are abduction experiences real

People who have been through something profound often wonder if what happened to them was objectively real or just in their head. Dr. Melvin Morse, who studied children's near-death experiences, notes that many experiencers ask themselves exactly that: was my experience real? 1 The question haunts them because what they felt was so vivid, so unlike anything else, that ordinary language fails.

What strikes researchers is how consistently NDErs describe their experiences as more real than waking life. One person put it plainly: "These experiences have to be real" 2. Another said, "Your experience is real, my experience was real, as an experience" 3. Natascha Amrein heard the same refrain from many near-death-experiencers: the experiences seem "more real than real" 4. They don't mean metaphorically real. They mean the colors were brighter, the love was sharper, the sense of being present was more acute than anything they had known before.