The brain goes through many things trying to sort what's happening to it. When I was very young I was running around and fainted--probably dehydrated. I distinctly remember being in the dark but seeing "stars" and drawing up from my body, looking down. Then I was conscious again and the day sunny. We hallucinate because of the brain trying to regain control--or help the body survive. Dreams do that, too. Sorting the day with symbols, messages.

We are emotional beings and have many experiences, sometimes being unable to explain them. I have personally had many experiences that some would call supernatural. What is going on? I have also had "out of body" experiences. The facts are simply that we do not always understand. Try to remember that "near death" is not really death and nobody was dead nor did they go anywhere. While you are "in heaven" (or hell) the body is still right here. Then people start making things up and talk about "the soul." It's a way of trying to say you were right all the time. But you are not right. Things go on in a mental realm and mankind has never really understood his dreamtime or his sleep. Misconceptions about all this has produced our religions and supernaturalism.

You don't have to be near death to experience that. I was stressed because I didn't want to get married, but as my wedding day approached I had a sort of "dream" where I left my body and floated up through the ceiling, went off with my friends I'd known forever, into a peaceful, wilderness place. When I came back into my body I was very reluctant to return to my life.

There's are reason they are called NEAR death experiences rather than death experiences.

", the brain can survive for up to about six minutes after the heart stops. The reason to learn CPR is that if it is started within six minutes of cardiac arrest, the brain may survive the lack of oxygen. After about six minutes without CPR, however, the brain begins to die." From Quora.com.

During this time your brain will process through several chemical and electrical reactions. This is the root cause of all "after death" experiences.

I am actually shocked that in the 21st century money is being spent on research into this nonsense when there are so many other things of far great value to humanity that need our attention.

A fascinating topic.

The main reason I still skim through these stories is from several experiences I had personally when I was about 7 or 8 years old, and the memory has never left me.

I won't go into it, but for a young fellow, I did a great job of checking the circumstances, to make sure it wasn't just a series of dreams.

There are plenty of occasions where there have been proofs of fraud, or scientific explanations too, but the huge numbers of claims over my lifetime are impressive.

I guess science will have the last word when they manage to either transfer consciousness to a machine, or build a machine that has all the characteristics of consciousness, which they are way short of doing at the moment,

Every day is a near-death experience.
I'm not buying into any kind of "afterlife".

You may retain some form of consciousness altho not yet completely dead...after all, they brought you back, sort of like a pilot light slowly going out as the propane runs out. But how it would "prove" anything about Heaven...........Really?!?!
Plus, anecdotal "evidence" is considered claptrap by actual science!

Had OOBEs twice. I still don't believe in Heaven.

Was NOT dead.

But that perspective leaves you wondering just what is happening and why so many OOBEs are from above? Plus my sister was there to confirm my observations (from above) the second time.

Interesting study that seems to explain some things:
[facebook.com]

Altered States

Many of NDE accounts are indistinguishable from those of people who have had drug-induced hallucinatory trips. Take Eben Alexander’s story of his “trip” to the afterlife during a meningitis-induced coma. There he met a beautiful young woman and together they travelled on the wing of a butterfly: “In fact, millions of butterflies were all around us… It was a river of life and colour.” Alexander was overwhelmed with a feeling of love, not friendship or romantic but “somehow beyond all these, beyond all the different compartments of love we have down here on Earth.

“It was something higher, holding all those other kinds of love within itself while at the same time being much bigger than all of them.”

Compare Eben Alexander’s trip with the “trip” taken by the neuroscientist Sam Harris after he and a friend ingested a dose of the drug MDMA, which he details in his book, Waking Up. Harris reports that he was overwhelmed with love for his friend. More than this, Harris says, “came the insight that irrevocably transformed my sense of how good human life could be… I suddenly realised that if a stranger had walked through the door, he or she would have been fully included in this love”.

Psychedelic drugs can have similar emotional effects. A single dose of LSD given to cancer patients by the psychiatrist Stephen Ross, for example, not only reduced their depression and anxiety, but the effects were so dramatic that, Ross said, “they were saying things like ‘I understand love is the most powerful force on the planet’. The fact that a drug given once can have such an effect for so long is an unprecedented finding”.

Hallucinations

There are additional problems with Alexander’s claims. During his NDE he says his “cortex was completely shut down”. He concludes from this that “there is absolutely no way that I could have experienced even a dim and limited consciousness during my time in the coma”. According to his doctor, however, Alexander’s coma was induced by her, and whenever they tried to wake him he thrashed about, pulling at his tubes and trying to scream, so his brain was not completely shut down.

We now know of a number of factors that produce such fantastical hallucinations, masterfully explicated by the late Dr Oliver Sacks in his book Hallucinations. For example, Sacks recounts an experiment by the Swiss neuroscientist Olaf Blanke and his colleagues, who produced a “shadow-person” in a patient by electrically stimulating the left temporoparietal junction in her brain. “When the woman was lying down a mild stimulation of this area gave her the impression that someone was behind her; a stronger stimulation allowed her to define the ‘someone’ as young but of indeterminate sex.”

Migraine headaches also produce hallucinations. Sacks explained that the reason hallucinations seem so real “is that they deploy the very same systems in the brain that actual perceptions do. When one hallucinates voices, the auditory pathways are activated; when one hallucinates a face, the fusiform face area, normally used to perceive and identify faces in the environment, is stimulated.”

From these facts the neurologist concluded: “The one most plausible hypothesis in Dr Alexander’s case, then, is that his NDE occurred not during his coma, but as he was surfacing from the coma and his cortex was returning to full function.”

The Tunnel Effect

There are other conditions that may trigger an NDE. The psychologist Susan Blackmore, for example, notes that the “tunnel” effect of the near-death and out-of-body experiences may be the result of oxygen deprivation interfering with the normal rate of firing by nerve cells in the visual cortex, which may be interpreted by other areas of the brain as concentric rings or spirals, which may be described as a tunnel.

Another part of the brain implicated is the right angular gyrus in the temporal lobe. During surgery on a woman suffering from epileptic seizures, Olaf Blanke and his colleagues stimulated this neural module, which induced “an instantaneous feeling of ‘lightness’ and ‘floating’ about two metres above the bed, close to the ceiling”.

A scientific understanding of NDEs – situating them in natural explanations sufficient enough to forestall any need for invoking the supernatural – is not meant to take away from the power of the experience as seemingly real, as emotionally salient, or as transforming and life-changing.

Perhaps belief in them is a way of dealing with the difficulties of life… and death.