Life After Near-Death : Changed for Good, Dianne Morrissey Leads ‘Journey Into Consciousness’ at OCC

In her courses covering the paranormal, Dianne Morrissey likes to think she is able to bring a sensible amount of skepticism to people’s stories of supernatural events.

But then again, she says, “I never want to doubt someone’s experience when they say they’ve had one. Who am I to say they didn’t have their experience when I’m walking around saying I died once and came back?”

That is a bit of a conversation stopper, isn’t it?

Morrissey’s classes, titled “Parapsychology ESP: Journey Into Consciousness” (one commences at 7 tonight at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa; call (714) 432-5880 for information), cover an interesting range of subjects, including Tarot card readings and willing traffic signals to change, but those rather pale beside the notion of talking to someone who has actually dropped dead.

One of the core wonders of the human experience has always been: What is it like to cross that mysterious veil, to broach the infinite? Are there ATMs on the other side? Is sloughing off one’s corporeal body the dramatic weight-loss plan we’ve all hoped for? Does Tylenol still work when you’re dead?

As one might expect, being dead certainly got Morrissey’s attention, and her time spent on the “other side” changed her life.

“You want to see where I was electrocuted?” Morrissey asked, leading to the den of her nice and normal Santa Fe Springs home. Now 45, she was 28 in 1977 when she was cleaning her wall-mounted aquarium one day and a faulty pump squirted water carrying 117 volts into her mouth.

“I stayed standing while I watched my physical body fall out of me. I was thrown with such force from where I was standing that my head, of my physical body, went right through the drywall about a foot and a half above the floor. The vacuum had been next to me and my arm hooked around it as I fell, and I took that through the wall too. So I fell hard, but I never felt it, because I was already out of my body, standing watching.

“I’d never even heard of an out-of-body experience. There weren’t the books on it that there are now. I was raised a very religious Catholic, was the office manager of a big construction company in downtown L.A., played professional clarinet at night, and if anyone had asked me if I thought I would ever do anything weird like the paranormal, I’d have said, impossible ,” Morrissey said.

Yet, there she was watching her body on the ground and aware of being in a separate, transparent astral body. She says she was unconscious for 45 minutes and was told later her heart had stopped for a portion of that time. She already knew that, claiming she had been aware of having a choice of returning to her body or not. There are now masses of data on near-death experiences (which has earned its own acronym: NDE), and Morrissey says only 6% of those experiencing them know that they are dead.

So what happened while she was out there?

“Initially it’s a surprise, to find that the you that’s conscious, that thinks, perceives, feels emotions and loves, is the part that is out of your body,” she said. Like other of the now much-documented NDE cases, she recalls being aware of the physical world but unable to interact with it. She tried calling to her dog, but he didn’t respond. She tried touching things and her hand went through them, including a person whose attention she tried to get on the street outside her house.

But, like other NDEers, she also was aware of another dimension, including a tunnel she passed through, a beckoning, enveloping light and a benevolent being. Many people brought back from death recall meeting with loved ones, but in Morrissey’s case, it was a stranger.

“She looked like a person, but she was transparent. She had brownish, shoulder-length hair, a little bit turned under. I felt that she was real and that she cared a great deal for me. I had a great childhood, but if I took all my parents’ love and multiplied it by 100 million it wouldn’t be close to how much this lady loved me. It was that strong. And she cared so much in helping me trying to decide whether to stay or come back,” she said.

Like other accounts, she said the entirety of her life was unreeled before her, but not in the judgmental manner her religion had led her to expect. Then there was the light, too bright for her to look at steadily, that reached out in a pinprick until it touched the middle finger of her right hand, “and I lost all sense of my transparent body. I was still me, still conscious, but I was in the light, and I knew the light was God. . . .It was much better than any sister or priest had told me heaven was. It was like feeling all things in the universe at the same time, like perceiving every grain of sand on every planet and knowing why each grain was in its place. I knew that if I went into the light, I would never die. Everything just changes.

