Last Conscious Thoughts

The last conscious thoughts before loss of consciousness have been of interest for many years. Some people have been reported as having said that they had had a glimpse of an afterlife , and had regretted returning to this one; others have recalled, so novelists write, a misspent youth, or events they wish had not taken place. During an investigation into retrograde amnesia (Rudolf, 1947, 1948) enquiries were made with regard to the last memories before loss of consciousness, and in some of the patients questioned it was found that there was no period of amnesia. These patients therefore provided true last thoughts. Whether death takes place, or recovery occurs from unconsciousness, is a matter of chance and organic damage. Consequently the last thoughts before loss of consciousness as recalled by a person who has recovered and who recalls the injury sustained may be reliably supposed to be the same as they would have been if he had died without recovering consciousness. If retrograde amnesia has occurred, however brief its duration, the last thoughts before injury may have been repressed. This repression is likely to be caused by the fear of injury or death. If conscious or unconscious fear is present, death would not be welcomed and an afterlife would not be considered as pleasant. It is therefore possible that when death and its sequelae are feared, a person may have no last thoughts available for recollection. If on the other hand the individual believed that he was passing to an afterlife of happiness, or returning to a state of non-existence, the event of death would not be unwelcome, and repression affecting the events leading up to death would then be unlikely to occur. The present paper deals with 34 men who had suffered from unconsciousness but who had no retrograde amnesia?that is, they recollected the actual event, such as a blow, that produced unconsciousness. Twenty-five of these men were in action at the time of the incidents, and so were in the presence of danger and death. Of the total number of 37 periods of unconsciousness amongst the 34 men, 9 were accompanied by thoughts that occurred after the injury and before loss of consciousness. In one inc-dent the thoughts could have been memories of an actual event; in another incident unconsciousness could have commenced while a man was in the air, as he recalled rising but not falling. …