Near-Death Experiences: When Sales Matter More Than Truth |
Several years ago, I was approached to write a popular book on terminal lucidity—a near-death phenomenon in which individuals with severe cognitive impairment experience unexpected moments of clarity and connection shortly before death. Our work in this area, including the first large-scale systematic study of contemporary cases published in Psychology of Consciousness (1), attracted considerable media attention. Shortly thereafter, a major publisher offered a substantial six-figure advance for a trade book on the topic. By any measure, this was serious business.
I had written more than a dozen books before, some translated into 14 languages, but these were primarily academic works. Trade publishing, I was told, operates differently—according to its own rhythms, expectations, and assumptions about what readers require.
Recognizing this, I agreed to my agent’s suggestion that I collaborate with an experienced co-author who had worked on bestselling titles in the genre. He would know how to translate my research into an accessible narrative; he knew what sells. The arrangement seemed sensible: He would interview me extensively and then produce drafts that I would review and refine. Naively, I agreed.
The interviews followed. Then came the first chapters—and I barely recognized what we had discussed.
Instead of the material we had covered, I encountered confident descriptions of observations I had never made: ethereal lights, mists rising from the dying, prophetic visions, even claims of “precognitive terminal lucidity.” There were passages speculating—with complete assurance—about the color of a mist allegedly left behind by dying patients, along with other extravagant claims that I had neither observed, heard reported, nor discussed in any of our conversations. None of it was true.
To me, this was patently absurd. Why write and publish under the heading nonfiction when so much of the manuscript consisted of invention and exaggeration? Why interview me at all when the outcome bore so little resemblance to anything I had witnessed, observed, or described? And why assume that I would simply endorse this litany of........