“I knew I could stay there or come back. And I really thought I was picking to stay dead, so I guess we don’t always get what we want. I didn’t have a death wish; it was just so wonderful, so spectacular. Part of me absolutely wanted to go into the light. Another part of me felt this pulling from my stomach, the feeling that I wanted to be able to touch something again.

“I dove into the back of my physical body’s neck. I felt the shag carpeting there between my fingertips, and then I absolutely knew I wasn’t on the other side and just cried buckets. I couldn’t believe then that I had picked to come back.”

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And perhaps some of you can’t believe you’re reading this account in an actual newspaper, as opposed to the tabloid type, where post-death doings vie for space with alien abductions and Liz’s liposuctions.

I, for one, tend to chalk most smug New-Age revelations up to folks tripping on moldy granola. At the same time, though, I know a sufficient number of credible people who have had incredible experiences that I wouldn’t discount anything. And given what passes for daily life, it’s hard to view paranormal events as being any weirder.

Morrissey struck me as being sincere in recalling her time out-of-body. She also doesn’t clutter her work up with unnecessary mumbo-jumbo designed to impart an air of exclusivity. Rather, she says, “In my class I try to let people understand that these things are pretty common, that it’s not anything magical and doesn’t come from any special powers. I think it’s just part of life.”

After her near-death, she says she began seeing auras around people and objects, had out-of-body experiences in her sleep and other psychic occurrences. One day she heard Dr. Thelma Moss, then head of parapsychology studies at UCLA, discussing Kirlian photography on a talk radio program.

“I’d thought I was the only one. I had no idea others had had this happen to them. Then I heard her talking about how people glow, and how she could take pictures of it. It sounded like what I thought I was seeing. I called the station and was too embarrassed to talk on the air, so I asked if I could call her. I thought she would be able to make it stop, since she seemed to know what it was.”

She got to know Moss and was asked to talk to one of her classes about her experience. The students seemed interested in what she had to say, and she had been feeling a growing urge to share her encounter with bliss and the world it opened up to her, so she sought other speaking engagements, taking long lunch hours from her job to speak to women’s clubs and other organizations.

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In 1983 she organized classes in parapsychology, and speaking became her full-time job. In her classes she shies away from the more spiritual implications of her dead-time, focusing more on “objective information” about all aspects of the paranormal.

“I don’t want to change anybody’s beliefs. That’s not what my class is about. It’s just that many people are misinformed horribly about what paranormal things are. What they are is very common, and they happen to most people. What brings many people to my class is they have had out-of-body experiences or had been visited by a relative who had just died. They’re wondering, ‘Did I really see this? Am I the only one this has happened to?’ The class makes people feel OK with their experiences.”

She categorizes her students as “everyday working people, not weirdos.” Part of the curriculum for the four-week, non-credit, $57 course are exercises aimed at increasing ESP skills. She says it would be fraudulent to guarantee results, but does add, “I think everyone is somewhat intuitive and, like typing, if you practice you can get better at it.”

She says women tend to have an edge in telepathy--in projecting dream images to loved ones and such--but it is mostly men who make up the 5% of students in her classes who claim they have the ability to influence traffic signals to change. Others report that street lights dim or go out when they pass under them. Morrissey says these are examples of psychokinesis.

Though she no longer sees the whole world in auras, Morrissey says her near-death experience has changed every aspect of her life. She has grown less judgmental in her religious leanings, and, where she once played classical music in local orchestras, she now prefers the less rigid sounds of jazz and blues. She sleeps half as much, quit wearing a watch, started recycling and became so concerned about the state of the world that when she watches politicians on TV, “it makes me furious most of the time.

“After I died, when people remarked about how different I was, my common little joke to them was, ‘I haven’t changed at all. You have.’ Because the whole world looked different to me: my feelings about life, about what things were important, how important it was to be with people, to participate fully, not just say ‘hello’ without meaning it. You should mean it because every little second counts so much.

“Not a day goes by that I don’t think about the light. I guess you could say in some ways I regret coming back. I look forward so much to dying it’s overwhelming sometimes. Yet my experience has also taught me to deeply love this world.”