Reports of the paranormal come in an extremely wide variety. One interesting type of report is one that is sometimes given the rather poorly chosen name "After Death Communication." In such a report someone may experience some mysterious effect he may regard as having come from some person who died. For example:
- Someone may report that while awake he heard the voice of someone who died.
- Someone may report that while awake he saw some human form that looked like someone who died.
- Someone may report some mysterious hard-to-explain event occurring at the time someone died or shortly thereafter.
- Someone may report having some "feeling of presence" in which he someone gets the idea that some deceased person is near.
- Someone may report some hard-to-explain event that he regards as some kind of sign of manifestation of someone who died.
- Someone may have an unusually high number of dreams about someone who died.
- Someone may have some particularly vivid dream about someone who died.
The term "After Death Communication" is a poor term to use for the objective study of such reports, because:
(1) The term is too limiting. Having only some vague "feeling of presence" of a deceased person is not actually communication in the sense of words, thoughts or ideas transmitted. Also, seeing something or hearing something that is interpreted as a manifestion of some spiritual power (possibly a deceased person) is not communication in the sense of words, thoughts or ideas transmitted. And dreaming (either very often or sometimes vividly) of some deceased person is not typically communication in the sense of words, thoughts or ideas transmitted.
(2) The term "After Death Communication" is not an objective term for the discussion of reports such as those mentioned in the bullet list above, because such a term seems to presuppose one particular explanation of such reports (that they come from some deceased person). It is much better to have a neutral term that does not suggest any conclusion about the cause of such reports, a term as neutral as the noncommittal term "Unidentified Flying Object." A good noncommittal term for the type of reports listed above might be some term such as "Death-Related and Deceased-Related Anomalies" (DRADRA). Such a term involves no presupposition about the cause of the phenomena, and the relation referred to may or may not be purely some mental association made by the observer.
A recent scientific paper made a survey of people reporting things like that in the bullet list above. We end up with quite a bit of waffling about in regard to the results. Specifically:
(1) The survey form uses mainly the term "ADC" or "After Death Communication" as if the authors had the idea (or were trying to suggest to the survey participants) that certain phenomena involve some type of communication between deceased people and the living.
(2) One of the papers discussing the survey results is entitled "The phenomenology and impact of hallucinations concerning the deceased," just as if the authors had an interpretation completely the opposite of what is suggested by the survey form.
(3) Another of the papers discussing the survey results (by essentially the same authors as the other paper) is entitled "Perceptual phenomena associated with spontaneous experiences of after-death communication: Analysis of visual, tactile, auditory and olfactory sensations." This paper mentions three possible explanations: "(1) they are the result of hallucinations or day-to-day thoughts about the deceased; (2) they are subjective phenomena reflecting the extrasensory perception of remote events; or (3) they constitute objective phenomena, perceived more solidly, as if within the physical world." The synopsis ends by saying, "These elements are more compatible with hypotheses 2 and 3 than hypothesis 1."
So this paper seems to be arguing (or presenting evidence) against the hypothesis that such phenomena are caused by hallucinations. So why then did basically the same set of authors entitle their first paper (about the same survey data) as "The phenomenology and impact of hallucinations concerning the deceased"?
The practice of using the term "hallucinations" to describe reports of hard-to-explain events is an appalling one. The authors have provided no justification for the use of the word "hallucinations" to report such events, and should not have used such a word in the title of one of their papers. The paper states the following:
"Surprisingly, 36.4% of our respondents reported that they were not alone at the time of their ADC, and of these, 21.0% asserted that the ADC was witnessed by their companions. Also related to the perceived evidentiality of the experiences, 24.4% of respondents stated that they had received information that was previously unknown to them (often concerning circumstances of the deceased's passing)."
Such results don't sound like hallucinations, so why have our study authors used the word "hallucinations" in their title?
The study authors report getting very many affirmative answers from their study, and would have got more affirmative answers if they had asked additional types of questions. No questions are asked about mysterious anomalies on the day of someone's death or the day of someone's funeral, and no questions are asked about hard-to-explain item appearances or item movements that an observer thinks is somehow associated with a deceased person. For example, someone may mysteriously see a picture of a deceased person falling or moving, or mysteriously find some item associated with a deceased person, in some way that cannot be accounted for, as if it "appeared out of nowhere" or was teleported to where it was found.
I have observed quite a few interesting anomalies that may be classified as examples of "Death-Related and Deceased-Related Anomalies" (DRADRA). My long and interesting post here discusses such anomalies, along with many spooky and inexplicable things I have seen.
Yesterday I had an experience that could be classified as another example of a DRADRA. Just after having a dream in which a kind of shadowy indistinct human figure seemed to approach my bed, I woke up and found myself feeling colder than I have ever felt in bed. At the time (about 12:30 AM) no running fan was pointed at me, the nearby windows were all closed and the outdoor temperature was about 62 degrees. I was fully clothed, wearing both a cotton tee-shirt and silk pants.
Feeling chilled to the bone, I put on an extra shirt, an extra pair of sweat pants, and put a blanket and a sheet on my body. For about a minute, I thought that I was still too cold and that I would have to retrieve another blanket. But then I felt warm enough. Within about 5 or 10 minutes I had taken off the blanket and the sheet, and not many minutes later I took off the second shirt and the second pair of pants, returning to the same dress state I was in when I woke up. It was just as if the temperature around me had suddenly dropped by 30 degrees, and then had gradually returned to normal in the next twenty minutes. The same baffling coldness was reported by my wife as occurring at around the same time that I noticed it.
What could have caused the extreme chill? It wasn't any fever coming on, because I have had no fever in the past week. We may wonder whether the anomaly was related to my dream (just before waking up) of a shadowy indistinct human figure approaching my bed. It is said that a ghost may appear by drawing the heat from a small space, causing a sudden chill. Accounts of ghost sightings often involve reports of strange drops in temperature.
Near my bed was an air conditioner, but it was not running in air conditioning mode during the incident, and is set to turn off at 71 degrees, meaning it could not have been the source of a cold room.
Lacking any actual sighting (outside of a dream) of a ghost-like figure, we cannot classify this as an apparition sighting. It can merely be classified as yet another DRADRA anomaly in my experience.
The figure I saw in my dream (just before waking up) had a shadowy indistinct appearance like that of the visual below from a clip art site.
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