Still, for Dr. Monica Williams, an emergency physician who now serves as a medical director of The Shared Crossing point, those remote cases raise a serious question about whether our current models can account for everything people report.

There is a very powerful pattern in some of the shared death experiences that suggest that it is time for a paradigm shift in the medical model of consciousness and who we are as a species.

So, you know, unlike the near-death experience, which has been dismissed as a physiologic aberrancy, the last act of a dying brain, a hypoxic brain, if you are away from the bedside of a dying person, and that person's dying unexpectedly, and you have an experience that is parallel to the near-death experience, the features often overlap.

No one can say that was a response to a stimuli either internally or externally.

So whatever model of consciousness we're working from presently is too small to contain this experience and to explain it.

So we need to expand our model of consciousness and what it is to be human.

And in that expansion, that creates the space for this to be engaged for all people.

It's whether medicine is ready to listen to those who are experiencing it.

And you imagine,

I know biologically, physiologically, everything that's happening inside her body.

I could, I should be able, I can explain this to patients.

Well, I can't explain it to my daughter.

And then extrapolate that over the human population.

And if you don't have that information and your mom, you know, like you said, you just kind of figure it out.

And not because it was any mom's fault, but our moms probably really didn't know what was happening inside them unless they were really highly educated medical professionals.

It's a journey.