Can Dreams Provide Symbolic Hints of an Afterlife?

In the paper here we have an example of an alleged "scientific consensus" that is completely contrary to my own experience. We read this:

"There is a relatively broad consensus, based on results from both survey and laboratory studies, that the capacity to recall dreams decreases with age (for reviews see Funkhouser et al., 1999; Guenole et al., 2010). One early study of 17- to 70-year-old college-educated participants (n = 295) found that dream recall frequency (DRF) was at its highest level (9.8 dreams/month) in the late teens, progressively lower at ages 30–39 (6.1/month), 40–49 (4.2/month), and 50–59 (3.7/month) and then somewhat higher again at ages 60–69 (4.5/month; Herman and Shows, 1983)." 

Such factoids are quite contrary to my own experience, because although I am in one of these older age groups, I have been able to recall and log an average of about 100 dreams per month (to make a very rough estimate). My almost-daily-updated post "I Keep Dreaming About Danger, Death and Life After Death" is by now one of the largest dream journals that can be found anywhere online.  Dream journals in chronological order tend to be very hard-to-read because of all the dream-to-dream variation.  My dream log has avoided such a problem by avoiding chronological order, and organizing all the dreams into five  categories:

(1) Dreams I had of danger.

(2) Dreams I had with an explicit death reference (such as someone dying or some mention of death).

(3) Dreams I had in which death seemed to be symbolized.

(4) Dreams I had that seemed to refer to life-after-death, often in an indirect or symbolic way. 

(5) Dreams I had in which some deceased person appeared or was mentioned. 

The dreams of danger are not terribly noteworthy, as danger is a common theme in dreams. What is very noteworthy is the very high repetition of themes of life-after-death in my dreams. Since starting to log my dreams in November 2020,  I have had more than 270 dreams that seemed to refer to life after death.  This is not counting more than 400 dreams I have had referring to or involving deceased people. Counting both dreams that seemed to refer to life after death and dreams in which a deceased person appeared or was mentioned, I have had more than 670 dreams in the past two years that either seemed to refer to life after death or referred to (or had in them) a deceased person.  Interestingly, famous deceased people appear far more often in my dreams than famous living people.

Such dreams may support a belief in life after death, but I can imagine a skeptical objection. A skeptic might say something like this:

 "Your frequent dreams of life after death are just wish fulfillment produced by brain activity. You want to believe in life after death, so that is what you dream about." 

I will now list several reasons why such an explanation is not credible. 

(1) Wish-fulfillment dreams tend to be rare in the general public, and I had few wish-fulfillment type dreams prior to the time I started to record my dreams. 

A rather frustrating feature of dreams for the average person is how infrequently a person will have a wish fulfillment dream. The average male would very much like to have a dream in which he has sex with a movie star or hits the home run that wins a World Series game, or buys a lottery ticket that makes him a millionaire.  Dreams like that rarely occur to the average person.  It is very much more common for dreams to involve some danger, or a person being in an uncomfortable situation.  That's why there exists a word in English language referring to bad dreams ("nightmare"), but why there does not exist in the English language a word referring to good dreams in which a wish is fulfilled. 

Before I started logging my dreams about a year ago, I would almost never get dreams that seemed like wish-fulfillment dreams.  Before I started logging my dreams, the only recurring dreams I ever had were uncomfortable dreams in which I found myself either working at the lowest-paying job I ever long worked at or at a company I formerly worked at that was pretty much the last company I would ever want to return to. Such dreams were the opposite of wish-fulfillment dreams. 

(2) Under materialist assumptions, there is no reason why anyone would have frequently repeating wish fulfillment dreams involving life after death.

If we assume the type of things a materialist skeptic would assume, there is no reason at all why a person would tend to have repeated wish-fulfillment dreams, particularly those involving life after death. Having such dreams would serve no evolutionary purpose and no survival-of-the-fittest purpose. The same objection can be made to those who claim that near-death experiences or reports of apparitions of the dead are caused by some built-in brain "comfort" mechanism. Such "comfort" mechanisms would have no purpose for reasons pertaining to survival of the fittest. 

In fact, under Darwinist assumptions we would expect that an increase in fear of death would tend to produce more survival. A person more afraid of being killed by predators would be more likely to protect himself against predators. So under the assumptions favored by materialist skeptics, we simply cannot account for why a person would keep having dreams suggesting life after death. A person having abundant dreams about life after death would tend to be a little less likely to avoid danger, so there would be a slightly negative effect in regard to "survival of the fittest." 

(3) My dreams about life after death are too often cleverly and elaborately symbolic to be credibly explained as the result of random brain processes. 

It is not correct to describe my dreams about life after death as a recurring dream.  Such dreams are better described as a set of dreams that are each unique but seem to share an underlying theme. Many dozens of the dreams seem to involve clever and elaborate symbolism. Very often there will seem to be two or three symbolic elements in the same dream. Below are some examples:

