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“I was actually punched by a patient who said, ‘You had no right to bring me back,’ ” Maggie Callanan, a hospice nurse and author of Final Gifts (New York: Bantam, 1992), told me in an interview. “And you know what I wanted to say to him? ‘Do you know I missed lunch for you?’ ”

3 One category of research examines whether these people are mad or not. In terms of psychological health, near-death experiencers are as sturdy as those who do not report these unusual death experiences. See Michael Sabom, Recollections of Death: A Medical Investigation (New York: Harper & Row, 1982); H. J. Irwin, Flight of Mind: A Psychological Study of the Out-of-Body Experience (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1985); and B. Greyson, “Near-Death Experiences Precipitated by Suicide Attempt: Lack of Influence of Psychopathology, Religion, and Expectations,” Journal of Near-Death Studies 9 (1991): 183-88.

Near-death experiencers score the same in intelligence, mental health, and personality traits such as neuroticism (proneness to anxiety, fear, and depression) and extroversion (talkativeness, assertiveness, enthusiasm). See T. P. Locke and F. C. Shontz, “Personality Correlates of the Near-Death Experience: A Preliminary Study,” Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research 77 (1983): 311-18. But look closely at this seemingly normal group and you find a few quirks. Bruce Greyson at the University of Virginia has collected stories from more than 1,000 people and found that those who report near-death experiences are more likely to report paranormal experiences, such as out-of-body experiences or vivid dreams. They tend to be putty in the hands of a hypnotist. One intriguing theory is that near-death experiencers enjoy vivid imaginations. For example, they score higher than average on being “fantasy prone”—that is, likely to report religious visions, ghosts, near-death experiences, and psychic abilities. See S. C. Wilson and T. X. Barber, “Vivid Fantasy and Hallucinatory Abilities in the Life Histories of Excellent Hypnotic Subjects (‘Somnambules’): Preliminary Report with Female Subjects,” in E. Klinger, ed., Imagery, vol. 2: Concepts, Results, and Applications (New York: Plenum, 1981), 133-49.

They also seem able to dissociate—replace an unpleasant reality with pleasurable fantasies to shield them from the emotional shock. Kenneth Ring and others have found that near-death experiencers report more abuse as a child than the average person. His theory is that these people learned early to cope with traumatic events by accessing “alternate realities”; later, faced with another traumatic event, these people are more likely to “flip” into that alternative consciousness and perceive things that others may not. See K. Ring, The Omega Project: Near-Death Experiences, UFO Encounters, and Mind at Large (New York: William Morrow, 1992).

They also tend toward “absorption.” They often become focused on their thought life—particularly their imaginations—and can shut out the world. (Frankly, this sounds to me a whole lot like a reporter on deadline.) See A. Tellegen and G. Atkinson, “Openness to Absorbing and Self-Altering Experiences (‘Absorption’) a Trait Related to Hypnotic Susceptibility,” Journal of Near-Death Studies 2 (1974): 132-39.

4 After a while, I came to think of the temporal lobe as the all-purpose lobe that skeptics say is responsible for virtually every type of spiritual experience. Nonetheless, the temporal lobe, with its electrical spikes and auditory hallucinations and flashes of memory, plays a central role in explaining spiritual experience for many scientists. See M. L. Morse, D. Venecia, and J. Milstein, “Near-Death Experiences: A Neurophysiological Explanatory Model,” Journal of Near-Death Studies 8 (1989): 45-53; also J. C. Saavedra-Aguilar and J. S. Gómez-Jeria, “A Neurobiological Model for Near-Death Experiences,” Journal of Near-Death Studies 7 (1989): 205-22.

Willoughby Britton, a graduate student at the University of Arizona, compared twenty-three people who