When did you first become fascinated by the afterlife?
When I was growing up, in Georgia, there were people all around me who believed in the afterlife. But my parents regarded religion with a certain amount of bemusement. They weren’t atheists, they were just not interested.

I went to the University of Virginia in 1962 and decided to study philosophy. A lot of the great early philosophers, like Plato, were interested in cases of people who had supposedly died and come back.

In 1965, I met Dr. George Ritchie, a professor of psychiatry who had once been pronounced dead from pneumonia. His heart wasn’t beating for at least nine minutes. During that time, he underwent this amazing experience in which he saw different levels of eternity with Christ. Whether his experience was real or not, George absolutely was convinced. His goodness and solidity just came through.

READ MORE: SURPRISING FACTS ABOUT NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES

How do you define a near-death experience?
It’s a patterned experience people have after dying or almost dying. No two NDEs are exactly the same, but there are striking commonalities. Most people say they seem to leave their bodies and watch from above as their body is resuscitated. They pass down a dark tunnel and come out into a brilliant, warm and loving light.

They meet deceased friends and loved ones in spirit form. And they undergo a panoramic or holographic review of their lives in which they witness everything they’ve done from an external point of view. Often, this life review happens in the presence of a being of love and light.

Couldn’t the similarities of NDEs be explained by cultural influences?
I’ve gone to China, India, Japan, Russia, Africa, North and South America, and everywhere people tell me the same basic things. The accounts aren’t different, just the religious imagery.

People borrow imagery from their religious traditions to explain what they’ve experienced, but they’ll usually say, “I have to use the words from my own tradition because they’re the only ones I’ve got.”

Do you have to be religious to experience an NDE?
No, absolutely not. I have had lots of people tell me that, prior to having an NDE, they had no religious background. But they came back with some kind of assurance that there is a world beyond this one and that there is a God. It changes their lives dramatically. They come back and say that the most important thing we can do is to learn how to love. They have no more fear of death. Death is actually a transition.

What objections do detractors of NDEs raise?
Contemporary criticism of the idea of an afterlife is that it is unintelligible. To say that there’s a life after death is to say that there is life after the final irreversible sensation of life, which is a contradiction in logic. So we need a new set of rational principles for thinking about it.

READ MORE: NDEs—PROOF OF LIFE AFTER DEATH

If the mind shifted from one type of reality to some other framework of existence, and then came back from that, then of course people would talk nonsense! Now we have a method of actually scrutinizing the structure of that language and creating a classification system for types of nonsense.

It seems kind of ridiculous—“types of nonsense.” But the nonsense spoken by the dying falls into specific patterns; it’s not random. I’ve catalogued over 70 different types. We have the ability to actually follow the mind right through as it crosses into some other state of existence.

Critics say that there’s no scientific proof for NDEs, only stories.
Life after death is not a scientific question. It’s a philosophical and religious question. It may well be that sometime in the future we will have proof through science. But the fact that we don’t yet doesn’t mean that we can’t accept it on rational grounds. People just get so swept away by that word scientific.

Could the process of resuscitation or another physical process be causing NDEs?
What I can’t figure out is this—if it’s something physical, then why should bystanders sometimes share in a person’s NDE? This surgeon in Italy, for instance, told me that he was doing an elective operation on a fairly young man in good health. The patient had a cardiac arrest and the doctor was unable to resuscitate him. All of a sudden, the doors of the operating room were flung open and there was this woman.

She said, “I was out in the waiting room and my husband came to me. He told me to tell you that he’s not dead.” The doctor resumed the resuscitation and the patient’s heart started beating again. The first thing the patient said was, “I was up above my body and I kept trying to tell you I wasn’t dead, but you couldn’t hear me. So I told my wife.”

I hear from people all the time about how they participate in someone else’s NDE—that indicates that the experience is not due to oxygen deprivation to the brain.