• I had a dream in which a moth was trapped in my bathroom, and I opened up the bathroom window and turned off the light, so that the moth could be attracted to the moonlight or light from outside, and leave my bathroom.  The moth trapped in the bathroom may symbolize the soul trapped in a body. The turning off of the light may symbolize death. The idea of the moth leaving the bathroom and heading towards the greater light outdoors may symbolize the soul leaving the body and heading toward some greater light like that in some heavenly realm often described as a place of dazzling light. 
• I dreamed that as I looked from a high balcony, I looked down and saw a big table in  which about 24 people were seated. There was a single empty chair which  I recognized as where I would have sat. The empty chair may symbolize  death, and the high balcony a position in some afterlife realm. 
• I dreamed that two women came into my apartment, and some paranormal things started to happen. At least once the lights turned off and then on;  the face on a helium balloon changed its expression; and I found a little rag doll where no one would have put it: on top of a table lamp, near its glowing light bulb.  The turning off and turning on of the light is something I have got repeatedly in my dreams (and, most mysteriously, in real life when no human action was involved). The turning off may symbolize physical death, and the turning on may symbolize life after death. The rise of the rag doll to the top of the lamp may symbolize the ascent of the soul to heaven (people having near-death experiences often report rising up towards some heavenly light). 
• I had a dream I was in the lobby of a tall building, in front of its elevators. I was dressed in a business suit, but wearing no shoes.  My attire in this dream may symbolize death, because people who have open-coffin funerals often have fancy clothes on their top half, but no shoes (their bottom half being unseen by funeral attendees).  The elevators in front of me may symbolize an ascent to some higher plane of existence after death.  

Hundreds of similar examples are found in my very long post here. I have had very many dreams such as this in the past two years,  dreams that seem to make a very clever use of symbolic elements to refer to life after death, by employing more than one symbolic element in a single dream. Clever symbolism seems more the rule rather than the exception in such dreams. Each of the dreams has been different, although some elements repeat. Looking at the entire set of 270+ dreams I have had seeming to refer to life after death, all I can say is that I wish I was clever enough to have thought of all of these dreams myself. Doubting that my sleeping subconscious is some Einstein of semiotic creativity, I suspect they come from some power with creative ability and cleverness beyond my own.  

It is claimed that  in the dream state a person may be more prone to ESP.  Maybe there is some master of literary symbolism elsewhere on our planet who is sending such dreams to my mind. Or perhaps such dreams come from some spiritual reality beyond this earthly realm. 

Another reason for thinking that my dreams are not at all mere random content is the fact that known deceased people have appeared in my dreams far more often than known living people (not counting dreams of my daughters and wife). Our culture is celebrity-saturated. Who do we read about as we swipe our smartphones and tablets? Almost entirely living people. But, very oddly, in my dreams during the past two years the deceased seem to have appeared far more often than the living. Besides about 80 dreams about my father and about 80 dreams about my mother, I have had hundreds of dreams about a vast variety of deceased figures. Living people (outside of my family) show up much less commonly. This is not at all what we would expect from random brain activity. My dreams cannot be explained as something actively willed during a dream, because I virtually never have lucid dreams (dreams in which you are aware that you are dreaming while you are dreaming). 

The phenomenon of having extremely abundant dreams about life after death is one that psychologists have failed to study. In general,  scientists have done a rather poor job of researching the subject of dreams. There are some interesting studies that have involved questioning terminally ill people about what kind of dreams they had. Such studies have often suggested that dreams hinting at life after death may be more common among the terminally ill. But the proper way to study dreams is not merely to ask people what dreams they recall having, but to get people to keep dream journals over a lengthy period of time. In general people tend to remember their dreams for only a short time. So if you are serious about studying dream content, what you need to do is to get people to keep dream journals, in which people write down their dreams as soon as they wake up and recall the dreams.  Almost no scientific studies have involved systematic attempts to get people to keep dream journals, and to analyze the contents of such journals over a long period of time.  

But I was able to find one study that analyzed dream content by age, and found one result consistent with my own experience. The study is one entitled "Typical dreams across the life cycle." It reports a theme of "a person now dead as alive" as being the seventh most common dream, with the frequency of the dream sharply increasing with age, as shown in the graph below:

A 1935 study ("The Dream in Primitive Cultures") found that a theme of "death and spirits of the dead" was the most common theme of people in the Solomon Islands. 

The type of analysis that typically occurs in scientific studies of dreams is a very superficial analysis. What typically goes on is a very shallow kind of keyword analysis. So, for example, a scientist may quantify how many dreams referred to an animal, how many dreams referred to a vehicle, how many dreams referred to a weapon, and so forth. While such analysis can conveniently be done through computer programming, such analysis is almost worthless for gleaming the content of dreams that may be symbolic and representational. A much better technique would be a technique of thematic analysis or semiotic analysis that requires a person to read a description of a dream and try to categorize a theme or idea that the dream represents. Instead of having computer programs that scan for keyword repetitions, you give dream accounts to humans who read the accounts, and then categorize each dream into one of a hundred categories, based on the assumption that a dream may symbolize or represent some particular idea or theme. 

I can give an example of how human semantic analysis is required for dreams that may have a symbolic content. Suppose someone has a dream in which he crosses a river and then walks up a path leading to the shining luminous top of a mountain:

Artwork by Stable Diffusion AI (link).

Now, a human familiar with the symbolism of life after death would recognize that the dream has three elements suggesting life after death: (1) the ascent to a mountain top; (2) the luminous elevated state at the top; (3) the crossing leading to the other side of the river (suggesting the motif of an Other Side or an afterlife).  But a computerized keyword searcher will merely record keyword matches for "river," "mountain," and "light," which will fail to provide any insight. 

Scientists could study dreams far more deeply, using better techniques such as encouraging the keeping of long-term dream journals, and the semantic or semiotic analysis of dreams requiring human analysis rather than mere computerized keyword matching. With adequate study and better techniques, scientists might discover something profoundly important: that humans receive very strong hints of an afterlife through their dreams. 

