Why do the dying—and only the dying—keep seeing the dead in their last days and hours? If there is any true mystery to all this, it’s that in mud huts and in hospital rooms, in car accidents and on battlefields, in darkened bedrooms and in screaming ambulances, deathly ill people are startled to see a loved one hovering over them. There are neurochemical explanations for why people hallucinate, but not for why they keep hallucinating the same thing. Some attempts have been made, though: the visions are said to be unconscious projections ginned up by terrified patients, or evolutionary
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