A Step Toward the Light : Research Raises New Questions About Children’s Near-Death Experiences

In the current film “Flatliners,” a group of medical students is so bewitched by the afterlife that they systematically induce cardiac arrest and brain death in one another.

The students get a flat line on both a heart and brain monitor. They wait a minute or so for the legendary lights and tunnels to kick in for their dead colleague, and then they frantically resuscitate their friend with familiar Code Blue techniques (defibrillation, CPR, plea-bargaining with God).

As Kiefer Sutherland, who plays the first student to “go under,” puts it: “I don’t want to die. I just want to come back with the answers to life and death.”

Here in Renton, a Seattle suburb, Dr. Melvin Morse thinks many of those answers are already available--in abundance. He’s discovered that children who’ve had near-death experiences may not use sophisticated words to describe what happens to them, but he’s found their reports to be extremely believable, comforting and consistent.

Consistent enough for him and his research partners at the University of Washington School of Medicine to abandon trying to prove Morse’s original theory: that near-death experiences are just the result of drugs administered during hospital stays or life-saving attempts.

“When we started the study, we were really looking for which drugs caused this experience. That’s why I had Don Tyler, who’s head of the anesthesia department (at Children’s Orthopedic Hospital and Medical Center in Seattle) to get involved in it,” says Morse, a 36-year-old pediatrician whose findings were first published in the American Medical Assn.’s American Journal of Diseases of Children in 1986.

He has elaborated on the research in a popular book just published by Villard Books called “Closer to the Light.” Concludes Morse: “All my book is saying is that when people die (and live to tell about it) they have beautiful visions of another life and that those visions should be respected, taken for what they are. They don’t need to be dismissed.”

Michele Wilson, 16, a Seattle high school student, was interviewed by Morse about an experience she had during a diabetic coma: “I was lying on this hospital examining table and these doctors and nurses were around me. I was lying there unconscious and not moving and I was watching myself. It was really peaceful. I was floating. I’m not scared of death anymore. I’m actually kind of interested in it.”

Says Morse, “These experiences are real experiences. I feel our research has proven that these are not caused by the artifacts of resuscitation, not caused by drugs, not caused by hallucinations.

“There are definitely people who have come back with the answers to life and death,” says the father of three, sitting in the office from which he runs a full-time pediatric practice. “At least they feel they have and I guess I think they have come back with the answer--because it rings so true to me and it’s such a simple and prosaic answer. My co-writer Paul Perry (former executive editor of American Health magazine), said to me, ‘Mel, I want some good stuff for the book. I want some people who came back to save their parents or to find a cure for leukemia.’

“I love it that the people I’ve talked to don’t have that at all. Mostly, kids don’t say really articulate things, like it was blissful, peaceful and full of unconditional love. They usually just tell you that there was a really bright light. And they say things like, ‘My family’s really important now.’ ‘I came back because I’m supposed to help my mom.’ ”

Recently, Morse met a millionaire whom he describes as a “big-time industrial chemist” who had a near-death experience as a teen-ager. In the process, the man feels he received a new understanding of relationships, which he applied to molecules. Says the doctor, with a giggle and a glint in his eye, “He hasn’t found a cure for cancer. This guy says, ‘I came back to invent new forms of dry-cleaning fluid.’ ”

As for differences between adult near-death experiences and those of children, the chief contrasts Morse found are that children do not report having had life reviews--flashbacks of specific incidents from their lives. And, Morse finds that unlike adults, children tell their stories “without a lot of adornment: They rarely say things like it was universal peace and love. At the most they might say, ‘There were a lot of good things for me in the light. I really wanted to get to that light.’ ”

(Morse would then proceed to ask the kids why, only to be told “I don’t know.” So then he’d ask, “Well, was it something about the light?” and the kids would respond, “I don’t know.”)

Morse’s collection of such reports--coupled with the appeals of childhood innocence and serious science--is already generating considerable heat in the book trade. The book is so popular that it went into a second printing (5,000 copies after the original run of 30,000) before the official publication date. And Morse has already appeared on--or is scheduled to be on--”20/20,” “Good Morning America,” “The Oprah Winfrey Show” and “Sally Jessy Raphael.”

A Japanese television reporter and documentary crew flew over to visit. And England’s BBC recently sent a crew to Seattle to chat with Morse for one of its shows.

Diane Reverand, Morse’s editor and the vice president/executive editor of Villard, observes that there is a hard-core but rapidly expanding audience eager for this sort of material. She notes that “Life After Life,” the 1975 book on the near-death experiences of adults by Dr. Raymond Moody, has sold about 10 million copies internationally since it was first published. “Moody made anecdotal reports. Mel’s taken it a step further,” Reverand says. He collected anecdotal research and compared findings to several control groups. “This is getting a lot of attention because he’s scientifically examining it. As a scientist, Mel’s bringing the material to the mainstream.”

Moody, who is working on a book about “hypnagogic” or altered states of consciousness, is the first to agree.

In an introduction to “Closer to the Light,” he writes that Morse’s research is currently “the most interesting and arresting” in the area of near-death studies.

By phone, Moody adds, “The work I did on this is very anecdotal. The work being done now by Mel and other researchers is more systematic. The work that’s come after what I did is more reliable. I think Mel’s a great guy. I love it the way his whole jaw comes loose when he laughs.”

Indeed, Morse repeatedly punctuates his sentences with grins, chuckles and belly laughs. As he walks down the halls of the adjacent hospital where he often sees patients, he seems to know most of the people he meets in the hall and he makes time to acknowledge if not joke with each of them.