If you research the acronym ELDV (standing for end-of-life dreams and visions), you will read some papers and articles that sometimes suggest that the phenomenon of dreams suggestive of life after death is one that may occur in a person's last weeks or months. My own experience suggests that dreams suggestive of life after death can occur very strongly and heavily for years before someone's death. I've been having such dreams throughout the past two years, and expect they will continue for additional years.  Researchers should attempt to gauge the prevalance of such dreams not just in the last few weeks or months or someone's life, but also in the last five or ten years of someone's life. 

I can give the following advice for anyone keeping a dream journal:

(1) Keep a notebook next to your bed. 

(2) When you wake up and remember a dream, immediately use a pen or pencil to write down what you remember about the dream. Don't turn on the light to do this, which may make it harder to fall back to sleep. 

(3) Record any dream, regardless of whether it seems meaningful or not. It often happens that a dream will seem to have symbolism that you will only recognize upon pondering the dream. So don't try to figure out whether a dream is meaningful or not before writing it down. Just write down as quickly as possible whatever you remember about the dream. After you have risen, you can reflect on whether a dream seemed to symbolize anything. 

Paleontologists Peddle Transformation Tall Tales

Scientists have four main problems in trying to understand the origin of flying organisms:

(1) Understanding the origin of flying insects, the oldest known form of flying organisms.

(2) Understanding the origin of flying reptiles such as pterosaurs. 

(3) Understanding the origin of birds. 

(4) Understanding the orgin of flying mammals such as bats. 

Scientists have made no great progress in any of these areas. An example of their lack of progress can be seen when we consider the question of origin of flying insects. An example of the current tall tale told about such an origin is the paper here, a paper by Bruce and Patel entitled "Insect wings and body wall evolved from ancient leg segments." In that paper some scientists attempt to convince us that flying insects evolved from crustaceans. The paper tries to suggest that a little leg (or lobe on the leg) on the front of a shrimp-like organism transformed into a big wing on the back of an insect organism.  It says, "two ancestral crustacean leg segments were incorporated into the insect body, moving the leg’s epipod dorsally, up onto the back to form insect wings."  Really, and while that mystifying migration and radical transfiguration occurred, a shrimp-like crustacean was also turning into a vastly different type of animal, into an insect? 

This speculation is as silly as the theory that animals got arms after their toes moved up the side of their body and turned into arms. 

	Crustaceans	Insects
Body segments	2	3
Number of antennae	2 pairs	1 pair
Wings?	Never	Sometimes
Chewing appendages	Usually 3 pairs	1 pair
Location of appendages	Cephalothorax and abdomen	Head and abdomen
Respiration	Gills	Tracheal system

See here for this table's source

In Figure 1 of this paper by Bruce and Patel we have a drawing designed to show us some structural similarity between a part of a crustacean leg and an insect leg. The drawings aren't labeled as diagrams, but are labeled as  "cartoons," which doesn't exactly inspire our confidence.  When we compare these two "cartoons," we find the structural similarity isn't even very strong. So we get no visual reason for thinking one structure evolved from the other.  Since the authors have claimed that insect wings evolved from a crustacean leg or part of such a leg, why aren't they showing a diagram comparing the details of an insect wing and some part of a crustacean? It's because nothing on a crustacean looks anything like an insect wing. 

Recently the science news sites had another example of paleontologists making dubious boasts claiming some progress in understanding the origin of flying reptiles. One of the stories appeared in the BBC News, which for many, many years has displayed the most child-like credulity in uncritically parroting any evolution story coming from professors, no matter how ridiculous  such a story may be. The story is entitled "Scottish fossil revealed to be pterodactyl ancestor." There is a claim that a creature called Scleromochlus was an ancestor of flying pterodactyls.

There are some gigantic problems here:

(1) We see a skeletal "reconstruction" of this Scleromochlus, along with a visualization of it taken from a scientific paper, and neither shows signs of any wings or wing bones. 

(2) Pterodactyls were flying animals with very large winspans of about 6 meters. But in the BBC article we see a photo of a fossil of this Scleromochlus, and the fossil easily fits in the palms of someone's hands. So this Scleromochlus was no more than a few inches long, about the size of someone's palm. So claiming tiny Scleromochlus creatures (without even the beginning of a wing) as some explanation for how we got pterodactyls with huge wings is preposterous, rather like claiming that albatrosses arose from acorns. 

In the BBC article a professor claims that these tiny Scleromochlus creatures had "wings of skin attached to a single long, skinny finger."  Wings of skin? We see nothing in the visuals in the article justifying any such claim. No such wings are shown. One of the  visuals shows a tiny whitish something in the shoulder area of these creatures, with such a tiny whitish something being no more about a thirtieth of the length of the creatures. But since the creatures were palm-sized, such a whitish little something could not have been even half as long as a pea. Calling things so tiny "wings of skin" is baloney, since whatever such little bumps were, they could not conceivably have been wings. And referring to "fingers" on these palm-sized creatures as "long" is also baloney, since such "fingers"  must have been very tiny, less than half the size of a pea.  

The tale that pterosaurs with 6-meter wingspans arose from tiny wingless Scleromochlus creatures is a transformation tale comparable to Cinderella's white horses arising from Cinderella's white mice, but maybe even harder to believe, because at least the white mice and white horses had the same types of limbs. Why should we have much trust in the statements of paleontologists when they make boasts so dubious, and make ancestry claims so unsubstantiated?

