One morning in November 2008, neurosurgeon Dr. Eben Alexander awoke with an intense headache.
On the seventh day, the doctor opened his eyes, a miracle in itself. When he began to talk about what he’d seen in those seven days, however, an even greater miracle was revealed.
Within hours, he would be admitted to a Lynchburg, Virginia, hospital and diagnosed with a rare form of bacterial meningitis, which was eating away at his brain. While he was in a coma for seven days, his colleagues questioned if he would ever regain consciousness.
He says he “journeyed to another, larger dimension of the universe. A dimension I’d never dreamed existed and which the old, pre-coma me would have been more than happy to explain was a simple impossibility.
“Toward the beginning of my adventure, I was in a place of clouds. Big, puffy, pink-white ones that showed up sharply against the deep blue-black sky. Higher than the clouds–immeasurably higher–flocks of transparent, shimmering beings arced across the sky, leaving long, streamer-like lines behind them…”
As Dr. Alexander found out later, the visions had occurred while the higher-level functions of his brain were inactive, making what he saw unlikely to have been a hallucination. He began writing down the details of his experience and came to believe they could only be evidence of one thing…
Dr. Alexander’s book Proof of Heaven became a New York Times bestseller and established him as one of the world’s most prominent figures on the subject of near-death experiences, or NDEs. While his initial claims have certainly generated controversy, Dr. Alexander has spent the years since studying what world religions have to say about NDEs, as well as gathering stories from others who encountered the divine at death’s door. He’s become an expert on the glimmers of heaven those of us here on Earth have been blessed to see.
We’ll be speaking to the doctor tomorrow morning for a story in an upcoming issue of Mysterious Ways. We want to hear any questions you have for Dr. Alexander! What do you want to know about heaven and the afterlife? Send us your questions!
