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JOURNAL OF NEAR-DEATH STUDIES
Ring called a life review that goes from the present to the past a
"flashback" (1980, p. 67). A life review that goes from the present to the
future he called a "flashforwards," as illustrated by the following case
of a woman who had an NDE while recovering from surgery:
At one point during her NDE, she found herself facing what she
described as an "enormous television screen." On the screen she was
shown-in vivid color-various scenes from her life in a very rapid
sequence of realistic images. Following that display, the screen disap-
peared but was followed by a second screen. That one, however, was
dark and the images-in black and white this time-were much murk-
ier and more difficult to discern. Nevertheless, she remembers being
shown, among other events, the deaths of two members of her family
(who were not ill at the time of this woman's NDE) and told that she
would play a special role in caring for these persons during their
terminal illnesses. This NDEr averred to me that these events, appar-
ently disclosed during her flashforwards, did indeed come to pass.
(Ring, 1988, p. 5)
In George Gallup's nationwide survey on beliefs and attitudes to-
ward the afterlife with a special focus on those who had had NDEs, he
found about 2 percent, or approximately a half million adult Ameri-
cans, experienced during an NDE a premonition about some future
event or events. Gallup further elaborated this point by saying that
"there is occasionally a tendency for the person's thought patterns to be
jarred out of the present altogether. In those cases, a flash of insight
into some future event may be the result" (Gallup and Proctor, 1982, p.
32). For example, some of the people in the Gallup poll reported "that
during near-death encounters or other related experiences, they
learned of events that were in the process of happening at some dis-
tance or would happen in the future" (Gallup and Proctor, 1982, p. 54).
Ring (1982) described two types of precognitive near-death visions:
the personal flashforward and the prophetic vision. The first type per-
tains solely to the personal future of the individual experiencer, while
the prophetic vision has a planetary focus and pertains to a picture of
the earth's future. Prophetic visions have been reported by a number of
researchers, including John Audette (1982), Margot Grey (1985), Ray-
mond Moody (Moody and Perry, 1988), and Melvin Morse (Morse and
Perry, 1992), and we now know that they are usually reported to occur
during or immediately following an NDE and are apparently disclosed
only in a relatively small proportion of cases involving deep NDEs. Pro-
phetic visions take the form of a distinct vision and tend to follow a
single common scenario, reproduced by Ring as follows:
There is, first of all, a sense of having total knowledge, but specifically
one is aware of seeing the entirety of the earth's evolution and history,
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