E211 - Dr. Raymond Moody - Near-Death Experiences

Welcome to the Grief Dreams podcast, where we have conversations with guests about their life, loss, grief, and of course, grief dreams, which can be dreams of the deceased. If you want to know more about the topic and your hosts, please visit our website at griefdreams.ca. To support our podcast, please go ahead and rate it. For additional ways to support us, please refer to our show notes. Before we move on with the show, we'd like to give a territory acknowledgement. Long before Canada was formed, the Stalo people were the original land stewards, and they have lived here since time immemorial. They continue to live in unceded Stalo territory, known to settlers as the Fraser Valley and Lower Fraser Canyon of British Columbia. We recognize and honor the contribution that Indigenous people have made and continue to make to our community and the topic of grief dreams. So, welcome to the Grief Dreams podcast. Today on the show, we have your hosts, Joshua and Jade, with our special guest, Dr. Raymond Moody. Raymond is a world-renowned author, lecturer, and psychiatrist whose seminal work, Life After Loss, changed the way we view death and dying. He is widely acknowledged as the world's leading expert on near-death experiences, and you can find more about him and his work at LifeAfterLife.com. So thank you, Raymond, so much for coming on the podcast today. Oh, thank you, guys, for letting me on. I'm just really, and I'm so sorry about my technical incapacities, but I've had to live with it all my life. It's like this Asperger's is what they called it when I was in medical school. But one of the things is I just can't handle any kind of computer or machinery, so anyway, so I'm just happy to talk to you on a medium that I can't handle more or less, a telephone. That's great. And say this is the beauty of having multiple ways to get in touch and contact. And so I'm just really excited to speak with you. I read your book this summer. Oh, really? Just likewise. I'm just so happy to hear about you guys and your research. This is just absolutely very exciting and delightful. And so you're so big, as I said, some people call you the father of near-death experiences and really shedding light and awareness, because you didn't bring about the experience in people. You just showcased what was already going on throughout history. Well, that's right, Joshua. And you know, in reality, I always feel awkward about that. To me, it's like the person who got the ball rolling on this were actually two of them, Plato and Democritus, about the same time in ancient Greece. So that's how I found out about it, because I was a philosophy major. But then I happened to meet somebody when I was a third-year student who actually had such an experience, Dr. George Ritchie. And that sort of set me off on this quest. And you know, it was far less dramatic. I mean, it was dramatic in the rapidity with which the public picked this up. But you know, by 1974, when I wrote that book, the advent of cardiopulmonary resuscitation had caused a great avalanche, I guess, or tidal wave of experiences that had occurred throughout history and were well known to the Greek philosophers who studied these cases of apparent death where people revived and told these experiences. But it was a rarity. But then, when CPR came in, there were more and more, and so I realized that when I wrote my book, people say, oh, how courageous. No way. I knew full well by the time that book was published, that physicians would be in a position to find plenty of these, and that's what happened. So the mystery has been there for a long time, and I'm not so sure that much further along towards solving it. No, I agree. I think it just sometimes takes naming it, and that's one of the big things that you did was name it into something like very catchy and that people could remember and understand, and then people would then able to see it more often. I think that's very interesting in life is that when someone names something or makes a concept using a name, people then see it more often, where before it's like people are having these experiences, but people haven't really labeled it as something yet. And I think that's, I think it's very powerful what you did. So well, you know, I mean, in a way it was, you know, I think also it's Joshua, it's the naming, but also the phenomenology. That's a name for a school of philosophy, and I don't mean it that way. By phenomenology, I just meant a description of the typical characteristics. And I think really that's what the life after life did was to say that this is a common phenomenon, and it's also patterned that it has distinct characteristics by which you can identify it. And then so when you're saying patterned and specific characteristics, can you just share a little bit about that? Yes. Now I came into this from philosophy. You got into it from psychology. I came into it from philosophy in Thickenstein. It solved an old or advanced an old philosophical problem when he pointed out that mostly when we use a common noun term, there is not any one characteristic that characterizes it. He called it like a family resemblance. Like there may be, you know, what seven or eight different