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JOURNAL OF NEAR-DEATH STUDIES
that the mysticism of the NDE is simply a reflection of cosmological
dark matter.
Perhaps the author who has been most explicit in modeling a hy-
perspatial approach to NDEs is Gordon Greene. In a series of articles,
Greene (1980, 1981, 1983a, 1983b, 1999; Greene and Krippner, 1990)
has set forth a topological model of the relationship that exists between
the third dimension and higher dimensions. He has used this model
to comment on the nature of the life review within the NDE (Greene,
1981), the experience within the NDE of simultaneously possessing two
bodies (Greene, 1983a), and the separation of consciousness from the
physical body in NDEs (Greene, 1999).
In his hyperspatial analysis of the life review, Greene wrote that the
motivation for his analysis was that "any purely neurological theory
cannot account for the paranormal effects surrounding some NDE life
reviews" (1981, p. 120). He argued further that the present challenge
for near-death research is to understand "the laws of topological trans-
formation between space and hyperspace" (p. 121). Greene then went
on to suggest that when a three-dimensional being achieves sufficient
"depth" in hyperspace, and time achieves a dimension of space, then
both past and future may be seen. This phenomenon explains both the
life review and the phenomenon of precognition, in which a near-death
experiencer returns with predictions about the future. Presciently and
insightfully, Greene ended that article by speculating that the neuro-
logical and hyperspatial explanations of the NDE were not necessarily
mutually exclusive. He wrote: "It may be that [the two explanations]
account for the vision on different levels" (p. 129). I shall have more
to say below about Greene's speculation about a possible relationship
between the neurological and hyperspatial explanations of the NDE;
but first I will consider the nature of the veridicality, precognition, and
"fear-death experience" phenomena, three anomalies that pose a re-
markable challenge to traditional explanatory models of the NDE.
The Veridicality, Precognition, and Fear-Death
Experience Phenomena
The Veridicality Phenomenon
The veridicality phenomenon arises when near-death experiencers
return from their NDEs with veridical or truthful accounts of things,
processes, or people that they observed during the time that they
were presumably dead, near death, or, at a minimum, unconscious. For
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