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Children and the Near-Death Experience
by Brad and Sherry Steiger
FATE :: September 2007
While few adults would claim to have memories stretching back beyond four or five years of age, a number of respondents to our Steiger Questionnaire of Mystical, Paranormal, and UFO Experiences say that they are able to recall dramatic near-death experiences (NDEs) that they experienced as young as two or three. Because both of us had near-death experiences as children, we have taken a personal interest in such reports of childhood NDEs. Of the approximately 36,000 individuals who have responded to our questionnaire since 1968, 69 percent state that they underwent a near-death experience—82 percent of that number had an NDE before the age of 12.
One respondent to our questionnaire claimed to remember being held in his mother’s arms when he was running a very high fever during a siege with chicken pox when he was two years old.
“I can still clearly remember a bright light shining over my mother’s shoulder,” he told us in his account of the experience. “And then the light was transformed into the image of a beautiful lady. She took my hand and we went to somewhere very peaceful with lots of animals. It was like a kind of wonderful garden or the ultimate petting zoo. Then, after I don’t have any idea how long, I opened my eyes to see my mom and dad smiling at me. Obviously, that was when my fever broke and I started to get better.”
Another respondent insisted that she recalled an experience of falling into a lake and drowning when she was about 20 months old.
“I remember that I was suddenly surrounded by lots of little boys and girls who were smiling and laughing and holding out their hands to me,” she said. “Behind them was a tall, bearded man, who just seemed to beam love and peace. He smiled at me and shook his head, indicating that I couldn’t stay there with the other happy children. The next thing I knew, some strange man was kneeling over me and I was coughing up water. My mom stood behind him, looking scared and relieved at the same time.”
“I had already been given the last rites by our priest,” wrote a questionnaire respondent from New Mexico. “I was 26 months old. Somehow I knew that I was dying. My parents were at my bedside, and my mother was weeping in deep, sobbing gasps. An angel—or a being of Light that I assumed was an angel—appeared beside me, smiled, and took me out of my body. This being told me that I would not die, that I would return to my parents and grow into a mature woman. Later, the being said that I would bear children of my own. And then I heard a nurse telling someone to get the doctor, that I was coming back to life.”
A Gallup Poll conducted in 1992 indicated that around 13 million American adults claimed to have undergone at least one NDE.
A survey undertaken by U.S. News magazine revealed that a total of 18 percent (approximately 50 million adults) of the U.S. population had undergone a near-death experience.
In a special report on spirituality, the August 29/September 6, 2005, issue of Newsweek released survey results which included the statistic that 67 percent of Americans believe in an afterlife, a heaven or hell to which souls ascend or descend.
On March 7, 2006, Scripps Howard News Service released the results of a survey in which 72 percent of those polled said that they believe in an afterlife in which they will have “some sort of consciousness.”
Our friend Dr. P. M. H. Atwater, author of many studies of NDEs, said that nearly one-third of all those who face death in a hospital or a clinical setting are likely to have an NDE. “With children, however, the figure is 75 percent,” she said, citing the research of Dr. Melvin Morse, who together with Kimberly Clark Sharp and a team of associates conducted the first empirical study of children’s near-death experiences.
Dr. Atwater has herself survived three near-death experiences, and her first two books, Coming Back to Life and Beyond the Light, are considered the “Bibles” of NDE research. Dr. Atwater has found that “…even newborns can have a near-death experience and tell their parents when old enough to be proficient at language.” ........
Read the rest of this article in the September 2007 issue of FATE
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