characteristics of a face. And one family member may have, you know, no, not all of the characteristics, but enough of them to make this. And so that's the way I look at it, that if you look at hundreds and now thousands of cases as I've done, what you see is that the same thing elements start or crop up in its way. It looked to me like about 15 very fairly common ones. And one person who comes close to death may have two or three or four of these or seven or eight or sometimes all 15, depending pretty, you know, roughly it seems to me from experience on how close they got to death, like people with these extremely lengthy cardiac arrests that literally don't make any sense from the point of view of what I read in medical school and my tennis course, people, for example, who like a dear friend of mine who was believed to dad by her doctor, Dr. Nelson for 40 minutes and yet not only came back, you know, just better than ever as everybody says, and that doesn't make any medical sense. I know it, but, but it happens. And in those cases are the ones who have get most in most into this, like a person who has a brief momentary cardiac arrest may talk about three or four of these things, but somebody who has goes into these extreme things, they may get the whole bomb, full bomb picture. Now what, what are the characteristics? Well people who returned from a close call with death will tell us that, for example, they heard their doctor say something like, oh my God, he's dead or we've lost her to or words to that effect, which very surprises them because I hear this all over the world, but you've heard the same remark and translation from many languages, but it's like people say, I have never been so alive is when I heard that doctor say I was dead, that far from entering what it seems like a loss of consciousness or they say consciousness is amplified and they say that they, they leave their physical bodies and they watch from typically above as a resuscitation scene going down on below, for example. And people say that they can't, there's no longer auditory sensation as we know it, but they say it's not like they hear a voice, but they can understand what the doctors and nurses are communicating or saying among themselves. And at some point a thought or a realization is, oh, this is what they call death, right? And people say that they go into a state of consciousness, no matter how eloquent or, you know, how many languages they speak, they say there are no words for it. There's ineffability as William James, as you would know, talked about this feature of such experiences that people say that there aren't any words. But the words that they choose are, you know, consonant, all of the world people say that they felt like they proceeded through a passageway, which they may liken to a tunnel, and come out on the other side into this incredibly brilliant and warm and loving, completely clear light. And they say they're just sort of taken up in feelings of love and peace. They tell us that relatives or friends of theirs who have already died seem to be there to meet them almost like a greeting committee or something. They say that you don't see people as physical presences, but there is a kind of form, nonetheless, which they find difficult to describe, but they say you recognize the person through the memories and the feelings and the sense of presence and so on. And very interestingly to me, this to me is one of the most fascinating parts of your death experience. At some point, people say that everything else kind of disappears, time stands still. And they say that everything they have ever done appears around them in this sort of visionary panorama. And in this panorama, they are embedded in the consciousness of those with whom they have interacted. So they say when they see themselves doing an action and are in that, the person doing it, nonetheless feel empathically the impact that action had on the other person and because there's no distinction in this. And very often people say that they review this panorama in the presence of a being of sheer light. People say that this is a personality of complete compassion and love who sort of sees everything you've done. Now, I will say here, even though I worked as a forensic psychiatrist with the gosh-awful people like you see and read about in the tabloids and how many of these horrific homicides was what I did. And so I've never heard of any near-death experience from anybody like that, if you know what I mean. I'm not just or any of the great villains of history. The folks I've talked to by and large be the sense with which we are all familiar, right? But people say that there's the kind of understanding that the point of this being is that if you look at it, that you see that whatever you were chasing, that the point of all this, the happiest outcome is to learn to love is the feeling. So people say at some point, obviously, they have to go back. Some people say they have no idea how they got back. There was one moment in this light, the next moment back in their body with no sense of transition. Other people say they were told you have to go back, kind of kicked out, as it were. And they've got things left to complete, although they're not told what that