A 1992 paper on the origin of flight in bats tells us that "the fossil evidence for bat origins is extremely sparse," and that "all fossils available only complicate matters." A 2005 paper discussing the origin of bats states "The phylogenetic and geographic origins of bats (Chiroptera) remain unknown." After noting that the earliest bats date from the early Eocene era, we read that "skeletons of these early taxa indicate that many of the anatomical specializations characteristic of bats had already been achieved by the early Eocene, including forelimb and manus elongation in conjunction with structural changes in the pectoral skeleton, hind limb reorientation, and the presence of rudimentary echolocating abilities."  The paper then tells us that "evolutionary intermediates between bats and their non-flying ancestors are not known from the fossil record." Quite the missing link. 

Paleontologists also have no credible theory to tell of the origin of birds. They tell us that birds evolved from reptiles, but not flying reptiles such as pterosaurs, but non-flying reptiles.  Paleontologists  have no credible theory to tell of how something as hard-to-achieve as flight could have appeared through any gradual Darwinian process. 

With the origin of flight, we have a classic case of a requirements threshold, an extremely important concept that paleontologists and evolutionary biologists like to ignore. A requirements threshold is a minimum level of parts and organization of such parts that must be achieved before something is useful. Consider an airplane. There is a certain number of parts that must exist and be arranged in a suitable manner for the airplane to reach the requirements threshold of being able to take off and land without killing people. Meeting only 60% or 70% or 80% of such a requirements threshold results in an aircraft that is useless but harmless (incapable of lifting off), or worse than useless (being something so unsafe it will tend to kill people riding in it). Below is a table with some rough estimates regarding levels of completion in meeting a requirements threshold for a flying animal:

 

Level of completion	Effect
10% of flying requirements threshold	Useless
30% of flying requirements threshold	Useless
50% of flying requirements threshold	Useless
70% of flying requirements threshold	Worse than useless. An animal trying to fly will tend to fall and kill itself, or have useless wings that will make it easier for predators to bite it.
90% of flying requirements threshold	Worse than useless. An animal trying to fly will tend to fall and kill itself,  or have useless wings that will make it easier for predators to bite it.
100% of flying requirements threshold	Useful. Animal can fly, and escape predators.

You have a similar situation regarding the construction of a bridge across a river. Building 50% of a bridge that leads halfway across the river does not result in something 50% useful that transports half as many people across rivers. Building 50% of a bridge that leads halfway across the river results in a suicide machine suitable only for leading drivers to their deaths at the bottom of the river. It's the same thing for building 70% or 80% or 90% of a river bridge: that merely gives you suicide machines that will dump drivers at the bottom of rivers. Requirements thresholds constantly appear in both biology and engineering, and when we properly ponder them, very many a gradualist origins tale will dissolve like the morning mist. 

Some have tried to suggest a gradual evolution of flight from animals that could jump between trees. But animals such as flying squirrels first appear in the fossil record about 31 million years ago, while paleontologists claim that birds appeared more than 100 million years ago. You could make a table like the one above, listing levels of completion for being able to jump between trees, and it would be something as problematic as the one above. The problem with jumping between trees is that unless it is done very reliably, it will be worse than useless. An animal that can only jump between trees with 90% reliability will quickly kill itself jumping between trees, as it falls from high distances. Also, animals such as flying squirrels don't look anything like birds. Such animals have arms that birds that don't have, and web-like structures between arms and legs, unlike anything in birds. So it is hard to imagine any transition between tree-jumping animals and birds.  

For the orthodox Darwinists there are countless problems of this type: how did nature “climb the staircase” to reach some top level of anatomical innovation, in such a way so that each step added to the reproductive value or survival value of an organism, so that each step was useful? Under Darwinian assumptions, each step must be useful, or we can't explain it. One of the biggest “climbing up the staircase” problems involves the evolution of wings. It is very hard to imagine that a small part of a wing would have any use. 

Faced with this issue, Darwinism apologists tend to cheat. One cheat is to try to give a reasonable-sounding answer to the question of "what good is half a wing?"  We may be told speculations such as half a wing is useful for keeping warm, or that half a wing may be useful for picking up food. Speaking like that is cheating, because it is starting halfway up the stairway, when you should be starting at the bottom of the stairway. The question that should be asked is not “what good is half a wing?” but “what good is an eighth of a wing?” or “what good is a wing stump?” To explain this problem under orthodox Darwinian assumptions, one would need to offer a scenario by which a species might progress through this series: (1) no wing; (2) an eighth of a wing; (3) two eighths of wing; (4) three eighths of a wing; (5) four eighths of a wing; and so forth. One would need to explain how each of these progressions involved an increase in either reproductive value or survival value.

Evolutionary biologists are unable to credibly explain such a progression. It doesn't work to suggest that organisms began to develop wings to keep them warm, because that can't explain the first two steps in the stairway; it can't explain why a species would start to evolve a wing stump or just an eighth of a wing. A wing stump or an eighth of a wing is worthless for keeping you warm. If you doubt this, I suggest the following experiment. Break a chopstick in half, and paste a few feathers on it. Then tape that feathered half chopstick on your shoulders, and go out on a cold night. You will not feel any warmer.

It has also been suggested that partial wings were useful for gliding. This does not work, for two reasons. A lesser reason is that gliding is only useful for certain types of animals (such as tree-dwellers); but it is believed that birds evolved from reptiles that did not live in trees. The larger reason is that to get even a capability for gliding, a wing must be quite well developed, much more than just a wing stump. So a gliding hypothesis cannot explain why an organism would evolve the first eighth of a wing or a wing stump.

