To date, researchers have focused mainly on verbal descriptions of near-death experiences (NDE) but have not studied the graphic representations of survivors’ accounts. Authors from Israel (Lerner) and Belgium (Laureys and Botbol-Baum) decided to fill this gap.
The scientists recruited fifteen volunteers and asked them to draw their NDEs using basic geometric shapes (for example, an ellipse, sphere, rectangle, square, or triangle), thus marking the space that surrounded them. Then the participants had to describe the color, the degree of illumination, saturation, contrast, transparency, and sharpness/blurriness.
Next, the volunteers were asked to depict any other sensations they experienced: light, sound, taste, touch, temperature, pressure, smell, pain, etc. Then they were asked to indicate their own location, direction, and speed with arrows.
The authors reduced the obtained results to three NDE models:
Model 1. Tunnel vision (people described the space as a cone, tunnel, funnel, corridor, tube, etc.), the absence of colored details (only black, white or gray), linear and continuous movement at high speed.
Model 2. Idealized scenes (garden of Eden, meetings with the dead, angels), slower pace of movement. Everything is in color here, but the figures are often transparent, or the colored shapes have blurred edges, iridescent or pastel shades. In terms of the shape of the space, the participants drew a circle, an ellipse or a sphere.
Model 3. Intense light that attracts like a magnet. The feeling of enlightenment, unconditional love, ego dissolution.
How would you draw your near-death experience if you had one?
The article was published in September 2022 on the website of the Catholic University of Louvain.
Get all the latest news about lucid dreams via our channels on Telegram, Instagram, Facebook