is, they say you got to go back and finish things. Other people are given a choice. The most common reason they choose to come back, and all the ones I've heard is they say that for me, I would rather have stayed than I chose to come back because I had young children left to raise, or less commonly some other kind of person who was stuck back there who they needed to help. And so people come out of this, and I'm sure in your psychological career, you're aware that most people are chasing something, power or fame or money, or as in my case, and apparently your case, knowledge, right? But whatever we were chasing in life, people say, come back from this and say that what this seems to be all about is to learning to love others. And they also say, though, it doesn't make you, I mean, it puts you in a situation where you do that automatically, like as I like to put it, it's very difficult to get through the average day without wanting to choke at least one person, and that does not resolve, right? So they still sign themselves on a quest, does it work? And then beyond that, beyond what I've said about the, you know, the vision of one's life, there are sometimes people with these extremely leaky cardiac arrest talk about seeing a realm where it seems to be attached right around to the place we are, and it seems to be consistent to people who don't quite get it, that they're dead, and that they are repeating some action. You know, the people have seen this, that it's not any big deal. I mean, it's like, you know, it's like they just don't get it, and there are these other people around her trying to snap them out of it, kind of. And then a number, quite a number of these extreme cases of people would say, do you see that there's an entire realm of existence that seems to be consistent knowledge, and that the people there, I mean, it's just like they're pursuing knowledge. And one person, the first person who told me this about this, he said, if you try to imagine Caltech and MIT and Yale and Harvard and Princeton, all of them wound up into one, you couldn't even begin to imagine this. But then even beyond that, a few people say that they see what seems to be a civilization of light for one of the better term, and I know it all sounds wacky. And yet the fact is that people who go to the brink of death return, you know, if you look at thousands of them, you will hear this from people. Wow. So incredible. I'm so just fascinated. There's so many things that you mentioned that kind of stuck out to me, and I just want to preface the follow-ups by just saying that the work you've done is amazing. Fifty years, you've been studying this, and just incredible insight. And I'm always intrigued to explore or discuss any kind of intersection between what you referred to as wacky and the evidence-based, you know, research and where those things marry and how they marry and how they relate to one another. And I'm sure a lot of listeners are enjoying this conversation thus far. And I thought it was interesting too, when you said a lot of people reported being able to feel the impact of their behaviors or the decisions upon. That's right. That's right. Exactly. People that they were encountering, that's very interesting to me. That's right. To me too. And it really, it's like, if you think it out, it really means doesn't, in some sense, doesn't that mean we're all the same person in some hard-to-grasp sense, in the sense that if you are, if you empathically are that person in your life with you, then at least at that point, see, there is an identity. And I mean, it's just, I think it's beyond our, you know, people naturally all, you know, look at this and they say, "Well, is this evidence of an afterlife?" And I have to, you know, I, before I became, you know, went into medical school, I was a, a philosophy professor. And what I would say from that stance is that this is a very complicated thing. And I think that we're into something here where we really don't have any conceptual scheme to, to make it make sense. And the one that has tried out by, democratists looked at all this, he, he had figured out that there are things, despite the appearance of solidity, things are actually made up of tiny, invisible bits called atoms, right? And he, he wrote about this, he said the, you know, these experiences of people who almost seem to die. He said, "Number one, there's no such thing as a moment of death." He said that, in other words, that dying is a process. And he said, "What these experiences are caused by is the invisible because atomic activity in the body that's, the residual biological activity, which takes place on the atomic level and it's not visible to the eye, but that, that accounts for these experiences." The same thing people say to, "Oh, it's oxygen deprivation to the brain," right? Whereas Plato and others looked at this and took it at face value as an indicator of an afterlife. Not much has changed, sadly, but, because of limitations in logic, and, and that is the, the real fact. I am not by way of a parapsychologist, I think, that the idea that, in 2022 anyway, the idea that science could, you know, give evidence of an afterlife to me is that, that's pseudoscience, that is, and there are reasons for it. It