In general Darwinism fails to credibly explain the first stages of useful new complex structures. This was pointed out very clearly in Darwin's time by the biologist Mivart, who wrote the following at the beginning of Chapter II of his book On the Genesis of Species: "Natural Selection utterly fails to account for the conservation and development of the minute and rudimentary beginnings, the slight and infinitesimal commencements of structures, however useful those structures may later become." Mivart devoted Chapter II of that book to many examples of "incipient stages" that Darwinism could not explain well.  You can read online Mivart's many examples here.  Without even reading that, it is easy to think of many examples of incipient stages that would not be useful, such as the first small part of any limb (such as an arm or leg) or the first small part of a wing or the first small part of a mammary gland. Other examples are the first small part of a penis, testicle, or an ovary.  On the microscopic level, there is the fact that the first small part of almost every protein molecule is useless. 

There is a general reason why all Darwinist attempts to explain the origin of flying animals are doomed to failure. The reason is that DNA does not specify anatomy. DNA merely specifies low-level chemical information such as which amino acids make up proteins. Since DNA does not specify anatomy, there are no conceivable mutations in DNA that can explain the origin of flying animals. Wings are an example of very impressive anatomical innovations, and you cannot explain very impressive anatomical innovations by imagining changes in DNA. So how could you ever get dramatic new anatomical innovations? That's something that Darwinism cannot credibly explain. 

When Crisis Apparitions Seem to Notify of Someone's Death

 A WIlliam J. Groo asserted that a judge had told him this account:

"That,  sometime  in  the  night,  he  awoke  and  saw  the form  of  the  lady  robed  in  white  with  whom  he  had  boarded  when  reading  law. That  she  was  standing  near  his  berth,  and  said  to  him  :  'I  have  just  died,  and thought  I  would  come  and  tell  you.'  She  then  disappeared;  whereupon  he arose,  procured  a  light,  and  made  a  note  of  the  occurrence  and  of  the  exact  time. That  soon  after  reaching  home  that  day  a  telegram  was  received,  announcing  the death  of  the  lady,  and  that  subsequently  he  ascertained  that  it  had  occurred  at the  exact  time  that  she  had  appeared  to  him  on  the  boat."

Robert Crookall's book What Happens When We Die contains many fascinating accounts of out-of-body experiences. In the book we read this account on page 40:

"Four years ago my sister was killed in a car crash. That night -- before I knew she had died -- I saw a smoky figure take form before my eyes; it gradually formed and then gradually materialized. I learned of her death the next day." 

I omit in this quote a bracketed comment that seems to be a speculation by Crookall. 

On the web site of Psychology Today, a PhD tells us the following account:

"In one of the cases of crisis apparitions I have investigated myself, a young woman was on vacation and started to feel concerned about a friend who hadn’t returned to their youth hostel. He was a fell runner and had set off that morning to run up a mountain. Suddenly, the man appeared before her, although not in his normal physical form. He walked up the stairs of the youth hostel, then 'moved towards me as though he was floating and with his arm outstretched as though trying to reach out to me. I just sensed he had died and was visiting the people and places he knew as though trying to figure out where he was. I went downstairs to tell my boyfriend that I’d seen our friend and felt he had passed.' The man’s dead body found was on the mountain the next day."

The book Psychism: Analysis of Things Existing by Paul Gibier MD contains some very interesting accounts. On pages 146 to 150 we have one of the earliest detailed accounts of an out-of-body experience. The subject reports floating out of his body, traveling to a neighbor's never-previously-seen apartment, and then later verifying (with his physical body) what he had seen in his out-of-body experience. On page 245 we read an account sent to Gibier by a son who heard it from his father. While being the captain of a boat at sea, the father saw an apparition of his brother.  The apparition persisted for several days. Later the father found out that his brother had died 

In her autobiography Lady Sings the Blues the singer Billie Holiday recalls an experience that may not quite qualify as an apparition sighting, although it would seem to qualify as an apparition experience. We read this:

"We were just sitting there when suddenly I felt my mother come up behind me and put her hand on my shoulders. And I knew she was dead. I turned to Joe. 'Mama just left and she’s dead,' I told him.

'You’re crazy,' he told me. 'You must be blowing your top.' 'You listen to what I said,' I told him, 'and g*ddamnit, you better be good to me because you’re all I’ve got now.' "

Holliday's mother had died unexpectedly at age 38, around the time the quoted dialogue had occurred. 

On page 64 of her very interesting book Opening Heaven's Door: What the Dying Tell Us About Where They're Going, Patricia Pearson tells us of a man named Derek Whitehead who was working on a ship in the Merchant Navy when he was very surprised to see his grandfather in front of him. Whitehead would learn by mail awaiting him in Australia that his grandfather had died the same evening.

On pages 72-75 of the book The Scalpel and the Soul by Allan J. Hamilton M.D. we learn of a boy named Thomas who was very badly burnt, and received skin grafts at a hospital, which his body rejected. The boy's father died of a heart attack while doctors were trying to save the boy. The surgeons grafted the father's skin to try and save the boy. The boy regained consciousness, and asked, "What happened to my father?" Hamilton told the lie that the father was okay. The boy then said that his father was standing silently at the end of his bed. The boy was then told that his father had died. The boy said, "That must be his ghost then that's waving back at me." The boy survived to become an honor student. 

On page 30 of the same book Allan J. Hamilton M.D. discusses a strange phenomenon he has observed. Hamilton says this:

"A dull, waxy, yellowish light accumulates around those who are about to die....This glow would seem to shine from underneath the patient's skin. Invariably, when I saw it, patients would die soon....I've seen patients precariously close to dying in the ICU, who have had this soft, candle-like light come into their being. Then it faded back to a crisper, cleaner white light as they recovered. But when the yellowish hue comes, the individual is near death."  

