One day, Mr. Nam got sick. His medications didn’t help. The patient’s condition was deteriorating, and his family was preparing to lose him. However, at dawn, he suddenly asked for rice porridge, sat up in bed, and told of two messengers from the underworld who had just accompanied him on an otherworldly journey – in the end, he was informed that his life expectancy had been increased and was told to return.
This is one of the stories from the book Tales from the Green Hills. Korean researcher Kun Hwang notes that there is much evidence of near-death experiences (NDEs) preserved in the legends of his people, and he gives a number of examples. As the author adds, NDEs usually include out-of-body experiences, flying through a tunnel, meeting with beings of light, etc. This collection of fairy tales reflecting the customs of Korean society of the XVIII-XIX centuries is filled with such stories.
NDEs occur during a clinically diagnosed death or life-threatening coma as a result of an accident or illness. The researcher (the doctor himself) compared the work of doctors to a tug of war against the grim reaper: if the doctors win, the victim will remain alive; if they lose, the patient will die. But in the case of successful rehabilitation, as the author notes, rescued people talk about NDEs fairly often.
We should add that the NDE is one of the phase states, which also include lucid dreams (LDs), sleep paralysis, false awakenings, and out-of-body experiences. In one of the Phase Research Center experiments, lucid dreamers intentionally reproduced classic NDE scenarios by flying through a tunnel in an LD.
Have you ever seen works of art that reliably describe phase states?
The article was published in June 2023 in the Journal of Trauma and Injury.
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