has to do with verifiability, like what sort of proof could you give is a far more complex problem. And it, I think the, the, the essential problem was very well identified by David Hume, who lived from 1711 to 1776, and who identified the problem of causation, for example, and the difficulties with inductive logic and so on, but for which he's probably best known. But he wrote an essay on immortality in which he said by, and if you think these words through, as I say them, you'll see he was right. He said, "By the mere light of reason, it seems difficult to prove the immortality of the soul." He said, "Some new species of logic is required for that purpose and some new faculties of the mind that they may enable us to comprehend that logic." Now that is the reality and Hume meant it as irony. He meant to say that it's impossible, but I say that quite otherwise, that we can solve that problem. But also the other big difficulty, which was identified by the logical positivist at the early part of the 20th century, and AJ Ayer, for example, most famously said, "You know," he said, "It makes sense in our language to say that a person survived the loss of his memory or the change of personality or a total change of personality." But he says that it just makes no sense to say that a man survived the annihilation of his body. He said it's a self-contradiction. And you know that may seem like a trivial criticism to people who feel spiritually informed, but to get right down to what are we talking about is the real problem. Right? And that is, you know, it's a self-contradiction to say that you live after you die, isn't it? I mean, if you look up the dictionary means, then see that's where I've got to start because, you know, I love logic. I was just going to say, we love logic too. And I get that piece, but I think part of the intrigue is, especially with our research as well in grief and dreaming is the mystery is like all the things that fascinate me are the things that we haven't quite put our finger on. And so I think for me, that's part of the intrigue and it's having that open-ended kind of piece and having research only carry us so far is intriguing, I guess. And I think I speak so long. It is. It is. See, I was just not, I mean, I was not religious as a kid, I mean, and I'm still not religious. I just, you know, I'm sorry, I just, but God is a different matter. I'm personal things, but I, you know, religion has never made any sense to me, but I, I, um, I started, you know, pro astronomy was my thing. Okay. That's where I was. And I came across this life after life, life after death thing when I was 18 years old. Plato was the first person I ever knew who had any interest in the afterlife. I thought it was just a joke. So it, that was in 1962. Now it's come through a long process and I am a skeptic in the real sense, the peronian, you know, what a skeptic is and the sense of the founder of it is a person who refrains from drawing a conclusion. That's the essential meaning. So if somebody says, oh, I'm a skeptic about these near-death experiences, I think it's just the chemistry of the brain. That person has thereby identified themselves as an ignorant ramus because if you translate that assertion, it means I'm a, I'm a person who doesn't draw conclusions and like conclusion is such and such, right? They don't know what they're talking about. But to follow that, refraining from conclusions, which I've done even before I knew who Puro was, I've always done that. And so I can't say I've drawn a logical conclusion, but I'm saying I give up. I mean, I can't think my way out of it. They say this thing, oh, the oxygen deprivation to the brain. The trouble is, as you guys probably know, all the time people standing there at the bedside of a dying loved one will experience these same things, like seeing a light fill the room, feel the apparitions of the departed person's relatives and friends who've died come into the room. Even cases, I mean, a lot of people have told me over the years that they actually empathically co-lived the dying life review of a person who was passing away, including a wonderful young woman right there in D.C. years ago, whose father, who was a farmer who was dying and she, not knowing that concurrently, was having visions of his life before her eyes. And you know, so to try to say this is oxygen deprivation to the brain, which some people just want, you know, that's their religion on it. But in reality, the same thing happens to people who are not ill or injured, but who are just right there at the bedside. So where I have come on this is that even though the idea of an afterlife is still highly counterintuitive to me, I give up. I just don't know what else to say. Like I have so many wonderful physician friends, for example, who've had this, who's a medical judgment. I've put my life in their hands if I was sick, right? But they say, "Well, you know, yeah, I had this experience. Was it real?" Well, not only that, it was more real than this thing we're in. So you see it. It just gets me in. It's not that I've drawn a logical conclusion that there's an afterlife, is this. I just don't know what else to say. I like that. I like that. I really like that position. To my utter