Experience description:   

I wanted to write and tell you of a number of anomalous experiences that my father, who has since died of cancer, had experienced. He told me that he had experienced what he called "being outside of his body" twice. He didn't even know of the term "out-of-body-experience" as he had never read about it or even known if anyone had ever experiences something like this before.The first of these occurred when he was a young boy (around 9 years old). He was sitting at the kitchen table in his house when he spontaneously experienced a vantage point near the ceiling, seeing the top of his own head as his body sat at the table. He said that it was over as quickly as it began but had always been something that he was never completely able to rationalize to himself, as he knew that it was not imaginative. He said that this occurred a second time in college (in his dorm room) while he had been in the midst of battling some of flu-like illness, but this was all he relayed about this experience.

When my father was in his fifties, he had become very discouraged about financial issues and had becoming quite despairing of life, in general. I was around 13 at the time when he inexplicably came home early from work (which he never did). He looked as though he would burst into tears at any moment and he told me that he couldn't explain what he was going through but said that he felt like giving up. Around this period, he awoke during the night to find a person standing next to his bed looking down at him. Counterintuitively, he felt a calming presence instead of fear at the sight of a stranger standing in his bedroom, staring at him. This person said only two lines before leaving the room: "Don't worry. Everything will be alright."

The last experiences took place while my dad was on hospice at home, in the grip of terminal cancer. On at least two occasions, he was lying in his bed when all of a sudden a look of intense focus came over his face (like he was transfixed by something off in the distance) and he would say, "Oh, it is so beautiful! It's so beautiful!"

Hopefully some people will be encouraged by my father's experiences. And thank you so much for providing an archive of these experiences. They are endlessly fascinating, whatever their cause.