Some people have admitted to lying about having an NDE. How can we tell who’s telling the truth?
There’s something different about people who’ve actually had NDEs. They have a serenity to them. With imposters, it’s all about “me, me, me.” Whereas someone who’s really been through this, it awakens a kind of modesty in them. A willingness to acknowledge that there’s a lot they don’t know.

In 1991, you attempted suicide and came close to death. What happened?
I had an autoimmune disease—one in which your body destroys your thyroid tissues. A typical symptom is suicidal ideations. Never did I think about having a near-death experience. I was just thinking about how unbearable the world seemed.

I didn’t have a life review or see my body from a distance. Just more of a sense that I was beginning to be drawn over into some different framework. It felt like I got close enough to see the city-limits sign. This world that we’re in seemed very dreamlike. I felt like I was waking up. Like when you look at something on a high-definition TV set—it looks more real than real.

One man I met who had an NDE after a suicide attempt compared it to walking out before the end of a movie—he was glad he survived because he needed to know how the movie turned out. That’s the attitude I’ve developed.

READ MORE: MY ANGELIC NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCE

You wrote Life After Life at age 31. At 72, do you think more about your own mortality?
Oh, yes. Both my parents died at 72, so you have to think about things, especially when you have kids. I’m focusing on my kids and getting everything knitted together in this interesting existence that I’m in now. It’s very nice to be in the home stretch. It’s just fascinating to watch every little wrinkle form.

I’m ready to be out of here when God calls. My prayer is, Guide me gently through a painless and peaceful death on your schedule. That’s what I always say.

What are you still—excuse me—dying to find out about the afterlife?
You can’t really imagine what the afterlife is like until you get there, people tell me. So I’m not spending any time on that. I like to say that I’m an expert on the unknown and a specialist in guesswork. When I first looked through a telescope, when I was seven years old, I realized I’m never going to know much of anything. I don’t know that my curiosity will ever be satisfied. It’s just so much fun to keep on inquiring.

A few years back I wrote an article for Guideposts on a subject I knew readers were interested in: Do our beloved pets join us in heaven?

It’s a comforting notion, but I wanted to see if there was theological justification for it. Your response was an overwhelming yes.

The topic, I realized, deserved more than could fit into a single article. It deserved a whole book. Do animals have souls? Where do those souls go when they leave this earth? Will our pets be there to greet us when our own time comes?

And what happens to that unique, God-given personality we miss so much when a beloved pet dies?

Most of my article focused on what the Bible says on these subjects. But the Bible was only the beginning.

I eventually left Guideposts to work on the book full-time. Instead of spending my days in an office filled with people, I found myself alone with my computer.

Or rather, almost alone. I did have one steady companion, my schipperke Mercury. Schipperkes are smart, hyper-alert dogs. Once, I’d watched in astonishment as Mercury leapt up and caught a sparrow in mid-flight (don’t worry, I took the startled bird and released it unharmed).

But those days were long gone. Mercury’s glossy black coat was dull now and fringed with white, and his sight was so bad that when we visited friends with cats, he tottered right past them.

Often, in the midst of writing, I’d look down at Mercury lying at my feet and wonder how I’d cope when his time came.

Most of the letters I received in response to my Guideposts piece came from people who wanted to tell me how deeply they had grieved the loss of a pet. A surprising number had received assurance that came in a dream, a heavenly confirmation that their animal companions lived on.

“I was crushed,” ran a typical letter, “when my 15-year-old white Persian Mindy died in my arms. I’m a widow and my kids are grown. Mindy was all I had. I didn’t know if I could continue without her.

“One night a week or so after Mindy left me, I had an unbelievably vivid dream. Mindy was curled in my arms just as she always used to be. She was young and healthy again, her coat bright and shiny, her big yellow eyes clear and sharp.

“She looked up at me, and in those diamond eyes of hers I saw something I’ll never forget. I’m still here, she was telling me. Even though you can’t see me or touch me anymore, my spirit is with you…and always will be.