astonishment. What else could it be? I don't know. Right. Well, I think that's the sitting in the mystery of life. And you really refer that there's this intersection that is going on between other areas of research. As you just mentioned, the dreams and visions at end of life that people have, that have similar qualities to this, and also the grief dreams. So the dreams people have of the deceased can have very similar qualities too with the sense of either getting information about the afterlife or being in a place of peace and comfort and total love and feeling that it was more real than the reality that they normally live in. And so I think that's really fascinating to me that there's just different things that are exploring, I think, a similar topic in the sense of, as you were saying, like different cousins and family members on a similar phenomenon. And I like to look at it as love. So what is this love that people are experiencing and how do you, how can you get there while you're awake? Right? That's one of my goals. It's like, how can I live? I don't know what me too, but I give up on that one too, because we both know everybody says there's no way what happened, this framework we're in. They say you have to use the word love only analogously, that it's so far beyond what we can experience in this life and love that, but it's interesting too that all over the world people use the words light and love, and they say that, you know, it's from that perspective, it's the same, which I can kind of see in some of these cases, I'm sure you've seen of these people who just before they die, there's this flash of light for one of the better term, the clarity of the light that's coming from, and I know that nobody who's not been there working with the terminal ill is going to be able to see that. But once you do, you see that just before they die, people, even if they've been demented for a long time, just suddenly come back to life, or I've heard it described by one man who flew all the way from Australia to tell me that the thing he saw with his wife, he said, looking back on it, he said it was like she already had one foot in the other world, and I've seen that myself enough to know exactly what he was talking about. Wow. And so this is a fascinating conversation, just like trying to understand the mysteries of life and to be able to sit in it. And I think the most important thing is to just normalize the experience for those who do have it or hear about it from others and just really sit, yeah, sit in the beauty of what they're experiencing, and hopefully if it's causing the stress to sit with them or if it's causing them comfort and peace and love to celebrate that and to really encourage that conversation. That's exactly always been my, even before I wrote my book, I was confronted with the situation as a medical student, right? I wrote the book and in November, it was finished in September of '74, but I'd been a medical student for over two years, and I saw this all the time. It's like the, you know, that amazing experience of being there with people as they are going into, it certainly seems they're going into something, it always did to me, you know, it's just, they talk about their relatives who died, they're in the room with them. I remember going into a room in 1980 with an elder, she was in her 80s, an elderly woman, and she was very happily talking to her dead relatives. And when I went to the bedside, she looked at me and she said, "Oh, Dr. Moody, I know what you're thinking, this old woman is delirious." And I said, "Oh, no, no, I'm tuned into that." But you know that people really do, from their point of view, they're actually conversing with their relatives who've passed away. I just have a question around stigma, and obviously you're well versed in the field of psychiatry. And so I'm wondering, just the collective kind of acceptance of these conversations and your experience with how that relates to psychiatry practice. And because like earlier referring to calling, you know, it's wacky or it sounds wacky. And so I think some people are being... Well, it does sound wacky to many people. Right. And so maybe if you could touch on that a little bit, because I think some people, like I think a lot of people are open to hearing, but there has to be people out there that have had these experiences that are reluctant out of fear that they'll be stigmatized. That's right. Well, you know, I can understand that. It's another way of saying it, it's a very personal experience. So, you know, I can understand either way. But I think that things have changed such that, you know, it's much easier in 2022 to find somebody who will listen to you than it was when I was first interviewing people with this back in the '60s. That is just a different time. So I thought of a thought that just because of the aging of the population, that there will be sort of a whole new wave of interest in this. I see it building now. And another thing is life is so hectic. I mean, it's like it's easy to judge people for not thinking about death. But, you know, there are all sorts of reasons why people avoid it. You know, you have to always ask somebody, well, what is it about death that you fear? Right? But some people, as