Pre-Death Visions

Several months ago I reread Dr. Melvin Morse’s book, “Closer to the Light,” about the near death experience in children.  Dr. Morse researched the phenomenon in Seattle around 1990 and came up with a number of interesting cases.  Two different children told him that in the next world they could “double jump.” 

One of the chapters deals with “pre-death visions,” the visions the dying have before they enter the near-death state.  Dr. Morse gives several accounts of dying people seeing dead relatives who come to comfort them or escort them to the next world.  One dying boy told him that he had visited a crystal castle where he met several of his fellow patients who had died before him.  The dying have reported seeing angels, God, and other people who enter their bedrooms to talk to them.

I know of only one person who has had pre-death visions, and that was my own father.  In the weeks before he died, my father told my brother and sister-in-law (with whom he lived) that he kept seeing “people, out of the corners of my eyes.”  Once, when they were watching television together, my father asked my sister-in-law:  “Do you see them?  Do you see those people standing by the fireplace?”  Another time he told her, “I’m seeing those people out of the corners of my eyes again.”

My brother and sister-in-law took my father to the doctor for an EEG (a brain scan).  Nothing unusual was found.

My father died within weeks after these visions.  I have always wondered if they were delusions or actual visitors from the next world, waiting to escort him over the threshhold.  I’m probably a credulous fool, but I tend to believe it was the latter.