“The dream was so vivid that it jolted me awake. I sensed something in the bedroom with me. Right away I knew what it was. Mindy’s spirit. I lay there quietly, thanking God for what he’d shown me. Finally, I went back to sleep.

“The next morning the feeling in the room was gone, but my view of the world had changed–for good.”

I did a little research into this phenomenon and discovered that these dreams usually come to us in what is technically known as the hypnagogic state. Hypnagogia occurs when we are in that strange place between waking and sleep, where we are neither fully conscious nor unconscious.

The word “hypnagogia” comes from combining the Greek words for “sleep” (hypnos) and for “conductor” (agogeus).

The third-century A.D. Greek philosopher Iamblichus called the visions that occur in this state “god-sent,” and even Aristotle–a philosopher not known for his flights of otherworldly fancy–wrote that “in the moment of awakening” a man may “surprise the images which present themselves to him in sleep.”

Can we–or, perhaps more important, should we–trust the messages we receive in the hypnagogic state? From Jacob’s vision of the ladder of angels in Genesis to the prophecy in Acts that “your young men shall see visions, your old men shall dream dreams,” the Bible is rich with suggestions that dreams can be a genuine conduit for God’s word.

As the biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann notes, “The ancients dared to imagine that this unbidden communication is one venue in which the holy purposes of God, perplexing and unreasonable as they might be, come to us.”

Most of us experience the hypnagogic state twice a day–in the morning when we exit the world of sleep and in the evening when we enter it again. At those moments, the doors of our mind are open, and evidence of a larger world can creep into our consciousness before the everyday waking world comes along and crowds it out.

That’s not to say every dream we have is a message from beyond. But some dreams unmistakably are. Some dreams are simply different from others, and when we have them we know it.

These dreams, the philosopher and religious scholar Titus Burckhardt writes, “mostly occur at dawn and continue until waking” and “are accompanied by an irrefutable feeling of objectivity. These are the dreams that come from the angel.”

In the classic hypnagogic pet dream, a bereaved pet owner sees her ill and aged animal young and vigorous again, in a beautiful setting–often, a green field alive with flowers.

People typically awake from these dreams suffused with a feeling of well-being. They know with certainty that their pets are okay, and that they will see them again one day.

I finished work on my book The Divine Life of Animals last fall. Then, just before Christmas, the moment I’d long known was coming arrived. Mercury and I were at my sister’s house for the holidays.

Two days into our visit he took a sudden turn for the worse. A vet told us that Mercury was very close to death, and administered a shot to end his pain.

I laid Mercury to rest in my sister’s backyard with his head facing east–the direction of sunrise and, I knew from my book research, the direction humans have buried their dead since prehistoric times.

Going to sleep that night, I wondered if, after all the reading I’d done about the dreams that grieving pet owners experience, I might have one of my own.

I didn’t. But later that morning, I walked out to Mercury’s resting place and something occurred to me. Often during those last two years of Mercury’s life, when I was working on my book, I’d hear whimpering.

I’d look down at Mercury, asleep in his bed, and see his paws moving. Tentatively, then excitedly, he would kick his legs and utter little barks.

Some of those dreams didn’t seem all that pleasant; maybe they were the canine equivalent of nightmares. In other dreams, though, Mercury seemed quite happy. So happy, in fact, that I would take care not to wake him and rob him of the joy of being able to run and gambol the way he’d loved to when he was younger.

What are you seeing? I asked him silently as I watched his paws, gray with age, kick and buck as if he were a pup chasing birds. But even as I asked, I knew the answer.

Mercury was getting a foretaste of a place where he truly would run and play again. A place we can never see with complete clarity here on earth, but which certain dreams–the dreams that come “from the angel”–give us a wondrous and reassuring glimpse.