you were aware, are just afraid that if they talk about it, it might bring it closer. So people who, you know, haven't had in your death experience are reluctant maybe to talk about the subject or to listen to it. So you can understand why somebody who had had such an experience would be reluctant. Sure. Yeah. And at the same time, I completely agree with that we are in a more progressive space now with conversations around just acceptance. I think that we have some room to grow, you know, of course, but definitely more backspaces slowly opening more and conversations like this are helpful, no doubt. But yeah, interesting. Josh, what do you think? Yeah, I'd like to actually add that's the same problem, even with the streams of the sea that people have after a death in bereavement, where because the research wasn't around, and still it's infancy in many ways, people are afraid to talk about them. They, as I said, like they'll feel they're going crazy. They just it's not normalized to them. So the grief literacy that they that most people have just don't incorporate those dreams as part of it. But it's such an intricate part of the bereavement human experience. And so I think it's just so important to be able to talk about this stuff. And for me, it's weird how the near death experiences have more research and more awareness than something like a grief dream or like a dream of the deceased. Most people would have probably had, right? Like so like more people have had those experiences. For me, I was going to ask you a question on that. Have you ever experienced your own, you know, dream of the deceased? Or have you experienced people talking about this in your research? Yeah, yeah, I have. After my grandmother Moody died, I had a dream in which she was just in this most amazing place of light. I mean, I just, it felt more, more real than a dream. It had its own kind of reality. And I, I also have had some recurrent dreams about, you know, friends that I lost in hell. So dear, I, Milton Friedman was one of my best friends, not the famous economist. My Milton always said there are two Milton Friedmans. One has the economic solution and the other has the economic problem. And, but Milton was also very famous. He was a presidential speechwriter, but just the most wonderful person. He was like 20 years older than me. And I, you know, since he died up, just had these recurrent things. It's like I had a very interesting grief experience with the woman named Vi Horton that I knew for two decades. And the day she, she died on one day. And because of her religion, she had to be buried on the next day. And that next day was the day that I had set aside with my family to go and scatter my brother Randy's ashes. So I, I didn't get to go to her funeral and it's created sort of a death. It's like when you sigh, you're anxious and you sigh and it goes to the top, but you can't release it. It's kind of like that. It's like, I think that there are these things too that like glitches in the grieving process where, because we didn't get to do something, it's still there and the kind of glitch. Oh, that's, it's interesting. I know. Yeah, guys. And another thing I have, this is one of my, I think that there's a kind of mix up in our way that we think of grief and society because, you know, it's like the way people think of the stages of grief, right? Or the thing about the shock and the, the numbness and the shock, right? And, and then the denial and the, the anger, the guilt, the, the, the sadness and, and so on. And what's, what, that is how we think of grief. What strikes me is that those are not the actual symptoms of grief because we experienced those in other situations, right? We can be angry or numb or things that, for things that, or guilty for things that are not lost, a lot of a loved one, for example. But I think, because I see most people who come to me for grief are the ones that have some, you know, it's like some really, it is, well, the most common thing people just say to me when they come in to see me, me to see, to see me for grief is Dr. Moody, I must be losing my mind, right? And those that seem to me are the characteristic signs of grief, which you don't get in other things. And it consists, for example, of forgetting that your loved one is dead, right? Like for six months to a year after my mom died, every time we would get in the car to go down to Macon, Georgia, where my siblings still live, my mom still, what had lived, I would start going through my mental list of things I was going to ask my mom. And then I get into it and say, oh, she's dead, right? And that happens to people all the time. Well, if you hear a lot of grieving people, you know, that's normal, so-called, but, but people who don't know about grief, see, they think, oh, there's something wrong with me, right? Or people who are looking for their loved, their deceased loved ones in the, in the shopping mall, right? The searching phenomenon, which is perfectly normal. But when it happens to people, because they have its ego dystonic, right? They say, you know, well, this is, is not right. There's something wrong with me. Or the anniversary reaction. And these are the, the essential characteristics of the grief that don't occur in