Dreams Of The Afterlife

Over the past several months, I've come across some resources I want to recommend on paranormal issues. These are subjects often discussed among nurses, hospice workers, and other people working in relevant fields, covered on television, and brought up in books, YouTube videos, conversations about family experiences, and elsewhere. But the large majority of Christians are very poorly prepared to address these topics.

Here's a discussion Alex Tsakiris recently had with William Peters about shared death experiences (SDEs). I wrote about SDEs in an appendix in an e-book a decade ago. (See the last appendix here.) At that point, it was more difficult to find information on the subject. My article was written primarily in response to Raymond Moody's book on SDEs, Glimpses Of Eternity (New York, New York: Guideposts, 2010). Peters has done a lot of research since then and has a web site focused on the topic. As I said above, issues related to phenomena like SDEs frequently come up in family discussions, hospices, and other contexts. They shape people's views of God, salvation, the afterlife, relationships, and other important subjects.

Another resource I want to recommend is a discussion Gregory Shushan had with Jeffrey Mishlove. Shushan has done a lot of research on the history of near-death experiences (NDEs) and related phenomena. The video is less than an hour long, and it will provide you with an overview of the nature of NDEs and related phenomena across cultures and over many centuries. That's much better than going by something like a book focusing on what happened to one experiencer or a television program that addresses NDEs in modern America without discussing the evidence from other contexts. I wrote a post about Shushan's book on indigenous religions last year. As I mention there, one of the strengths of Shushan's work is that he brings up similarities among a variety of paranormal phenomena, not just NDEs. There are connections that people often overlook or underestimate. And he proposes a dream model for explaining what's going on with these phenomena, a model that's somewhat similar to mine. Both of those topics come up in his discussion with Mishlove.

Last year, I read a prepublication copy of a book by J. Steve Miller on deathbed experiences (DBEs). What I just linked is the first volume. I suspect it's highly similar to the prepublication version I read, but I haven't checked. It has a large amount of information on deathbed visions and other, related experiences (terminal lucidity, etc.). Miller is a conservative Evangelical, and he takes a highly veridical view of DBEs and NDEs. He thinks they're highly objective experiences of the afterlife or foretastes of the afterlife, and he thinks they're consistent with traditional Christianity. My view is that these phenomena are more subjective, reflecting a dreamlike state the soul enters when prematurely separated from the body and under whatever other circumstances. I had a discussion with Miller about these issues in a comment thread on Sean McDowell's YouTube channel last year. Despite my disagreements with Miller, I think his book is a good resource with a large amount of information and documentation. Even if you don't interpret the data the same way he does, he provides a lot of information on a lot of important paranormal issues.

It isn't enough to ignore these topics, to just shrug your shoulders at them, or to dismiss every report of an experience as fraudulent or demonic. The issues are too important and too widely discussed to be ignored, we have too much information for shoulder shrugging to be an adequate response, and the fraud and demonic hypotheses are deeply inadequate. And the fact that your relatives, the people you attend church with, the radio programs you listen to, and the other sources you most often hear from don't discuss these subjects much doesn't prove that they aren't being discussed to a larger extent elsewhere. It doesn't even prove that these subjects aren't significant for those relatives, church attenders, the people on the radio you're hearing from, and so on. Because of human nature and the nature of our culture, with its secular and trivial tendencies, people often don't discuss some of the most important issues in life. Something could be weighing heavily on the heart of one of your relatives, somebody in your church, or somebody you're listening to on the radio, yet he never says anything about it. It would be naïve to think that things like SDEs, NDEs, and DBEs have little or no effect on people. They have a big effect, obviously.

That's something that comes up over and over again in the literature. Bruce Greyson, Raymond Moody, and others working in these fields frequently refer to how these experiences transform the lives of not only the people who have the experiences, but also others they influence. The experiences affect how people view God, how they view themselves and other people, what they think of theological and moral issues, what they expect in the afterlife, and so on. Books, articles, videos, television programs, and discussions with relatives and friends on these issues capture people's hearts and shape their views on many important topics. Shushan's work has demonstrated how influential these paranormal experiences have been across cultures and across time. Miller's book provides a lot of documentation of how common these experiences are, how large a percentage of the population has had one or more of these experiences and/or has a close relationship with somebody who has.

But Christians have offered so little in response to these phenomena. The nurse or hospice worker looking for help in handling these situations will find a lot of material from a variety of non-Christian sources, but so little material and material of such low quality from Christians. It's remarkable, and irresponsible, how often Christians talk about something like the state of the culture or how to influence people without addressing issues like these, often without even acknowledging their existence or significance.

The title of this post is meant to express the appeal these paranormal experiences have for many people. The afterlife is enormously important (even though our culture and the large majority of Christians typically don't act like it), and we all have dreams, in more than one sense. And I think much of what happens in these paranormal contexts, though not all of it, is dreamlike. You shouldn't ignore something as important as the afterlife or give it as little attention as people usually do, and you shouldn't ignore people's dreams (their aspirations, hopes, etc.). So much of what happens in contexts like SDEs, NDEs, and DBEs reflects people's longings. An episode of "Oprah" about NDEs that they watched a few decades ago, a book they read fifteen years ago about somebody's NDE, or a YouTube video on DBEs that they saw last month could be shaping their view of God, the afterlife, and other important issues in ways they won't tell you about. Interacting with people involves not only responding to what they say, but also discerning what they may or probably have been influenced by without articulating it to you.