Terminal Lucidity
Why do dying people have a sudden surge of energy right before they die?
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What Is Terminal Lucidity?
Among the various items co-authors Dr Raymond Moody and Paul Perry count as proof of post-mortem survival of consciousness is the curious phenomenon of “terminal lucidity” (TL)—and they provide some impressive case studies.
The term was coined by biologist Michael Nahm (2009) who first defined TL as a sudden return of mental clarity and vitality taking place shortly before death. TL is far from a new phenomenon, though—it has been with us a long time, as Nahm points out:
“Hippocrates, Plutarch, Cicero, Galen, Avicenna, and other scholars of classical times noted that symptoms of mental disorders decrease as death approaches.”1
As recently as 2009 TL was also referred to as “lightening up before death,” while in Eastern Europe it was recorded as “madness”; in Italy it was sometimes written off oh-so-intelligently as “possession by demons.” In the early days of Moody’s medical career it was known as a “fey” experience, likely after Scottish custom. While also known in English as the “dying rally,” the TL label is currently evolving into “paradoxical lucidity,”2 which seems to better capture the phenomenon and, as an added bonus, sounds almost upbeat.
There are some drastic instances where people who are brain-dead suddenly make a profound (but temporary) recovery and speak lucidly about various things, despite EEGs showing an electrically dead and non-functional brain, as if their mind is somehow bypassing the brain altogether and performing what in conventional medical terms is, frankly, an inexplicable miracle.
In Book 1 we looked at various pieces of evidence suggesting the brain does not produce consciousness, and terminal lucidity is yet another. Dualism and/or parallelism find an ally in terminal lucidity; some cases of TL suggest the brain can actually get in the way of a functioning mind. TL events are also considered shared death experiences due to the presence of witnesses.3
Nahm notes some of the more unusual aspects of TL as:
the ability to perform bodily movements or skills shortly before death which seemed impossible before.
the (re-) emergence of normal or unusually enhanced mental abilities in dull, unconscious, or mentally ill patients shortly before death, including considerable elevation of mood and spiritual affectation, or the ability to speak in a previously unusual spiritualized and elated manner.4
Nahm’s detailed observations of TL’s stages can be boiled down to approximately these:
1. spontaneous return of awareness and vitality,
2. meaningful and miraculous communications as the patient returns to their old self,
3. farewells are said, lucidity and vitality recede, and the physical death process takes over and peacefully completes itself.
One of the most stunning cases of TL supplied by Nahm is that of Katharina Ehmer, a twenty-six-year-old German woman of the early 1900s who, from birth, had severe mental disabilities that prevented her from ever speaking, moving her body in a fluid and controlled manner, or even seemingly noticing anything about her surroundings. And yet on March 1, 1922 she suddenly became lucid and, after a lifetime of mutism, began elatedly singing a hymn from the 1800s known as “The Home of the Soul”—for a full half hour, and with a face described by the doctors as “transfigured and spiritualised.”
Being disabled and mute from birth, and having suffered many bouts of meningitis which had left her cortical tissue in dire condition, the attending medical staff felt they had witnessed a miracle seeing Katharina sing—and shortly thereafter she died peacefully.5
Another case supplied by physician and philosopher Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert (1780–1860) involved a deaf and mute man who, “in the elation of his last hours,” was able to “speak comprehensively for the first time in his life.”
Similarly, a sick old man who had lain ‘‘debilitated and entirely speechless’’ in his bed for twenty-eight years suddenly regained—on the last day of his life—his awareness and ability to speak, “after he had a joyful dream in which the end of his suffering was announced.”6
One case reported to Moody was extraordinary because the man’s father—who had no heartbeat—suddenly sprang to life and declared to his surrounding family that he loved them, carrying on a short but lucid conversation, before closing his eyes and transitioning peacefully.7
Etheric Awareness
The sudden recovery of a terminal patient’s memory (or ability to speak!) likely has to do with the transferral of the locus of consciousness away from the defective brain-body structure and into a different informational-perceptual paradigm altogether; esoterically, one of the physical body’s less dense counterparts, perhaps the etheric body—the vehicle Steiner and many others have acknowledged as being where our physical life memories are stored.
The etheric, of course, is linked to the astral, mental and so on. Thus, as the physical body dies, the other subtle (“plasma”) bodies come into play more, as awareness is transferred into them (firstly the etheric-astral composite).
In this way we can account for the restoration of things including vision, memory, and lucidity, since each subtle body is a “vehicle” of consciousness in its own right (though the etheric is not overly separable or mobile and traditionally not considered a true vehicle of consciousness). The etheric “nervous system” being so closely tethered to the gross physical body—as well as connected to the astral-mental vehicle—could explain both cognitive recovery as well as the striking physical reanimations noticed by Nahm and others through the ages.
