The Eternity Project

30



‘How can you say that?’ Lopez asked. ‘There’s no evidence to support it.’

‘Actually,’ Professor Bowen replied, ‘there is a wealth of evidence. There have been countless cases of victims of massive trauma finding themselves floating above their bodies as paramedical teams strive to save their lives. The experiences of people floating up through tunnels of light, meeting deceased family members and so on are common in the public knowledge.’

‘No.’ Lopez shook her head. ‘I heard it was suggested that all such experiences were the result of lucid dreaming.’

‘What’s that?’ Ethan asked.

‘It’s when you wake up within a dream,’ Lopez said. ‘The brain builds our world around us using what we see through our eyes. When we’re asleep, it does so without information coming in, and we dream. That’s why dreams can be so weird – the dream world is just the brain working alone. But some people train themselves to become aware when they’re dreaming, and the result is the best virtual-reality in the world, completely indistinguishable from the here and now, except that there are no rules: if this was a dream, I could walk through that wall right now.’

‘She’s right,’ Bowen said. ‘Lucid dreams are remarkable, and the majority of all supposed alien abductions can be put down to people having lucid dreams without realizing what they are. If you don’t understand them, they can be terrifying, as it appears to be absolute reality. Near-death experiences could plausibly fall into the same category.’

‘It’s still personal experience, though,’ Ethan said. ‘So it can’t be proved. I thought that such experiences were thought to be the product of chemicals in the brain, or similar?’


‘A chemical known as dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, exists in trace amounts in mammals, including humans,’ Professor Bowen agreed. ‘It acts as a psychedelic drug, if ingested, and has been repeatedly cited as the cause of both out-of-body experiences and near-death experiences, which in many cases are closely related to each other.’

‘So can’t DMT explain the experiences entirely then?’ Lopez asked.

Professor Bowen inclined her head in acquiescence. ‘That’s not impossible, but the victims I’m referring to were clinically dead. They did not have any activity in their brains. Not only that, but the events they witnessed when floating above their bodies actually occurred and were not the imagined products of the release of chemicals such as DMT. There are multiple accounts of people recounting the actions of surgeons and nurses working to save their lives while they were clinically dead. How could they even see and hear, Mr. Warner, if their eyes were closed and their brains inactive?’

‘More to the point,’ Lopez challenged, ‘how could they remember their experiences if their brains were inactive? I thought that if a person’s cortex was completely shut down, it could not be reactivated, that they really would be dead?’

‘Because you assume that the brain is the sole repository of memory,’ Bowen replied to her. ‘But what if the brain is in fact an antenna of sorts, a point of access rather than the home of memory? There are individuals who have fallen into icy water and been trapped for up to two hours, their bodies as cold as a corpse and their brains entirely inactive. Yet these people have been revived and made full recoveries. If their brain was dead and with it their memory lost, how could they have recovered in full?’

Professor Bowen gestured to newspaper cuttings tacked to the walls of her office.

‘In 2006, a Japanese man named Mitsutaka Uchikoshi was stranded on a mountain in the depths of winter for twenty-four days. His core temperature dropped to twenty-two degrees Celsius and he ate nothing. It is believed he went into some kind of hibernation, because, after being found, he was revived in hospital and made a full recovery.’

She gestured to another cutting.

‘Erika Nordby, a one-year old who in 2001 got out of her Canadian home on a bitter winter’s night and was found hours later lying in the snow wearing only a diaper in temperatures of minus twenty degrees Celsius. Her heart had not beaten for two hours and she was clinically dead, so cold that her mouth was frozen shut and her toes frozen together. Yet when she was warmed by a hospital team, her heart spontaneously began to beat again on its own and, upon recovery, she showed no sign of brain damage.’

Professor Bowen turned back to face them. ‘Both of these cases evidence the ability of the human brain to survive extreme trauma, with the cold likely responsible for preventing decay of otherwise dead organs and allowing them to return to life.’

‘But doesn’t that support a sceptical view of the soul and not a believer’s perspective?’ Lopez asked.

‘At first glance, yes,’ the professor agreed, ‘until you think about it. It took extreme cold to achieve what survivors of near-death experiences achieved without any such support. The decay of biological organs occurs very quickly in a hospital bed at room temperature. Yet the subjects clearly recall details of their experiences and of the real world around them despite having no recorded brain activity.’

Ethan frowned. ‘I thought that there were experiments done, where investigators secretly placed playing cards on top of cabinets in the hope that patients who had out-of-body experiences would spot them.’

‘They did,’ Professor Bowen agreed, ‘but answer me this: If you were suffering from a potentially fatal trauma and found yourself floating above your own body while surgeons tried desperately to resuscitate you, would you be watching anxiously to see if they were successful or would you be busy examining the dusty tops of nearby cabinets?’

Ethan smiled ruefully.

‘Fair point,’ Lopez said. ‘So you have evidence of life after death?’

‘Direct evidence of a man who experienced not just a near-death experience and all of the classical signs that go along with it,’ Professor Bowen replied, ‘but who also underwent a physiological change as a result of the NDE.’

‘What kind of change?’ Ethan asked.

‘The subject was a sixty-year-old man, whose experience was published in an extensive journal written by a British nurse who spent years documenting such events,’ Professor Bowen explained. ‘He had a profound out-of-body experience during a period of extremely deep unconsciousness and found himself floating above his own body. From there, he was later able to accurately describe the actions of the doctor and nurse caring for him at the time. He then rose up out of the room and traveled to what he described as a pink room, where his dead mother told him that it wasn’t yet his time and that he had to go back.’

‘Sounds like the effect of drugs,’ Lopez surmised. ‘If he wasn’t clinically dead, how could his experience be defined as proof of an afterlife?’

