Passage

“You’re leading again,” Joanna said. “No, not an underground passage. And not one of the passageways the Greek soldier Er took to the realms of the afterlife. It was some kind of corridor or hallway, and there was a door at the end of it.” She described the passage and the light and the dimly seen figure.

Tish took Joanna’s pulse and entered it on the chart. “It felt like an actual experience in an actual place,” Joanna said. “It wasn’t a dream or a superimposed vision. There was no sense of what I was seeing being imposed on where I really was like Saint Paul on the road to Damascus or Bernadette in the cave at Lourdes, where even though you’re seeing a blinding light or the Virgin Mary, you’re still aware of where you are. I had no awareness of being in the lab, of lying on the table.” Tish wrapped the blood pressure cuff around her arm. “It felt like I was really there, that it was a real place.”

“Do you know what kind of place it was?” Richard asked.

“No, but I had the feeling that I knew where I was.”

“You recognized it?”

“Yes. No,” she said. “I had the feeling that I recognized it, but I can’t — ” She shook her head, frustrated. No wonder her subjects ended up shrugging lamely.

Tish checked her pulse again and then began peeling the electrodes off her scalp.

“I recognized the place,” Joanna said, “but—”

“But at the same time you knew you’d never been there?” Richard said. “You had a sensation of dйjа vu, of experiencing something new and feeling you’ve experienced it before?”

“No,” she said, trying to remember the fleeting feeling. It had felt familiar, no, not familiar, yet she had had the feeling that she recognized it. “Maybe. It might have been dйjа vu,” she said doubtfully.

“That’s a strong indicator of temporal-lobe involvement,” he said and couldn’t keep the excitement out of his voice. “The feeling of dйjа vu’s been definitively located within the temporal lobe.”

Tish finished removing the IV and put away the equipment. “Do you need me for anything?” she asked.

“I don’t think so,” Richard said absently. “Temporal-lobe involvement… you didn’t have an out-of-body experience?”

“Leading,” Joanna said. “No. I was in the lab and then in the tunnel, with nothing in between.”

“Did you feel — ?” He broke off and started again. “What feelings did you experience?”

“The light didn’t make me feel warm and safe, or loved. I felt… calm. I guess you could describe it as peaceful, but it was really more just… calm. I wasn’t frightened.”

“Interesting,” Richard said. “Did you feel detached? Did it feel like you were separated from what was happening, that what was happening was unreal, dreamlike?”

“It wasn’t a dream,” Joanna said firmly.

“If you don’t need me for anything, I’m going to go,” Tish said, and they both looked at her, surprised she was still there. “Do you need me tomorrow?”

“I don’t know yet,” Richard said. “I think so. I’ll call you, Tish, thanks,” and turned expectantly back to Joanna. “How was it different from a dream?”

“It… dreams feel real while you’re having them, and then when you wake up, you realize they weren’t. But the NDE still feels real even now. That’s something nearly all of my subjects have said, that what they experienced was real. I didn’t know what that meant, but they’re right. It doesn’t feel like the memory of a dream. It feels like the memory of something that actually happened.”

“Can you be more specific?”

Joanna grinned. “It — I could move in a normal way. There was no floating or moving swiftly through the tunnel like some of my subjects have described, and there were no dreamlike discontinuities or incongruities. It felt like it was really happening.”

“And you said you sensed the presence of someone in the light.”

She nodded. “I thought I could see someone, but the light was too bright.”

“The sensation of a presence is a temporal-lobe effect, too,” he said. “I’d been assuming the light and peaceful feeling were endorphin-generated, but maybe it’s the temporal lobe that’s causing… I want to look at your scans.”

Joanna nodded and started to get down off the examining table. “Wait,” Richard said. “We’re not done yet. You still haven’t answered the big question.”

“The big question?” Joanna asked. “Do you mean, was what I saw real? Was it heaven? Or the doorway to the Other Side?”

“No. The big question,” he said, and grinned. “You said you heard a sound. Well? Was it a ringing or a buzzing?”

“It…” she said, and stopped, bewildered. “I have no idea. I know I heard it. I was in the tunnel…”

“Was it loud or soft?”

Loud, she thought. She had heard it quite clearly. But, trying to remember it now, she found she couldn’t reconstruct it at all, or even identify the type of noise it had been. A ringing? A buzzing? A horrible crash, like a whole stack of canned goods crashing down, as Mr. Steinhorst had described it?

“Has the memory of it faded?” Richard asked.