point of death (or almost dying). Having some kind of experience is acceptable to those in the scientific community but the significance of it and why or what is happening is the central argument.  
It is an area that fascinates and confounds science and there are as many disbelievers of the ‘out of body’ part of it as there are believers. Amongst the disbelievers I count myself as one. I certainly had an experience of some kind when I a life threatening event happened to me some years ago but I put it down to my body shutting down at the time. See, I am a natural born cynic and do not believe anything that cannot be proved scientifically speaking. For a long time afterward I pondered the incident but my medical background came up with ways for me to dismiss what I experienced.
However I can and do use the phenomena in my writing. Because I am a writer and work in the world of story and suspension of disbelief! It is exactly the notion that one cannot completely dismiss these ideas that prove such fertile ground for thriller/horror writers. And there is no shortage of people who can attest to the fact that strange things have happened to them. The crazy truth is that we can neither prove nor disprove the existence of life after death – it is purely a belief thing – so we can never know whether the ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ is really what happens or whether distressed bodily functions are to blame for hallucinations.
But there is the essence of the dilemma and that makes for intriguing supernatural thriller writing!

5 comments:

  1. Shirley MacLaine, the actress, is a great believer in out of body experiences. There was a documentary on TV several years ago, when she explained it at great length. It was very interesting. I recall it was called 'Out on a Limb'.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Good points here. I don't believe - yet - but I want to. I really really want this to be real, but I'm like you. I need proof. Thank goodness for fiction :-)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Exploring that which we disbelieve is part of the deliciousness of writing for me.

    ReplyDelete