Most people who know me know I died on January 18, 1989, went to heaven, and was prayed back to earth about ninety minutes later; however, many don’t know the rest of the story—a part I didn’t know until more than a year afterward. One powerful element came out when I ate at a Chinese restaurant with Dick and Anita Onerecker.

We had just come from church, where Dick served as the senior pastor. They had invited me to preach. My first encounter with Dick and Anita had been in the piney woods of East Texas. They were part of a leadership team for a church growth conference that ended on a Wednesday.

On a cold, rain-slicked rural road a few miles from the gates of the retreat center, a tractor-trailer truck crossed the center stripe of the two-lane highway on a bridge over Lake Livingston, and hit me head-on. I was killed instantly. The report stated, “Dead on the scene,” and they summoned the coroner. Although the accident involved three cars, there were no serious injuries to the other people.

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Because of the accident, traffic backed up in both directions. Dick and Anita also headed home from the conference. They had stopped for take-out coffee, and were half-a-mile from the accident. With so many cars backed up, they left their car and walked to the scene of the accident to see if they could be of assistance. Anita gave her hot coffee to an elderly man in one of the other accident vehicles. Dick sought out the emergency medical technicians. After Dick identified himself, one EMT said, “The man in the red car is dead; several people are badly shaken up, but not seriously hurt.”

Weeks after the accident, Dick told me, “The Lord spoke to me in a clear voice: ‘Pray for the man in the red car.’ ”

When Dick asked permission to get under the tarp that now covered my red Escort, an EMT refused. “The demolished car is too gruesome.” Dick persisted and the man relented. Despite the misty rain, Dick pulled back the tarp and crawled inside my Escort. He found my horribly mangled body slumped in the front seat. He prayed desperately for me, not knowing at that time for whom he was praying.

Even my intimate friends would not have recognized me. Both legs were crushed, one was severed. So was my left arm. My chest was impaled by the steering wheel. In addition to obvious wounds, I was bleeding from the ears and eyes. My best recollection of what I heard, and the one I related to Dick’s church, was that Dick had taken hold of my only intact limb, my right hand, and prayed fervently and urgently. He prayed that I would live and be delivered from internal injuries. He paused a few times and sang hymns.

At one point he began singing, “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” I started to sing with Dick. At the shock of hearing my singing with him, he scurried from under the tarp and yelled, “The man is alive!” Once again, he crawled under the tarp and continued to pray— with even more intensity. We continued to sing while firefighters, now on the scene, tried to extricate me. I was unaware of the activity, so I can only report what Dick and others told me. I had been driving along Texas Highway 19 on my way to lead a Wednesday prayer service at our church in Alvin, a suburb of Houston.

On the bridge above Lake Livingston, a huge truck came at me. In my next moment of consciousness I was in the darkness, singing hymns along with a voice I didn’t recognize. The powerful hand that gripped mine infused me with strength, encouragement, and the will to survive. More than a year passed after my ordeal, and most of that time I was in a hospital bed and underwent sixteen surgeries (more would follow). Excruciating pain filled my body constantly. Because of God’s grace I slowly recovered and within a year I was able to preach at Dick’s church.

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I wore heavy leg braces and was still in agony, but I was alive and able to stand at the pulpit of the man who had prayed me back to life. I told Dick’s congregation about their pastor’s fervent prayers, our hymn singing in the wrecked car, and his strong hand that supported me and infused me with courage to hold on. Many people cried that day—and tears came to my own eyes as I relived that experience.