‘Because when he was in the pink room, what he described as a “messianic figure” touched his hand,’ Professor Bowen replied. ‘The subject had suffered from cerebral palsy all of his life, and, from birth, his right hand had been in a permanently contracted position. But following his experience, he was able to open and use his hand normally. There is absolutely no medical explanation for that.’

Professor Bowen stepped out from behind her desk and gestured to her bookshelves.

‘Another case involved a fifty-nine-year-old woman who was admitted to a British hospital suffering from a severe asthma attack. She was in such distress and danger that she blacked out in the emergency room, but to her she didn’t lose consciousness at all. She reported that she suddenly felt entirely calm and was looking down at her body on a hospital bed from above. She reported noticing a mousetrap discarded on top of a tall cupboard on one side of the room. Then a bright light appeared and she was drawn toward it. Figures appeared, as outlines, and she reported feeling incredibly peaceful, but the figures told her that she had to go back. Although she wasn’t able to identify the figures, she reported feeling as though she knew them, like they were members of her own family.’ Professor Bowen looked at Lopez as she went on: ‘When she recovered consciousness, she reported the experience to a nurse, who checked the top of the cupboard in the emergency room and found the mousetrap.’

Ethan inclined his head.

‘But what you’re describing, even though they are true accounts with evidence, doesn’t tie in that well with what we’re encountering here in New York. This thing, if it really exists, is roaming the damned streets killing people.’

Professor Bowen glanced down at the picture of the wraith in the open book and sighed.

‘There is a different kind of NDE,’ she said. ‘They don’t get nearly as much attention, perhaps because they’re considered somewhat frightening.’

‘Frightening?’ Lopez asked. ‘In what way?’

‘They start the same,’ Professor Bowen explained, ‘with the body rising into a tunnel of light, but then things start to change. There are a few variations: the first is that the ordinary process of rising up into the light is translated by the person experiencing it as frightening. The second is that the person finds themselves in an infinite void of blackness, utterly alone and isolated. There is no sense of time – they could have been there ten minutes or ten thousand years, but are unable to tell. The third, and final type, is an experience of being dragged down into an intensely cold darkness by ghoulish, demonic beings. These experiences are considered terrifying by those who witness them, and are accompanied by loud and annoying noises, the sense of many beings in extreme pain or distress, and a complete inability to prevent the witness from plunging into an abyss of misery and suffering.’


Lopez raised an eyebrow. ‘I can see why that trip isn’t advertised as loudly.’

‘You think that people who have lived badly get the demon treatment, and those who have lived well head upstairs?’ Ethan asked. ‘Like heaven and hell?’

Professor Bowen shook her head.

‘It would be nice to think so,’ she replied, ‘but studies have shown that there is no defined difference. Some people who have had more than one NDE have undergone both good and bad experiences. It seems to have more to do with the person’s state of mind than any particular sense of judgment.’

‘Which could rule out the afterlife evidence entirely,’ Lopez pointed out, ‘but not the ability of the soul to escape the body or the brain.’

‘Exactly,’ Professor Bowen replied. ‘The experiences of what people are so tempted to call heaven or hell may simply be an extension of the person’s psychological state at the time of death. A high percentage of attempted-suicide victims report distressing NDEs, which holds well with the hypothesis: they’re unlikely to be in a healthy mental state when they decide to take their own lives. What really interests me is the fact that the consciousness does indeed seem able to escape the body and brain, and it’s not just the person undergoing the experience that has witnessed this event.’

‘What do you mean?’ Ethan asked.

‘Sometimes,’ Professor Bowen countered, ‘the experience provides knowledge that the recipient could not possibly have obtained through normal means.’

‘Such as?’ Lopez asked.

‘They’re called “Peak in Darien” cases, where a dying subject has a near-death experience and speaks to a family member whom they believed to be still alive but who now claimed to be dead. Upon recovery, they mention this strange meeting, and subsequent investigation reveals that the person in question has indeed died.’

‘Have there been many of these?’ Lopez asked, really interested now.

‘Countless,’ Professor Bowen replied. ‘One early example was recorded by Doctor Henry Atherton himself in 1680. His young sister died after a long sickness. Attendees placed live coals to her feet to no response and saw no breath on a mirror held to her face. But the girl later awoke and reported a vision of seeing heaven and several people who had died, one of whom was thought by the attendees to still be alive. They checked it out, and found that the girl was indeed correct.’

‘Anything a little more recent?’ Ethan asked.

‘There is the case of an elderly Chinese woman in the terminal stages of cancer who reported that her sister and husband visited her bed in visions, urging her to join them. She reported to a nurse that her sister was still alive in China, but they hadn’t met for many years. The nurse told this to the woman’s daughter, and was informed that the long-lost sister had died two days earlier of the same cancer, but the family had decided not to tell the patient to avoid upsetting her.’

Lopez shrugged. ‘Okay, but there’s still nothing here that we can use to try to stop whatever’s killing these victims.’

‘Yes, there is,’ Professor Bowen insisted. ‘I cannot speak for every paranormal event or haunting on our planet but, if there’s one thing that I have discovered over the past twenty five years, it’s that these things happen for a reason. The spirit of somebody is hunting people down and it must have some kind of goal in mind. You have three victims. Something must connect them, and, when you find out what that something is, you’ll be one step closer to figuring out how to stop the wraith.’

Ethan raised an eyebrow. ‘You think we can stop it? We can’t even see it.’

‘It’s on a mission,’ Professor Bowen insisted, ‘just as some hauntings seem to involve spirits unable to move on from injustice and murder, so maybe this wraith cannot move on. It’s your call – let the killings continue, or find out why they’re happening and try to put a stop to it.’