Near-death association seeks original stories for television series

May 31, 1:32 AMParanormal News ExaminerRoger Marsh

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Ascent of the Blessed by Hieronymus Bosch. Wikipedia.

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Ever had a near-death experience? Want to share your story?

The International Association for Near-Death Studies, Inc. has launched a project that may lead to a television series. The association is now collecting original near-death experience stories which they will submit to a television production company.

This Durham, NC, association is located in the same building as the Rhine Research Center.

From their press release, they indicate that the producers are interested in the following types of experiences:

• NDE
• Near-death-like experiences
• Shared near-death experiences
• Distressing near-death experiences
• Out-of-body experiences (without other elements of an NDE)
• Tunnel experiences
• Angel experiences
• Light beings experiences
• Light experiences (without other elements of an NDE)
• Life review experiences
• Meetings with dead relatives
• After-death communication
• Apparitions

More from the press release follows:

If you have had an experience like any of these--especially if your life has been strongly affected by it--and would like to have it considered as the basis for an episode, please let IANDS know (see below).

This is a preliminary request for experiences, as there is no guarantee that the series will be picked up for broadcasting. Your willingness to participate does not ensure that your experience will be included, as we cannot guarantee that it will be selected. The producers, not IANDS, will select the accounts they wish to use. If your experience is selected, there is no guarantee that you will appear on camera.

We will review all experience accounts that come to the office. Someone will notify you if the TV producer wants to talk with you. Please DO NOT call the IANDS office to check on your status. If the producer wants to talk with you, you will be notified; if you do not receive a message that the producer wants to talk with you, the producer has decided not to use your experience.

We will post an announcement on the IANDS website when we know whether the series has been picked up for broadcasting.

Here's how to send your experience for consideration:

Send us an email or letter, including these four things:
• your name, address, phone number, and email address if you have one
• a full description of your experience and its impact on your life
• a statement that you agree to having your experience considered for a TV show
• a statement that you agree not to submit your experience to any other TV show unless it is not selected by these producers

If you are using email, send to office@iands.org.

If you use regular mail, send the letter to:

IANDS
2741 Campus Walk Ave
Durham, NC 27705-8878
USA
Be sure to include the description of your experience.

Back in April, I wrote about my own near-death experience - so I will re-run that story here as a tie-in to this story.

Sacred Dialogue

The following is the incedible story of Mr. Dean, a man very near death lying in bed at an Olean, NY, nursing home in 1978. This story is pulled from my recently released Ebook, Sacred Dialogue: Tuning into Mother Nature's Universal Broadcast Band.

Image: From the cover of the Ebook, Sacred Dialogue; artwork by Amber Marsh.

Philosophy of Death

In April 1978 and during my senior year as a mass communications undergraduate student at St. Bonaventure University, I was living off campus with two roommates. One of those roommates, Tom, was in my Philosophy of Death class, which required we visit a nursing home patient weekly. My second roommate, Dan, joined us in our volunteer activity.

Tom was assigned to visit a woman. I was assigned to visit Mr. Jenkins in another room. When Dan came along one evening, he decided to visit weekly with Mr. Jenkins’ roommate, Mr. Dean. We stayed each week for about an hour talking with the men. The nursing staff said that the two men did not have visitors. While Mr. Jenkins could leave his room in a wheelchair, Mr. Dean was confined to bed. We made longer and more frequent visits later when Mr. Dean had a leg removed and he seemed to be very depressed about it.

Strange dreams

At 6 p.m. on April 4 I met my girlfriend in the campus library smoking room and we walked to Hickey Memorial Dining Hall for dinner. About 6:30 p.m., I walked home alone and found my roommates watching television. I sat and talked with them for about a half hour, until a point I began to feel very tired. I excused myself and went into my bedroom, turned on some music with head phones, and laid on the bed. A few minutes later I felt more tired and turned off the music and the overhead light and climbed back into bed. I slept from about 7 p.m. Tuesday to 3 a.m. Wednesday.

During that time I recall waking up periodically with a feeling as though I weighed 600 pounds, that I could not move. I found myself feeling as though I was shooting through space and time, with blackness all around me, spinning, but not feeling dizzy. I had a feeling as though Mr. Dean was somehow right alongside me and that we were traveling through this together.

