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JOURNAL OF NEAR-DEATH STUDIES
Patients may recollect perceiving not only their own body but also
surrounding persons, objects, and events. Particularly challenging is
that many such perceptions-often of a highly specific and idiosyn-
cratic nature-were subsequently corroborated as accurate by medi-
cal staff and others. In the van Lommel et al. (2001) study, a patient
who had remained deeply comatose and under artificial respiration
for days nonetheless upon recovering recognized the male nurse who
had removed his dentures to prepare him for intubation. He asked
him to return his dentures, correctly identifying their whereabouts
(on a sliding shelf). He also accurately described details of the resus-
citation room, the procedure, and the appearance of other staff mem-
bers (p. 2041; cf. Smit, 2008a, Smit & Rivas, 2010). The fact that the
denture removal occurred during the comatose period-and that the
staff had not mentioned the removal-supports the inference that
the patient's perception occurred during the coma.
The incident that van Lommel and colleagues reported is not
unique. Researchers have reported many other cases of verified per-
ceptual recollections from experiences apparently taking place dur-
ing deep anesthesia or near-death conditions (Long, 2010), and high
proportions of the reported details have been independently corrobo-
rated (Holden, 2009). A 7-year-old girl, despite having been deeply
comatose from having nearly drowned, nonetheless recalled idiosyn-
cratic details of her emergency care such as her unusual intubation
nasal instead or oral. Much to her parents' astonishment, she even
recalled accurate details pertaining to her parents' exact locations,
clothing, and activities at home during her hospitalization (Morse,
1990, p. 7). One respondent was baffled regarding his extraordinary
perceptual ability: "I just don't understand how I could see so far"
(Moody, 1975, p. 51; see also Farr, 1993, p. 25). Another recalled a
moment of amazement as he was, during the experience,
thinking about my family, and suddenly finding my energy at home in
my backyard, floating above the back porch and looking into the house
through the kitchen window. There was a bird sitting on the window
ledge. I was amazed that I could move so closely to it without its flying
away (Ring & Valarino, 1998, pp. 15-16).
Weiss (2000; cf. van Lommel, 2010, pp. 23-26) reported the cor-
roborated recollection of an elderly-and blind-woman who
suffered a cardiac arrest during her stay in the hospital where I [Weiss]
was the chairman of the psychiatry department. She was unconscious
as the resuscitation team tried to revive her. According to her later
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