Then, in February 2001, my family travelled to Norway, to the Peer Gynt region, where my great-great grandfather had built a hytte. For six years, I became more and more lost and paranoid, a stranger to myself. Back then, I had suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder for six years, following a couple of LSD bad trips when I was a teenager. They’re not always easy, and the re-entry to ordinary life can be bumpy.Ģ0 years ago, I had what could be described as a near-death experience on the side of a mountain. She came back from this experience understandably crushed, and spent the next few decades researching distressing NDEs. They told her that neither she, nor her child, nor anything else in her life was real. Three giant circles hovered above her, switching colour from black to white. She had an NDE in 1962, when in labour, during which her soul left her body and found itself in a dark place. Who would buy a book called Um…WTF was that?įor some perverse reason, I find myself more drawn to the ‘experiencers’ who are not totally at peace, nor totally certain what they encountered. The more certain their accounts, the more successful their books, which have reassuring titles like Proof of Heaven, Heaven is Real, and I’ve Definitely Been to Heaven. The speakers have come back from death with shiny smiles that beam certainty. In general, the reports are resolutely cheerful. This being the middle of a global lockdown, it’s a virtual conference, and I’m floating from zoom room to room like Dante in limbo, hearing the disembodied souls’ accounts of life on the other side. The official title of the gathering is the annual conference of the International Association of Near-Death Studies (IANDS), which brings together researchers into near-death experiences (NDEs) and ‘experiencers’ themselves, who have come back from what in some cases would technically be described as death, with vivid accounts of journeys beyond the veil. It’s June 2020, the middle of the COVID pandemic, and I’m in a room full of dead people. I’m worried that if I tell people the truth, they’ll put me in a strait-jacket.
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