'PEAK-IN-DARIEN' ENCOUNTERS WITH THE DECEASED IN NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES.

The perceptional phenomenon of seeing presumed deceased people is common across cultures and occurs under life-threating or near-death conditions, during times of bereavement, or in association with other types of circumstances. Although these events are sometimes interpreted by some researchers as subjective hallucinations or visionary experiences of some sort, other researchers have argued that such are genuine encounters with the deceased, insisting that they provide evidence for the survival hypothesis, which suggests that the human ego continues as a conscious entity beyond death. In particular, they have asserted that this is strongly demonstrated by what are referred to as Peak-in-Darien experiences in which the percipient either (a) encounters a known personage whom they did not yet know had died or (b) encounters a deceased personage they had never known in life with supposed evidential support in hindsight from conversations with relatives and/or photographs taken prior to that person's death. This paper focuses specifically on Peak-in-Darien experiences that occur during neardeath experiences, elucidating possible alternative explanations for their occurrence that need to be considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]