The departure of a person to another world is often accompanied by the appearance in front of him of people, landscapes of amazing beauty, mythological or religious images, etc.
The first to try to study these phenomena at the beginning of the last century was the English physicist, as well as the famous researcher of paranormal phenomena, William Barrett.
The scientist's interest in this phenomenon appeared in 1924, when his wife, an obstetrician, once told him about one of her patients, who, a few days before her death, told her that she had seen amazingly beautiful places, as well as her father and sister, who already long gone.
Moreover, the woman perceived these dying visions as absolutely real. And apparently, they fascinated her so much that when they brought her her newly born child, she suddenly whispered: “I cannot stay here. If you saw what I saw, you would do the same."
Most of all, Barrett in this story was surprised by the fact that the woman in labor, as it turned out later, did not know anything about the death of her sister, who died shortly before the events described. And yet she claimed to have seen her ghost along with that of her father.
For a long time, none of the scientists paid attention to Barrett's research, considering them pseudoscientific and of no particular value. And only in the late 50s - early 60s of the last century, American parapsychologist Dr. Karlis Osis became interested in them.
Over the course of several years in the United States and India, he collected over 3,600 facts supporting the existence of deathbed visions and dying sensations.
The results obtained in the course of this work confirmed the research of Barrett, as well as other psychiatrists and psychologists working on this topic.
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Typically, near-death visions appear in those patients who die slowly, for example, from an incurable illness or severe wounds. And as a rule, with sudden death, they do not appear.
Most often, ghosts of deceased relatives appear on their deathbed: parents, children, brothers or sisters, husband or wife. Sometimes, on the eve of death, religious images or deities appear: angels, Jesus, Virgin Mary, Krishna, etc.
These visions are likely to facilitate the transition of the dying person to another world. Their appearance gives dying people a feeling of extraordinary happiness, especially among people who sincerely believe in the existence of an afterlife.
It was noticed that in a patient who is in a depressed state or experiencing excruciating pain, after visions, the mood changes dramatically for the better. Moreover, sometimes their pain even disappears for a while.
An analysis of dying visions shows that about a third of them are represented by pictures of an unearthly world, which seems quite real to a dying person. In this new world, he sees endless meadows or gardens, rivers, bridges, as well as palaces or other architectural structures of amazing beauty. Sometimes ghosts and spirits may be present in the other world.
The consequence of this visit to a new wonderful world is a feeling of happiness from moving closer to these wonderful places.
True, Osis once faced the fact when a dying woman saw something that looked like hell. But, as the researcher says, apparently, her conscience was weighed down by a huge load of sins.
In the course of research on this phenomenon, it was found that near-death visions usually last for a short time: about half of them appear in front of the dying person for about 5 minutes, 17% take 6 to 15 minutes, and about 17% stretch for more than an hour.
And usually death images appear a few minutes before leaving for another world. So, about 76% of all patients died within 10 minutes after the vision appeared in front of them, the rest after that lived for several more hours.
Based on the above studies, Osis came to the conclusion that the appearance or absence of visions almost does not depend on the physical condition of the patient.
There are facts when a practically recovered person had visions and after that he suddenly fell into a coma and died.
To explain this fairly widespread phenomenon, scientists have put forward several hypotheses.
So, some of them try to explain the dying visions by completely natural reasons: exposure to the brain of drugs, high body temperature, hallucinations resulting from the disease, oxygen starvation of the brain, etc.
There is no doubt that all these factors can contribute to the appearance of all kinds of hallucinations. However, Osis found that near-death visions usually appear in patients who are fully conscious. And it is impossible to explain the appearance of pictures surprising in terms of clarity only by those natural reasons mentioned above.
Bernatsky Anatoly