Imagine getting rushed to a hospital after going into cardiac arrest. A physician flees to your unconscious body as he prepares to insert a tube in your windpipe to help you breathe. He opens your mouth, takes notice of your dentures and removes them carefully, placing them in the drawer of a nearby cart. When you wake, you find the same physician in your room and ask him to please retrieve your teeth from the drawer where you saw him put them. The physician is perplexed. How did you see his actions if you were clinically dead? According to Janice Holden of the counseling, development and higher education department who was recently elected president of the International Association for Near-Death Studies, thousands of people have reported near-death experiences, describing them as "hyper-real," or more real than life itself. "Several faculty members have had near-death experiences," Holden said, adding that most observe the scene from above their body, looking down. Their perceptions that are later confirmed to be accurate are called "vertical perceptions."

"My theory is that near-death experiences happen when our attachment to our ego is loosened," Holden said. "They also happen to people in deep despair." Holden was elected president by the board of IANDS directors to serve a one-year term, ending in October 2004. The nonprofit organization was established in 1978 and incorporated in 1982 as the first in the world to foster research in near-death studies. According to the organization's Web site, www.iands.org, today it has members on almost every continent. Also led by Holden is a support and interest group, Friends of IANDS, which meets in Lewisville, for individuals who want to share near-death experiences or who have an interest in the phenomena.

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intersting, while the conversations with dead people could perhaps be attributed to the endorphins the brain releases in such a situation, the denture story hints at something else...are the persons eyes open at the time of the NDE? they could be whacked out on the endorphins which gives them the out of body experience, however because their brain is still functioning, visual signals such as the dentures being placed in a drawer are recorded by the brain. Perhaps its similar to dreaming in that if I hear sounds while i'm dreaming (for example i leave a radio on) sometimes i dream of a band which happens to be playing a song that is on the radio at the time.