While we ate lunch after the worship service, Anita smiled and leaned toward me. “I need to correct something you said in the pul- pit this morning.” I returned her smile but I thought, that’s exactly what every preacher doesn’t want to hear. “I enjoyed hearing your testimony this morning. I know it wasn’t easy for you—” “No, it wasn’t.”  “There’s just one thing. The part where you talked about Dick holding your hand and praying for you—” I nodded. “That didn’t happen.” “I have many gaps in my memory, Anita, and some of my facts come from those who were there. But of one thing I am absolutely positive. I vividly remember holding his hand. That’s what inspired me to hold on. I remember—” “You were holding a hand as Dick prayed.” She peered intently at me. “But it wasn’t Dick’s hand.” I don’t know if I protested or stared silently. “But how—” “No one could have reached your hand while you were trapped inside your car. You were twisted so far to the right that your right hand was actually on the floor of the passenger’s side.” She paused and I nodded. “Dick reached through the back window of your car.” “That’s correct and—” “Dick placed his right arm between the front seats and your right shoulder—your unbroken arm.” “That’s right—” “Your right hand was beyond Dick’s reach.”

I stared at her uncomprehendingly. “But I remember the hand—it was so powerful. I know a hand grasped mine. I drew enormous strength and help from that hand. It gave me the power to hang on.” “There was a hand all right.” She paused and added, “But it wasn’t Dick’s.”

“If it wasn’t Dick’s hand, whose hand was it?” “I believe you know.” Just then I understood. God sent one of His ministering spirits—an angel—not only to hold my hand but also to infuse me with a will to live. There had been three of us inside that demolished car. It had been a heavenly trio.

My father had always been an astute observer of human character. Within seconds of meeting someone, he could sum up their strengths and flaws.

It was always a challenge to see if any of my boyfriends could pass Dad’s test. None did. Dad was always right—they didn’t pass my test either. After Dad died, I wondered how I’d figure it out on my own.

That’s when Jack arrived on the scene. He was different from any other guy I’d dated. He could sit for hours on the piano bench with my mother, discussing obscure composers. My brother Rick loudly announced that Jack wasn’t a turkey like the other guys I’d brought home. My sister, Denise, belly-laughed with him over old Danny Kaye films. And Jack was great with my brother Chuck, who has a mental disability.

One time, Chuck put his greasy hands, just dislodged from a cheeseburger, on Jack’s shoulders, kissed his cheek with ketchup-covered lips and called him by the wrong name, shouting, “Ah, Jeff, I luv ya!” Jack didn’t miss a beat. “I love you too, George!” Jack passed my family’s test. But what about Dad’s?

Then came the weekend of my mother’s birthday. Jack was coming down from his home in Milwaukee to Chicago. The day he was supposed to drive, I got a call: “Don’t worry,” he said, “but I’ve been in an accident.” His car had stalled; when he pulled over, another car careened into it. “I’m fine—but I need you to pick me up.”

Thank God he’s okay, I thought, as I drove up to Milwaukee. When I got there, we rushed to a flower shop for something for Mom. “How about gardenias?” Jack said, pointing out a beautiful white corsage.

“You never see those this time of year,” I said. The florist put the corsage in a box.

The entire ride, Jack was unusually quiet. “Are you all right?” I asked. We were pulling onto my mother’s street.

“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking,” he said. “I might be moving.” Moving? When was he going to tell me this? After he packed? Then he added, “Moving in with you.” I nearly put the car on the sidewalk.

“What?” I asked.

“I think we should get married,” he said. He told me he’d planned his proposal for a fancy restaurant, but after the accident, he decided to do it right away.

“Yes,” I whispered. We both sat stunned, tears running down our cheeks, unable to speak. I’d never known such a tender moment. If only Dad were here to give his final approval.

“Oh, let’s just go inside.” Jack laughed. We got out of the car and he walked up the driveway, carrying the corsage. My mother opened the door.

“Happy Birthday!” we shouted. Jack thrust the box at her. She opened it up. Suddenly, her eyes brimmed with tears. Jack and I looked at each other.

“Mom, what’s wrong?” I asked.

“I’m sorry,” she said, wiping her eyes. “This is only the second gardenia corsage I’ve ever received. I was given one years ago, long before you kids were born.”

“From who?” I asked.

“Your father,” Mom said. “He gave me one right before we were engaged.” My eyes locked on Jack’s as I blinked away tears.

Dad’s test? I knew Jack had passed.