On page 260 of the document here, we are told a memorable tale of an apparition:

"A NEW YORK doctor was called on by a little girl, who begged him to come and see her mother who was very ill. The doctor demurred at first about going, as he was very busy and had some important cases to attend to, and told the child it was impossible that he could go just then ; however, her persistence and some unaccountable influence at last prevailed, and, leaving his patients, he accompanied the girl in a cab to a poverty-stricken part of the city, where he found the child’s mother in a tenement house ill with diphtheria. The little girl after showing him the room, left him at the door and was not seen again. The doctor told the invalid that as it was diphtheria she was suffering from it would be dangerous for her little daughter to come near her. The woman, much surprised, said she had no daughter, as her little girl had died the previous day and the corpse was lying in the adjacent room. The doctor assured her that a little girl calling herself her daughter had called on him and begged him with the most earnest entreaties to come to her mother, and that she had brought him as far as the room door and then left him. The doctor, after attending to the woman, went into the adjoining room, where he saw the body of the child lying there awaiting removal to the mortuary, and was astounded to find that it was the corpse of the little girl who had just brought him to the house."

We are assured that this account is "quite true, and was told by the doctor himself to one of the Cowley Fathers, residing at Oxford, who was then on a visit to New York." On page 202 of the document here, May Crommelin describes being told by a woman that her father was a skeptic about life after death. But one day the father reported to the woman that he had seen the apparition of a friend who he did not know had died. "I have left the earth-life" said the apparition. When asked how he was, the apparition reportedly said this:

"Very happy. Of course had I been a better man I should be much more so. Still I am much happier than ever I was in my former life.” 

The apparition then reportedly disappeared. The experience was so dramatic that the father immediately changed his views about life after death. The friend's death was subsequently confirmed. 

In Florence Marryat's very interesting book There Is No Death she tells this account of her father:

"As my father was lying in his berth one night, anchored off the island, with the brilliant tropical moonlight making everything as bright as day, he saw the door of his cabin open, and his brother Samuel entered and walked quietly up to his side. He looked just the same as when they had parted, and uttered in a perfectly distinct voice, ' Fred ! I have come to tell you that I am dead ! ' When the figure entered the cabin my father jumped up in his berth, thinking it was some one coming to rob him, and when he saw who it was and heard it speak, he leaped out of bed with the intention of detaining it, but it was gone. So vivid was the impression made upon him by the apparition that he drew out his log at once and wrote down all particulars concerning it, with the hour and day of its appearance. On reaching England after the war was over, the first dispatches put into his hand were to announce the death of his brother, who had passed away at the very hour when he had seen him in the cabin."

In the Atlantic Monthly of May 1862 (pages 579-580), we read a writer who interviewed Harriet Horner, a sculptor. She said that she long had in her employment an Italian female named Rosa, who had to stop working for her on account of bad health.  After visiting Rosa and thinking that she would have quite a few future visits with her,  Harriet went to sleep and awoke with the feeling someone else was in the room. She then was surprised to see Rosa, who said, "I am well now." Rising to talk to her, Harriet was surprised to find no one there.  At breakfast Harriet said, "Rosa is dead," and remembered hearing the clock strike five during the experience. After sending someone to check on Rosa, Harriet was told Rosa had died at five in the morning. 

A Reverend C. C. McKechnie reported seeing the following "crisis apparition" of his grandfather, when C. C. was a boy of ten:

"At the time of his death, and without my having any apprehension of his end, I happened to be at my father's house, about a mile off. I was leaning in a listless sort of way against the kitchen table, looking upward at the ceiling and thinking of nothing in particular, when my grandfather's face appeared to grow out of the ceiling, at first dim and indistinct, but becoming more and more complete until it seemed in every respect as full and perfect as I had ever seen it.  It looked down upon me, as I thought, with a wonderful expression of tenderness and affection. Then it disappeared, not suddenly but gradually, its features fading and becoming dim and indistinct, until I saw nothing but the bare ceiling. I spoke at the time of what I saw to my mother, but she made no account of it, thinking, probably, it was nothing more than a boyish vagary. But in about fifteen or twenty minutes after seeing the vision, a boy came running breathless to my father's with the news that my grandfather had just died."

A man named Edward Jackson stated that while indoors he suddenly felt a current of cold air, as if the door had opened. The door was not open, but standing between himself and the door was a figure who Edward recognized as a boyhood friend. The figure (dressed in a polo outfit) walked past Edward, and disappeared into an inner room. Edward went looking for the figure but could not find him. Edward said "there was no way anybody could have got out unknown to me." He wrote about the event to his father, who told him that the boy had been killed on the same day Edward had seen him.  The boy had been killed while playing polo.

These are just additional examples of a phenomenon often reported in the West: that of someone seeing an apparition of a person he did not know had died, and later finding out that the person had died on the same day, often at the very hour the apparition was seen. You can read about  hundreds of such "wraith cases" by reading my posts below:

An Apparition Was Their Death Notice

25 Who Were "Ghost-Told" of a Death

25 More Who Were "Ghost-Told" of a Death

Yet Another 25 Who Were “Ghost-Told” of a Death

Scientific American's Very Lame "Ghost Explanations"

They Also Were "Ghost Told" of a Death

More Accounts of Veridical Apparitions

Even More Cases of Veridical Apparitions

When Apparitions Serve as Announcements

Still More Cases of Veridical Apparitions

When Apparitions Act as News Bulletins

They Too Were "Ghost-Told" of a Death

They Seemed to Ghost-Learn of Someone's Death

When Chemists Speak Baloney About Peptides

Like some seedy honkytonk used-car sales lot where "anything goes," the world of so-called "science news" nowadays is a hall-of-mirrors "carnival barker" world in which truth is all mixed up with hype and misleading claims. These days most science news comes from press releases written by the copy writers of corporate and university press offices, who are notorious for making claims not warranted by anything found in the scientific papers they are promoting, and who often lack strong knowledge of the complex and deep topics being discussed. Moreover, quotes by professors in press releases are often wildly inaccurate. The professors know that the more paper citation counts they get, the more highly they are rated. Sadly, many a professor asked about his latest research will make some sensationalist claim that simply isn't true, to make his research sound like something much more worthy of attention and citation than it is. By reading my 47 posts with the label "overblown hype," you can find countless examples of lies and misleading statements that appeared in articles I found while reading the so-called "science news."

