In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife

by Sebastian Junger

The question isn’t whether such dreams represent objective reality—they obviously don’t—but why people keep having them. The world over, people believe in two realities: one we walk around in and the “other” that we go to from time to time. Drugs, dreams, religion, and death are the ways people are generally thought to cross over. My dream was indistinguishable from both an NDE and a “shamanic journey” of the sort that anthropologists have documented from tribal cultures across the globe. Shamanism is a paleolithic-era practice that survived long enough for ethnographers to document in places as varied as the Siberian tundra, the Amazon jungle, the arctic ice fields, the African rain forests, and the canyons and uplands of central Mexico. It is one of the few human universals. The shaman flies his body and becomes a spirit, traveling to the land of the dead and returning with knowledge that is needed by the community. Hallucinogens, drumming, fasting, and hours or even days of dancing help the shaman leave this reality and reach the next.