Introduction

This course will identify and describe five types of transpersonal experiences recounted by terminal or critically ill patients:

1. near-death experience,
2. near-death visit,
3. out-of-body experience,
4. deathbed communication,
5. after death communication. 

In addition, reported perimortem observations will be discussed:

1. predicting the time of death,
2. emanation of light, energy or "mist" from the body at the time of death,
3. lifting hands toward the ceiling when dying.

Currently, the physical or metaphysical factors responsible for transpersonal experiences reported by critically ill patients, their families or friends, remain obscure.  Some believe they are hallucination, others believe they are due to lack of oxygen or temporal lobe dysfunction and some believe they are signs of an afterlife.  What is most relevant is that millions of people have these profound experiences every year.  Continuing research into the cause and relevance of these experiences could assist each of us as we make the inevitable passage from life to death.

An additional topic of discussion is veridical perception; the revelation of a seemingly unknowable circumstance  that is subsequently shown to be fact, e.g. coincident perception of the remote demise of a family member, without evidence of the usual methods of communication. 

On occasion, multiple persons have reported contemporaneous experience of a similar transpersonal event.  This course will assist the healthcare worker to identify and document the report of a transpersonal experience and to offer therapeutic approaches which may assist the patient and others to reconcile the event.

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