The Fear Factor

Focusing again on how knowing what you believe, or knowing what to expect eases fears of the unknown, I found the following post on The Archives of Scientists' Transcendent Experiences (TASTE), which is a site that provides scientists with a forum for sharing their own transcendent experiences and builds a database of those experiences.

This is the other side of the fear related to death -- scientific proof -- scientists are afraid to take any kind of report or research related to death and the dying experience as a serious account. But these scientists have had their own experiences and are documenting their observations and analyses related to their experiences. Note how the person who posted below is using a pseudonym -- and many of the scientists on this site do the same.

Here is William's:

William (pseudonym) has a Masters degree, when that was sufficient to begin in a field of science, and is now a Director of a research and development facility in Aerospace Engineering. This experience with a deceased friend happened to him as a teenager and totally changed his attitude toward life and death.

"My best friend, Mike, was in a car accident and for approx. a month was in a coma. One night I dreamed that he came to my parent's house. The dream was extremely vivid. We sat and talked for what seemed about an hour, about all kinds of subjects. Mike told me about the wreck, that his girlfriend had not died instantly (like the papers had reported) but that she was okay now, and that he was fine and would see me again one day. The odd thing about the dream was that it was completely real, but not surreal like most of my 'vivid' dreams. It really felt like reality. When Mike got up to leave, he mentioned that he wouldn't see me again for a long time, but that I wasn't to be upset, because he was fine. As he walked out the door, he looked back and said that his mom was about to call, and to let her know everything would be okay. I awoke with a start from the dream, and sat up in my bed. About one minute later, at around five in the morning, the phone rang. I had a room downstairs that had been a family room, and it had a phone. I got to the phone before the third ring and answered it. It was Mike's mother. She simply said Mike had died earlier that morning. I was still quite groggy from my sudden awakening, and all I could think of to say was, "I know. He told me." She started crying and hung up the phone.

"The thing that struck me about this incident was that at the time, it did not seem odd at all. It was simply a fact that Mike and I had talked prior to his leaving. It did not surprise me that Mike had died, because we had talked about that in our conversation, and Mike had told me that his mom would call, so the call did not even seem notable. I did notice a sudden change in my attitude after this event. Prior to Mike's death, I had been consumed by fear of death, often crying myself to sleep worrying about dying, even though I was brought up in a church environment that taught that death was not to be feared. After this incident, I lost my fear of death, but more than that, I gained a love of life, the absence of which had stifled my childhood.

"I never considered this a case of transcendental experience, in part because it was so normal and natural. However, had I not had this experience, I don't believe I would have had the courage to follow my creative scientific thoughts that lead to my leading an R&D team."

Copyright 1999 by the Institute for the Scientific Study of Consciousness. All rights reserved except as noted.