Some of the worst examples of phony-baloney "science news" comes when the topic of abiogenesis is discussed. Abiogenesis is the idea that life can naturally arise from non-life. Everything we know about the complexity and amount of organization in living things argues against this idea. Even the simplest living thing is a cell that requires hundreds of different types of protein molecules to exist and reproduce. Each of those types of protein molecules is a separate complex invention as unlikely to arise by chance as a well-written 100-word paragraph from a random arrangement of shells and pebbles and seaweed at a seashore.

There are no experiments supporting the idea of abiogenesis. No one has ever produced a living thing from any experiment realistically simulating lifeless early Earth conditions. No one has ever produced a functional protein molecule (one of the building blocks of one-celled life) from any experiment realistically simulating early Earth conditions. No one has ever even produced one of the building blocks of the building blocks of one-celled life (an amino acid) from any experiment realistically simulating early Earth conditions. The Miller-Urey experiment which produced some amino acids was not a realistic simulation of early Earth conditions, for reasons discussed in my post here. The apparatus used by the Miller-Urey experiment was a manufacturing device unlike anything that would have existed in the early Earth. We have had seventy years of lies from the mainstream press about the Miller-Urey experiment, claims that it revealed something that it did not actually reveal. 

The latest bit of untrue news in the long, long series of very misleading news stories about the origin of life is a pure baloney press release from Purdue University with the extremely untrue headline "The fountain of life: Water droplets hold the secret ingredient for building life." 

We read that Purdue University chemists have discovered a path by which two amino acids can form into a peptide. That is as unimpressive a result as "one plus one equals two." 

The basic facts are these:

(1) There are twenty types of amino acids used by the proteins in living organisms, with each amino acid being a particular arrangement of between 9 and about 25 atoms. 

(2) When two or a few amino acids combine, they form something called a peptide. 

(3) To produce the starting point of a functional protein molecule, you need hundreds of amino acids arranged in just the right way to form a very long molecule that is called a polypeptide.

(4) To produce a molecule with biological function, such a polypeptide has to somehow do a  very hard-to-achieve thing called folding, so that a very special and complex three-dimensional shape arises, which can serve as a functional protein molecule. We see one of those shapes in the visual below. 

(5) Just as it is not at all true that any old combination of hundreds of letters produces functional meaningful paragraphs, it is not at all true that any old combination of hundreds of amino acids produces a functional protein molecule. There is every reason to believe that within the set of all possible polypeptide chains, not even 1 in  1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 are polypeptide chains that lead to functional protein molecules. Similarly, within the the set of all random character 400-character combinations, not even 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 result in meaningful, functional instructions. The number of combinations of amino acids that do not result in functional folding protein molecules is almost infinitely greater than the relatively tiny number of combinations of amino acids that do result in functional folding protein molecules like the one shown below, just as the number of combinations of letters resulting in unreadable nonsense is almost infinitely greater than the number of such combinations resulting in functional instructions. 

(6) A living cell capable of reproduction requires hundreds of different types of protein molecules, just as a complex computer requires hundreds of different subroutines, most being a well-arranged set of hundreds of individual characters. The amino acid sequence needed to make a protein is specified in a particular gene in the organism's DNA. Humans have about 20,000 genes, but one-celled microbes  require far fewer genes. A team of 9 scientists wrote a scientific paper entitled, “Essential genes of a minimal bacterium.” It analyzed a type of bacteria (Mycoplasma genitalium) that has “the smallest genome of any organism that can be grown in pure culture.” According to wikipedia's article, this bacteria has 525 genes consisting of 580,070 base pairs. The paper concluded that 382 of this bacteria's protein-coding genes (72 percent) are essential. So multiplying that 580,070 by 72 percent, we get a figure of about 418,000 base pairs in the genome that are essential functionality. This is all information that must be arranged in just the right way for the tiny microbe to be capable of self-reproduction. Even the simplest living thing capable of self-reproduction requires hundreds of protein molecules, and hundreds of genes specifying the amino acid sequence of such protein molecules. Each type of protein molecule has a unique sequence of hundreds of amino acids. 

One of thousands of protein molecule shapes (Credit: RCSB Protein Data Bank)

All that is pretty complicated, but nothing could be simpler than what the press release is reporting. It is reporting merely one amino acid combining with another amino acid to produce a mere peptide. Just like a two-character string such as "AB" doesn't get you anywhere if you are trying to produce software, a peptide of two amino acids doesn't get you anywhere if you are trying to make a living thing. By using the term "dipeptide" the scientific paper makes clear that all that was found was a peptide of merely two amino acids. A dipeptide is a molecule consisting of only two amino acids connected to each other. 