At some point during this sleep session, I felt a slowing down of this process as we came upon a brilliant white light. I remember communicating with Mr. Dean telepathically and telling him to go into the light. He was no longer afraid and moved toward and into the light and disappeared.

In the dream state, I then found myself sitting in Mr. Dean’s room in a morning light. I was sitting in a chair at the table by the window and looked across the room at the two beds where he and Mr. Jenkins should be laying. I looked at Mr. Dean’s bed, but instead of seeing him lying there, I saw another man that I did not know. Mr. Jenkins was sleeping in the first bed. Just then a nurse came into the room and walked up to me. I asked her where Mr. Dean was. She explained that he died during the evening hours and Mr. Jenkins had been asleep. Since the bed space was needed for new patients, they removed the body, changed the linens, and quietly put the new patient into Mr. Dean’s bed. But they had forgotten one important step, she said.

They had not woken up Mr. Jenkins and told him about Mr. Dean’s death. Mr. Jenkins woke up later in the night on his own, saw the new person in his room, and assumed that his friend had died. They heard him crying and came to his bedside to explain what had happened.

Upon waking

With that explanation, the dream ended and I woke in my bed in my apartment. It was 3 a.m. I got up and worked on a paper due later that day for a few hours, then went back to sleep. Just after my 1:30 Shaw class, I met my roommates on campus and told them about my dream. They were about to bicycle into town, so I asked them to stop by the home and check in on Mr. Dean. They never stopped.

Then on Thursday, April 6, in my 4 p.m. Philosophy of Death class, Dr. Bean announced that the female patient Tom was visiting had passed away. He also said that Mr. Dean had died Tuesday, April 4 at 11:30 p.m.

Nursing home visit

I thought about Mr. Dean’s death and realized that I had been asleep at the time of his death and feeling as though I was traveling with him to this great white light. The coincidence bothered me. The following day I visited the nursing home and spoke with the senior nurse on duty.

The woman recognized me as one of the visiting students, and I reminded her that I had been visiting both Mr. Jenkins and Mr. Dean for several months. I wanted any details about Mr. Dean’s death that she might offer me. The woman acknowledged his death, but said that something awful had happened.

She explained that there was a long waiting list for beds in this facility, and that when Mr. Dean died during the night, they removed the body from the room, changed the linens on the bed, and moved another patient into the room. Throughout the switch, she said, Mr. Jenkins remained asleep.

The problem, she said, was that no one woke up Mr. Jenkins to tell him about Mr. Dean’s death.

Then a few hours later, she said, Mr. Jenkins woke up and noticed that the man he was sharing the room with was not Mr. Dean, and he assumed that his friend had died. This upset him very much, she said, and he began crying. A nurse on duty overheard the crying, and went in to check on him and gave him the details of what happened earlier in the night.

The similarity to what this woman said actually happened and to my dream was overwhelming. Just when I had convinced myself that I most likely just dreamed about moving through space and time with Mr. Dean to the white light, the matching details about the second piece of my dream with reality stopped me in my tracks. It seemed to me at the time that the piece of my dream about the nurse telling me what happened was deliberately put in place to allow me to reassure myself that the first part – moving along with Mr. Dean – was in fact a reality.

Back in class

I needed somehow to talk about what had happened and decided that the university was the best place. I spoke up at the end of the next Philosophy of Death class and told my story. The professor laughed right out loud in the classroom. His laughter then extended to the students sitting around me.

Class was over and everyone moved out of the room. I sat there thinking about why we were all here, why we were all taking the class in the first place, and that somehow I had been touched by the death process – certainly a story worth discussing in a university setting.

But I had been publicity ridiculed, by the professor himself no less, and sheepishly walked out of the classroom deciding it best to keep the story to myself.

Open for discussion

More research in this area is needed to understand how or why scenes like this play out. I bring up this story in particular, for the study of how mediums receive information, as it appeared as though I could have been communicating with a living person, and then stayed along for the ride as he passed over. The resulting conclusion to the dream experience seemed somehow like a final message, filling me in on the human side of the drama, facts that I would not know until several days later when the exact details were delivered by a member of the nursing staff.