{"id":19684,"date":"2025-01-09T18:03:54","date_gmt":"2025-01-09T19:03:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=19684"},"modified":"2025-01-09T19:27:46","modified_gmt":"2025-01-09T19:27:46","slug":"approaching-the-light-peter-fenwick-and-stories-of-near-death-experiences","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/?p=19684","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Approaching the Light\u2019: Peter Fenwick and Stories of Near-Death Experiences"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Dr. Fenwick, a neuropsychiatrist, assembled anecdotes from more than 300 people in his book \u201cThe Truth in the Light.\u201d Here are some of them.<\/p>\n

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I didn\u2019t fully understand the limits of my body until this past June, when I fell down my fire escape and floated outside myself in a near-death experience, much like the ones Peter Fenwick \u2014 a psychiatrist who researched end-of-life phenomena \u2014 documented over the course of his career. (Dr. Fenwick died on Nov. 22 at 89.)<\/p>\n

I was at my own housewarming party, standing on the fire escape with two friends, when I fell, tumbling around 12 feet and hitting my head. I lost consciousness for several minutes.<\/p>\n

As my friends tell it, the paramedics arrived quickly, detached the screen from a window on the second floor and hauled me downstairs in a stretcher. As they loaded me into the ambulance, I rose above myself and watched the fanfare: the concerned neighbors stepping into the street; the pale pink of sunset; my own body, small and far away in the stretcher as my roommate held my palm and my friend held my ankle. Their touch snapped me back into consciousness. I immediately felt pain and begged for water.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t the first time I\u2019d had what felt like an out-of-body experience. When I was a teenager, I became fascinated by astral projection \u2014 intentional out-of-body travel \u2014 and began to put it into practice at night. One evening, I hurtled toward the ceiling and watched myself sleep. A line tugged out from my sternum to my belly button. It resembled an umbilical cord: silver and long as a rope.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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I had a similar sensation after my fall, albeit without the cord. The doctors diagnosed a severe concussion, and I spent the next three weeks recovering in my new home. At first, I struggled to derive meaning from my sudden proximity to death. Then I thought about fragility \u2014 and the thousands of minute ways humans evade death every day without knowing it \u2014 and my experience concretized into a newfound appreciation of our bodies\u2019 capacity for self-preservation and a diminished fear of death.<\/p>\n

I was reminded of my near-death experience when I learned that The New York Times, where I work, would be publishing Dr. Fenwick\u2019s obituary.<\/p>\n

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Dr. Fenwick, a neuropsychiatrist, assembled anecdotes from more than 300 people in his book \u201cThe Truth in the Light.\u201d Here are some of them.I didn\u2019t fully understand the limits of my body until this past June, when I fell down my fire escape and floated outside myself in a near-death experience, much like the ones Peter Fenwick \u2014 a psychiatrist who researched end-of-life phenomena \u2014 documented over the course of his career. (Dr. Fenwick died on Nov. 22 at 89.)I was at my own housewarming party, standing on the fire escape with two friends, when I fell, tumbling around 12 feet and hitting my head. I lost consciousness for several minutes.As my friends tell it, the paramedics arrived quickly, detached the screen from a window on the second floor and hauled me downstairs in a stretcher. As they loaded me into the ambulance, I rose above myself and watched the fanfare: the concerned neighbors stepping into the street; the pale pink of sunset; my own body, small and far away in the stretcher as my roommate held my palm and my friend held my ankle. Their touch snapped me back into consciousness. I immediately felt pain and begged for water.It wasn\u2019t the first time I\u2019d had what felt like an out-of-body experience. When I was a teenager, I became fascinated by astral projection \u2014 intentional out-of-body travel \u2014 and began to put it into practice at night. One evening, I hurtled toward the ceiling and watched myself sleep. A line tugged out from my sternum to my belly button. It resembled an umbilical cord: silver and long as a rope.I had a similar sensation after my fall, albeit without the cord. The doctors diagnosed a severe concussion, and I spent the next three weeks recovering in my new home. At first, I struggled to derive meaning from my sudden proximity to death. Then I thought about fragility \u2014 and the thousands of minute ways humans evade death every day without knowing it \u2014 and my experience concretized into a newfound appreciation of our bodies\u2019 capacity for self-preservation and a diminished fear of death.I was reminded of my near-death experience when I learned that The New York Times, where I work, would be publishing Dr. Fenwick\u2019s obituary.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and\u00a0log into\u00a0your Times account, or\u00a0subscribe\u00a0for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?\u00a0Log in.Want all of The Times?\u00a0Subscribe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19686,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19684","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19684","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19684"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19684\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19687,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19684\/revisions\/19687"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/19686"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19684"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19684"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medexperts.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19684"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}