When she was in her 30s, Barbara Westfall of Nichols underwent back surgery and was administered a painkiller that contained codeine. "Suddenly, I found myself floating near the ceiling of the room," she recalled. "As I looked down, I could see the nurses and a doctor working frantically over me."

Then, she said, everyone seemed to step back from her body and "heave a collective sigh."

"The next thing I know, I was back in my body," she said. "That was when they told me I had a bad reaction to the codeine and never to take it again. They called it anaphylactic shock."

Dramatic, yes. Unusual, no.

Westfall's "near death experience" (NDE) mimics that of many who say they have witnessed their own deaths, and can describe them as if they watched them in a movie theater, sans popcorn, of course.

Some, like Westfall, describe the sensation of floating up to the ceiling. Others talk about witnessing a tunnel with a bright and soothing light at the end. Some say they were greeted by long-lost loved ones.

"I have never had a NDE myself, but people I really trust -- intelligent, educated people who are grounded in reality -- describe these experiences to me," said Unitarian Universalist minister Douglas Taylor of Binghamton. "And I have come to see that there are more things out there than we know."

"What is interesting is that people have been having experiences of this sort for over 2,000 years," said Douglas Shrader, a professor of philosophy at the State University of New York at Oneonta. Shrader has researched the meaning of NDEs.

One of the earliest known accounts of a NDE, he said, comes from about 2,500 years ago. It is recounted in Plato's seminal
"Republic," a book-length philosophical argument for ethical behavior.

"At the end of the book, Plato tells the story of a soldier named Er who was taken for dead on a battlefield," Shrader said. "He was amongst a heap of bodies on a pyre about to be lighted when he sat bolt upright and told the tale of being met by guardian spirits and taken through a tunnel to a place of judgment -- a classic NDE."

Read full article from Pressconnects

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