The etheric, astral, and mental bodies—our non-physical centres of consciousness—do not carry the physical or neurological limitations that hobble the dying. In other words, the more our “stream” of consciousness (a.k.a. sutratman) is associated with a dysfunctional physical body, the more those physical limits impinge upon consciousness; by the same token, the less associated/tethered the mind is to the physical body, the more it can perceive and function unimpeded by the presence of any physical body deficiencies.
The “problem” for most esoterically-challenged 21st century professionals is they have nothing conceptual or theoretical to help them account for what their physical eye-brain system sees (almost nothing) and which appears to make no sense at all (hence, “paradoxical lucidity”).
What people need to realise is that on subtle/energetic levels, the dying process begins far earlier than is visible at the physical level, as Cyndi Dale and other seers have noted. (More on that later in the book.)
A strictly reductionist/materialist model cannot account for TL in all its varied forms, no matter how much it might rankle with true believer materialists. Nahm also acknowledges this. He notes: “hemispherectomy—the removal of an entire brain hemisphere—often results only in specific impairments of motor skills and vision but has no apparent effect on personality and memory.”8 (Emphasis added)
This is possible if personality and memory are not stored locally in the physical brain, and personality instead derives from the subtle bodies (vehicles of consciousness) and immortal personality aggregates/skandhas (which represent information and programming bundles for the individual ersonality)—though expression of personality can be altered if both the prefrontal lobes are damaged, as has been documented.
In TL, as the mind of the already dying person de-couples itself from a structurally compromised brain/body we can expect improvements in cognition and perception (as NDEs have clearly shown) and potentially improved physical movement, assuming the latter limitations were not so much the result of physical defects, but rather, rooted in neurological limitations (now bypassed because the Ego/consciousness has shifted its locus into the new perceptual paradigms pertaining to the “subtle bodies”).
Once we are thinking in and through the subtle plasma bodies instead, we can bypass certain physical limitations. (And as I have personally experienced, the etheric body even allows for vision with eyes closed.) One LBL (life-between-lives) client in the trance state advised regarding her father’s Alzheimer’s condition, “The light inside understands everything.”9
In other words, the mind may not be as limited as outer physical conditions suggest. Endless NDEr (and other) testimony attests over and over that perception without a functional physical body is not only possible, but it is inevitable—and, moreover, it is enhanced far beyond regular brain-based perception.
I don’t consider my speculations here to be a complete explanation for TL at all, merely food for thought, and something for others to build on (further context and research will be found in Book 2).
Category Overlaps
TL events can blur into deathbed visions, crisis apparitions and NDEs—these categories are not all rigidly atomised and separate (categories are not natural phenomena but human mental constructs). For example, someone at death’s door with no discernible mental activity may experience TL and appear in a vision to a family member who is far removed shortly before they die. Someone in an out-of-body state and having an NDE may be contacted by a family member or friend who is in the process of dying and/or having a TL experience. These too are documented.
If you want to know more about these topics—and for the deepest of deep dives into death and the hereafter—you’ll want to grab Book 2 of THE GRAND ILLUSION.
About Brendan & His Other Offers
Brendan D. Murphy is the “consciousness guy”, afterlife expert, and author of the critically acclaimed epic, “The Grand Illusion: A Synthesis of Science and Spirituality — Book 1”
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1 Nahm, Terminal Lucidity in People with Mental Illness and Other Mental Disability: An Overview and Implications for Possible Explanatory Models, Journal of Near-Death Studies, 28(2), Winter 2009 ’ 2009 IANDS
2 See Moody and Perry, Proof of Life After Life, chapter 5.
3 Moody and Perry, chapters 4 and 5. See also Nahm, Terminal Lucidity… (op. cit.)
4 Nahm, Terminal Lucidity in People with Mental Illness and Other Mental Disability, op. cit.
5 Nahm and Greyson, The Death of Anna Katharina Ehmer: A Case study in Terminal Lucidity, Omega 68, no. 1 (2013-2014): 81-82
6 Nahm, Terminal Lucidity in People with Mental Illness and Other Mental Disability, op. cit.
7 See Moody and Perry, Proof of…, chapter 5.
8 Nahm, Terminal Lucidity in People with Mental Illness and Other Mental Disability, op. cit.
9 See Clark et al., Wisdom of Souls, chapter 11.
Wonderful article that adds some missing pieces to the mortality/immortality puzzle …
I’ve seen this in a few people! It’s like they reach a certain level of “understanding” about how things work, like a more enlightened version of them comes through. Fascinating