But the Purdue University press release quotes a chemist stating the following outrageous baloney:

" 'This is essentially the chemistry behind the origin of life,' said Graham Cooks. He is the Henry Bohn Hass Distinguished Professor of Analytical Chemistry in Purdue’s College of Science. 'This is the first demonstration that primordial molecules, simple amino acids, spontaneously form peptides, the building blocks of life, in droplets of pure water.'  " 

Hogwash. Bunk. Pure unadulterated baloney. The chemistry needed to start a living thing would be almost infinitely more complicated than the mere combination of two amino acids to make a peptide. It is not peptides that are the building blocks of one-celled life, but vastly more complicated molecules (protein molecules).  Claiming that you have produced "the chemistry behind the origin of life" by merely making a peptide from two amino acids is as pure baloney a statement as claiming that you wrote a good 100-page instruction manual  when you merely combined one letter (such as the character "A") with another letter, such as the character "B."  

Very eager to pick up page views that make money from people viewing ads on their web pages, mainstream online web sites these days always uncritically parrot whatever nonsense is being trumpeted by university press releases, no matter how transparently absurd the assertions are. So we heard many a web site uncritically parrot the rubbish in the Purdue University press release. One headline was "The Fountain of Life: Scientists Uncover the 'Chemistry Behind the Origin of Life.' " The Popular Science site had a nonsense headline of "Here’s how life on Earth might have formed out of thin air and water."  

Apparently the Popular Science writer has got the incorrect idea that the two amino acids that combined to make a lowly peptide were produced from scratch from water and thin air. That's impossible, because the amino acids involved (glycine and L-alanine) contain carbon atoms that are not found anywhere in water (H₂O) and thin air consisting of nitrogen and oxygen.  Given that the paper  makes no claim at all to have produced amino acids from scratch or through any natural process, we may presume with high likelihood that the scientists added to water some amino acids that were not naturally produced.  Referring to a highly artificial high-tech manufacturing processing involving "electrified nano-sprays that were blasted at a mass spectrometer," the Salon article on the experiment suggests that the amino acids were not naturally produced, telling us this: "The sprays were filled with two amino acids, glycine or L-alanine, and squirted out of an opening just a few millionths of a meter across." Such a manufacturing process is unlike anything that would have occurred in the natural world, where there are no electrified super-fast water jets aimed at microscopic holes. 

The word "spontaneous" used in the quote above by Graham Cooks is a word meaning "performed or occurring as a result of a sudden inner impulse or inclination and without premeditation or external stimulus." Instead of observing anything like any natural "spontaneous formation," the scientists produced the unimpressive combination of two amino acids using a high-voltage technique called electrospray ionization, which uses a very fancy piece of hi-tech equipment (like this) to produce chemical reactions. Claiming that the result from the use of such high-voltage equipment was "spontaneous" is as misleading as electrocuting an animal in an electric chair and then claiming the animal's death was "spontaneous." 

The same type of hogwash and baloney peddled by Graham Cooks in the quote above is given us by another chemist named Nick Lane. In a recent interview in Quanta Magazine, Lane states this bunk:

"So you have a random sequence of RNA that generates a nonrandom peptide. And that nonrandom peptide could by chance have some function in a growing proto-cell. It could make the cell grow better or grow worse; it could help the RNA replicate itself; it could bind to cofactors. Then you have selection for that peptide and the RNA sequence that gave rise to it. Although it’s a very rudimentary system, this means we’ve just entered the world of genes, information and natural selection."

This is nonsense. Peptides (combinations of only a few amino acids) don't produce biological functions. It requires vastly more complicated and vastly more hard-to-achieve molecules called proteins (consisting of hundreds of well-arranged amino acids) before you can get any biological benefit. It would be exponentially harder (like a billion trillion quadrillion times harder) for natural processes to produce a functional protein molecule than for natural processes to produce a mere peptide. And you can't get any so-called natural selection until you have a living, self-reproducing cell, which requires hundreds of different types of proteins, each consisting of very special arrangements of hundreds of amino acids, not just two or three of them. And how silly is it to claim that you have "entered the world of genes" from some event which merely formed a peptide? Genes are parts of a DNA molecule, something totally different (and vastly more complicated)  than a mere peptide. 

When origin-of-life theorists talk about "proto-cells" they mean merely fatty bubbles. Lane's insinuation that all you need is a proto-cell (a fatty bubble) and a peptide to get life rolling is every bit as false as claiming that a child can survive okay if it is born with only a tooth and a fingernail -- no brain, no heart, no stomach, no liver, no kidneys, but only a tooth and a fingernail. 

I can give you a good analogy for the baloney hogwash claims made in the Purdue University press release quoted above. Imagine if someone were to train his dog to move two wooden letter blocks together, training the dog to push the little blocks by using the dog's nose. Suppose that person were to then claim that this proved that dogs can write long useful instruction manuals, because when people write books it is "essentially the same" as the dog combining two letters with his nose. How should you respond to such a person? By saying something like this:

"What, do you think I'm the stupidest person in the world? Do you think I have an IQ of only 1 or 2 points?" 

Postscript: We get more of Nick Lane's baloney about life's origins in the interview here. It includes this false-as-false-can-be statement:

"What we are beginning to learn is that if we find carbon dioxide and hydrogen in a specific environment most of metabolism happens spontaneously. It recapitulates in the absence of genes and cells."

.

Metabolism is defined as "the chemical processes that occur within a living organism in order to maintain life." No metabolism has occurred in Lane's origin-of-life experiments, which have not produced life, have not produced genes, have not produced cells, have not produced proteins,  and have not even produced any of the building blocks of the building blocks of life (amino acids) in any experiment realistically simulating early Earth conditions.