This day he’s having a great time showing visitors the drawings he asked children to make of their near-death experiences. One of his favorites is called “Jesus With the Red Hat” created by a 5-year-old named Jane. It looks nothing like the traditional version of Jesus and more like a clown or Santa Claus. What’s more, Morse says, Jane whispered to him, “I didn’t think I was supposed to see Jesus. I didn’t think He would look like that.”

It was a similar near-death experience of one of his patients that initially prompted Morse to begin his studies eight years ago. He had resuscitated a 7-year-old girl named Katie who’d been found floating face down in a YMCA pool. She remained comatose for three days and Morse thought for sure she would die.

Instead, after three days she made a full recovery. When she was well enough to see Morse for an office visit, he asked her what she remembered about being in the swimming pool. To his astonishment, she answered “Do you mean when I visited the heavenly father?” Later, she talked for an hour about her visit with Jesus and the heavenly father and a guardian-angel-like guide named Elizabeth. And of course, those common near-death experience hallmarks: a tunnel and a light.

Morse, who was raised in the Jewish faith but hasn’t been inside a church or a synagogue in years, found that Katie told her tale “in such a powerful and compelling way” that he believed her implicitly. He began investigating, interviewing her parents, only to learn that the Mormon family believed in Jesus but not in spirit guides and guardian angels. He could not find any factors in Katie’s upbringing--aside from a belief in Jesus--that could have influenced her experience.

Now, after extensively studying 25 children in the Seattle area who had near-death experiences (and two control groups of more than 150 children), Morse has observed that it’s rare for religious figures to turn up in the stories or drawings of his young subjects. But rainbows, hearts and representations of light are commonplace. Nearly all of the 25 children he has studied reported positive feelings in their near-death episodes, but three did say they had had negative encounters.

For instance, one girl said the phenomenon was similar to being scolded for doing something wrong. Another had nightmares for many years after her near-death experience. And another told Morse that her mother looked like a “scary pig monster.”

The most “significant” finding, Morse emphasizes, was the presence of light. In fact, it occurred in the reports of 23 of 25 children studied.

But because the finding of a warm, beckoning light has such little-understood, spiritual/mystical associations, it was left out of Morse’s research published in the AMA’s American Journal of Diseases of Children. The pediatrician and his colleagues didn’t mention the children’s references to light because “we felt we could not get the article published if we put that in and I think we were correct,” says Morse.

But he now suspects that once-narrow medical views of areas such as near-death research may be loosening up. Recently, he was invited to make “grand rounds” and lecture on near-death experiences at Northwestern University Medical School.

But still there are plenty of critics. Morse points out that they usually tend to be neurologists who consider findings such as his to be mere hallucinations brought on by a dying mind. He says those in favor of this theory reason that as the brain shuts down, a patient can’t see or hear any more and is in a sensory-deprived state, conjuring up all sorts of fantasies.

“Dying brains should not be having hallucinations,” he argues, adding that people in comas (as many of his subjects were) are in a state in which brain activity is completely suppressed.

The researcher further rejects a group of critics who claim that so-called near-death experiences are just a variation on dreams. “Dreams are a specific biological state that happens to normal people when they’re asleep. Comatose patients don’t have that at all. They have very disorganized brain waves. They don’t have a dream state,” Morse contends.

And as for those who would write off near-death experiences as some sort of psychological defense mechanism, Morse responds that he has studied patient populations where psychological defense mechanisms are to be expected. But in these cases he found no reports of anything resembling near-death experiences.

For example, among the 121 control group children Morse interviewed who had “been critically ill but had less than a 5% chance of dying,” Morse studied more than 25 children with epiglottiditis. He says it’s a “horrifying” disease in which windpipes swell and patients think they’re going to die. Morse’s epiglottiditis subjects reported an impending sense of doom but no near-death experiences. “If this is a psychological defense mechanism,” he asks, “why don’t we see near-death experiences in that patient population?”

In fact, after hundreds of hours of research and questioning, Morse found that none of the 121 seriously ill children reported anything remotely like near-death experiences, which led him to conclude that a person does need to be near death to have a near-death experience.

It’s a basic point, but nobody had systematically studied it until he did.

And after he interviewed an additional 37 children “who had been treated with almost every kind of mind-altering medication known to pharmacology,” he found none of these kids had had near-death experiences either. Thus, he ruled out his initial theory that drugs were responsible for the phenomenon.

Which still leaves him with dozens if not hundreds of unresolved questions still to explore. Already, he’s working on a study which, when it’s concluded in about six months, should provide a psychological profile, a checklist of traits common to near-death experience survivors.

That way, people who may still suffer from amnesia covering, say, some sort of traumatic experience, may be able to discern whether they had a near-death experience--even if they can’t remember it. For the study, Morse is examining a population of people who had near-death experiences as children but who are now adults. He wants to see how they’ve transformed in the intervening years and is comparing them to two other groups: a normal population and a group who experienced serious illness but were never near death.

“In six months,” Morse predicts, “we expect to have a list of statistically significant variables that will show people have or have not had a near-death experience. I’m willing to bet the mortgage on my home, well maybe not that part, but I feel really confident that we could look at case studies and tell which people had near-death experiences and which did not.”

Beyond that, he’s planning a study with the University of Washington School of Medicine’s cardiology department, which will do a battery of psychological tests on cardiac patients before surgery, after surgery, five years after and perhaps longer.

In the meantime, though, he’d just like to see a little more respect from doctors and nurses toward patients who report such experiences. But, in truth, he suspects the medical profession may be the last to embrace the ambiguities surrounding the mystery known as death.

“As doctors, we don’t know what to do with this kind of information,” Morse says, forgoing the ready smile. “I’ll include myself in this. Even now, people say to me, ‘Well doesn’t this make you believe in life after death?’ I guess it just goes against my training so much that I have to say, ‘Well, I really don’t know.’ We’re not comfortable with death.”