I resuscitated this young girl after she nearly drowned in a swimming pool. She had no heartbeat for nineteen minutes.

When I expressed disbelief at her story of going to heaven, she patted me on the hand and said, "You wll see. Heaven is fun".

We see in this picture the "two realities" often described by those who have near death experiences. Above the blue line is "heaven".  Below the blue line is a "hole in the world" that opened up to show to this girl her yet unborn brother. She was told that she had to return to "help my mother because my baby brother was going to have some problems".  She does not say in words what the problem was, but draws a large heart in the boy's chest.  He was born with severe heart problems, several months after this picture was drawn.

(left) This is a picture drawn by a young girl who nearly died of bacterial meningitis. She is being resuscitated by my partner Dr. Christopher, the doctor who is working on her.

At the top left of this picture, we see a rainbow.  This was, according to the girl, a "light that told me who I was and where I was to go".  The seated figure on the top center is "Jesus, and he was very nice".  I am sure that is comforting to Christians to learn.  This picture is a nice example of how the details from this world are accurately drawn, and the details from other worlds do not seem to be culturally derived.  I have never seen a picture of Jesus with a red hat sitting on a log before this drawing.

This young girl nearly died of a diabetic coma. She did not go to heaven or see any religious figures. Instead, she said: "I was somewhere lying down. Behind me were a whole bunch of people in white. They were talking to me. In front of me were two buttons, a red one and a green one. The people in white kept telling me to push the red button. But I knew I should push the green one instead and woke up from my coma. I don't know why I knew that the red button was bad".

(Above)  This is another nice example of how the images from children's NDEs do not seem to come from our culture, but rather their own personal psychology.  This is an example of a child who had a decision to return, yet it is very mechanistic, instead of asking Jesus if she could return, she presses a button on a box.  The figures are "doctors who are fourteen feet tall and have light bulbs in their bodies".  A more religious child might have called them angels.

This young man had very little to say about his survival of cardiac arrest, but he drew me this picture of what he looked like when he died. It reminds me of a quote: "Only human beings find their way by a light that illuminates more than the patch of ground they stand on." Biologists Peter and Jean Medawar.

Kalana was ravaged with disease since birth. By age four, she required a heart and lung transplant, done at Los Angeles Children's Hospital in 1994. At seven years of age, her body started rejecting the organs. At one point, she nearly died and was resuscitated. While still in the Intensive Care Unit, she used an Magna Doodle to communicate as she still had a tube in her lungs. At one point, a doctor came into the room, and her mother told her "Kalana, this is the doctor who saved you." Kalana shook her fist angrily and sketched "God saved me".

(Above) After she recovered, she told her mother that she was up in the corner of the room, looking down at the doctor working on her. She talked with "angels in a tunnel with a special kind of light." It felt good to her, and she wanted to lie down and rest.

The angels told her that she could rest for a little while, but then had to go back.
She was told "we will come for you when the time is right".

On their way home from the hospital, Kalana and her mother saw a strong ray of light coming out of the gray clouds. It touched the earth. Kalana told her mother that someone had just died. Her mother tried to give her a scientific explanation for the stream of light, but Kalana was insistent. She said it was the same light as in the tunnel. When they arrived home, they got a message that another child from their area who had been terminally ill, had just died.

Kalana died several months later. Her mother has given me permission to show the picture of her Magna Doodle message and her story, so that other parents can learn what Kalana experienced.

(Above) Jamie is a young girl who nearly died of liver failure from a viral infection.  She told me that during the time she was profoundly comatose, while she was having a needle placed into her heart to inject medicines to restart it, she saw her grandmother.  "I was just so shocked to see her.  She was there and I was here. And then I was back." I asked her what she meant by this, and she clenched her fists and said "that's what I have been trying to figure out."  Her drawing says more than her words.  Her grandmother is sitting on a chair, surrounded by clouds.  Clearly Jamie went somewhere, and the experience is all the more moving that she can't tell us where.