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I don’t know if I stopped breathing, but I was unconscious. What I saw was the most hideous, horrible thing! This was no nightmare! If you saw the movie Ghost, it was like where those horrible black things came out and were grabbing you. There were people screaming. It was unearthly voices, not earthly. It was horrible. These things were all over me, and they were screaming.
Sadira, a South Florida nurse, had the near-death experience (NDE) she described just after taking an overdose of prescription medication in an attempt to kill herself. She related her vivid, nightmarish vision to Barbara Rommer, a Fort Lauderdale physician who has been studying the NDE phenomenon for the past four years. Sadira went on to detail the monsters she encountered as “horrible human beings, like anorexics. The teeth were all ugly and twisted. The eyes were bulging…. There must have been at least 50 everywhere, all around me. They were grabbing at my arms and my hair and screaming.”
Sadira’s experience is one of more than 80 included in Rommer’s new book, Blessing in Disguise: Another Side of the Near Death Experience. The “blessing” of the title refers to the positive life changes prompted by what are termed “less-than-positive NDEs.” According to Gallup poll data and the International Association For Near-Death Studies (IANDS), some 13 million people in the United States claim to have had an NDE after being declared clinically dead and then revived. Many “experiencers,” as they’re called, have blissed-out moments of peace and tranquility in a heavenlike setting. But nearly 18 percent have distressing NDEs. As traumatized as she was by her hellish encounter, Sadira benefited from it. “When I woke up, I felt absolutely terrified, yet with a renewed hope,” she told Rommer. “Suicide can never be the answer…. I saw hell. I do a lot more for myself now…. This experience did just totally change my life.”
Unfortunately, claims Rommer, “Most of these people, if they tried to tell their physician about [their NDE], they were instantly put down. They were told that they needed psychiatric care or some other form of therapy or that they were hallucinating.
“I’ve been in medicine since ’73 here in Fort Lauderdale,” continues Rommer, an internal medicine practitioner, “and I can tell you that there is no hallucination, delusion, anoxic reaction, or chemical reaction that causes such profound, permanent changes. People who are having hallucinations know that they are hallucinations; in fact they can often describe it as they are having it. But that is not the case with a near-death experience. They can’t describe it, because they are clinically dead.”
Much has been written about feel-good NDEs, but Rommer’s is the first book to tackle the bad ones. It also contains more directly quoted interviews with subjects than other books on the topic. Rommer meets many NDE interviewees at monthly gatherings of the IANDS South Florida chapter support group. In 1996 Rommer and Fort Lauderdale psychologist Joyce Strom formed the group, which has been featured on CBS’s 48 Hours. Between 40 and 150 people — “experiencers” and the curious — show up for meetings on the first Friday of every month.
Rommer, who appeared in the recent A&E cable special Beyond Death, is often approached at the meetings by folks who want to talk with her in private. She initially began compiling the interviews into a book about blissful NDEs, but she changed course. “There is so little written about these frightening experiences,” she says, “that this was what was needed at this time.”
As voluminous as Rommer’s volume is, though, it doesn’t include all of the stories she’s heard. “It’s ongoing. I’m still interviewing,” she says. “There’s not a week that I don’t do two or three, and it’s unbelievable. Just when I think I’ve heard everything, I hear one that tops the one before.”
