October 2023
Dr Janice Holden is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Near-Death Studies and President of the International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS). She served for 31 years on the faculty of the University of North Texas (UNT) Counseling Program. Her primary research has been on counseling implications of near-death experiences (NDEs), after-death communication (ADC), and other transpersonal experiences. McNair Ezzard interviewed Dr Holden for Share International magazine.
Share International: Some scientists refer to NDEs as hallucinations. What makes the NDE different from a dream or hallucination?
Janice Holden: Near-death experiences are recalled vividly for decades afterwards. There’s been research with near-death experiencers that twenty years ago provided a narrative of their NDE. They were asked again twenty years later to provide a narrative of their experience. It was virtually the same. People remember NDEs for a long period of time in great detail. That’s not characteristic of either dreams or hallucinations. Also, dreams and hallucinations tend to be non-rational. Near-death experiences tend to be more rational, like the unfolding of a story. Most important is that after dreams and hallucinations, when people return to normal consciousness, they look back on them and say, “that wasn’t real”. Whereas near-death experiencers tend to be quite adamant that the experience was as real or more real than normal waking reality. …
SI: Can you talk about the after-death communication part of your work?
JH: My research expanded into looking at after-death communication (ADC) as a topic in itself. The reason is that these experiences, just like near-death experiences, seem to move people in the direction of spiritual development, towards greater love and connectedness, and a sense of meaning and purpose and service to others. By any religious or other standards, this would be considered movement in the direction of greater spirituality. After-death communication also has some very constructive after-effects. Even though after-death communication can happen to people who are not grieving, it happens more often to people who are grieving. The experience tends to really help with grief. Some aspects of grief it doesn’t change. The person is still gone. The survivor has to figure out how to continue in life without them. With questions about how the deceased is doing, in after-death communication, people appear whole and healthy, no matter the circumstances of their physical passing. There’s also the question, will I ever see the person again? Yes, there’s the definite sense that when I die, we’ll be reunited. People get the sense from the ADC that the relationship with the disembodied person is ongoing. …
What’s interesting for me about after-death communication is that it actually occurs quite a bit to people outside the context of a near-death experience. After death communication can happen to a living person in any state of consciousness like waking, sleeping, meditating or daydreaming. …
SI: Can you give me an example of someone who has had an after-death communication?
JH: Yes, there are two. The first one actually combines an NDE and ADC. It’s an after-death communication that occurred during a near-death experience. It was Dr Eben Alexander, who’s a former Harvard neurosurgeon. In his NDE he met a beautiful woman whom he did not recognize, but she conveyed that he was absolutely loved. She was a companion through his near-death experience. By the way, he had been adopted as an infant and after his NDE he reconnected with his family of origin. They sent him a photo of his sister who had died years before he had his NDE. When he got the photo he recognized immediately she was the person who had accompanied him in his NDE. So it ended up being an after-death communication that he didn’t even realize was an after-death communication.
The other example is from the book, Hello From Heaven by Bill and Judy Guggenheim. In the book they talk about a case where a woman is driving home from work one day. And this illustrates that ADCs can occur outside the context of grief. Her father had died ten years before. She’s driving home from work and listening to the radio. Suddenly she hears her father’s voice say to her in a very commanding tone, “Turn right, right here, right now!” She’s at a stop sign. “Turn right! Right here.” It wasn’t the way she normally went home. She’s like, okay, so she turns right. She has to take this long, circuitous route to get to her house. She finally gets home, takes off her coat, pours herself a glass of wine, turns on the TV, and sees that the bridge that she normally crosses on her way home, which she hadn’t gotten to yet, had collapsed. Some cars had driven into the ravine. People had died before anybody realized what was happening. If she hadn’t been diverted from her normal route, she might have been one of those people. In a sense, she was rescued through after an after-death communication from her father.
SI: Do you have any hopes for the field of study of NDEs and ADCS?
JH: Yes. It’s my hope that through the research of organizations like IANDS and other academic researchers, particularly in the Western world, where phenomena like NDEs and ADCs are not really widely discussed, that they become more widely known, so that people can contemplate their implications.