other kinds of situations as well. So, I'm, you know, the ones I've said are most of people who think that they experience something that is, they think is uncanny or taking on the characteristics of the deceased without knowing it is another thing that people, I did that when Milton died. I just, you know, I never have liked bacon and eggs, but like he always did. So a couple of weeks after he died, like we were in the pancake house and I ordered like bacon and eggs. My wife, why? You know, and I went, what is that? It took me a couple of weeks to realize that that was my way of bringing Milton back. So it was unconscious, though. Interesting. I actually love that. And we haven't really talked about that way or using that in particular, like as a continuing bond and a way to kind of pull them close to you and bacon and eggs, order. I like, I've never really made sense and thought consciously about ordering something that they would order. Are they, you know, eight regularly? Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that's, you know, since I, I hear that, that same thing was a woman somewhere, I was given a talk on Netflix and she was telling about when they went out to eat after a friend of theirs died, she ordered what? Her dead friend always ordered. But, you know, not realizing it, but, you know, just sort of caught herself afterward. And it's interesting. You see some of those characteristics within dreams of people searching for the deceased that you sort of mentioned or like the deceased saying that they're not dead. So very similar to some of the issues or the moments that we're having in waking life where we're not thinking that they're dead or we're searching for them in the mall, right? So it's very interesting how some of the dreams really do mimic some of our tendencies in waking life and what we're going through in that grief process. But then there's these other dreams that are more characteristic, I would say of the kind of like the near-death experience of ones where it's full love, there's this comfort, there's this talking and usually the person knows the person's dead and they're just having this conversation. So it's really interesting of, you know, I think using discernment that there are these different experiences that people do go through and some may be a little bit more different than others, but we need to sort of explore this and it'll help us understand, I think, the grieving process more by able to understand I think these dreams as we sort of move forward with the research. I have a quick question because like we're running out of time and I could just talk to you and listen to you, talk for hours and we probably would love to have another conversation with you. But one of our questions we like to ask our guests at the end is if you could have a dream of someone who is died tonight, who would it be and what would that dream look like? How interesting. My uncle Farrelly, my uncle Farrelly was the chief of police in the little town of Georgia and he was chief of police there for 30 years and the local judges told me that when Farrelly died they had to hire three officers to take his place and when I was a kid he took me around in his cop car and I ended up being a forensic psychiatrist. As a psychologist you would see the connection there, right? And apparently he was just such an interesting and very wise and very observant person and so he popped into my mind if I had a dream of somebody who passed away tonight it would be my uncle Farrelly. Thanks for that question. What would that dream look like? So I'm really curious on how you'd want to interact with your uncle. Well I would rather leave it over to him because I figure he's in a much better position to figure out than I am but I guess he knows that I think of him often. I guess seven or eight years old and I remember when I was very young him going and investigating a murder when I was I mean it just sort of came up and then oddly enough I was in two other situations a friend of mine Don Glass who was a chief deputy sheriff in a county I lived in and my brother Randy who was a sheriff for 20 years and in both cases with them I happened just wildly they were called to a murder scene when I was in the car with them so it happened three times and I guess that's partly why I've had the privileges I think of it as interviewing probably over three certainly over 300 people who committed homicide but probably more like realistically like 400 because you know you don't you sort of quickly stop counting but so fairly he had a lot of influence on my life which has only come up I think it's only emerged at this phase in my life because um you would understand as is a forensic psychiatrist see I it's like it's so relentless right I mean you got 120 assaultive combative homicidal psychotic men in a unit you know it's there's not much time for a reflection and you may see 15 horrible you know people who've done horrible homicides in a day right and so you can't process it but what it tends to happen is years later like a few years ago it kind of started resurfacing in my dreams and you know I just had sort of festered down there a long time because you know I mean who you're going to talk to when you get home about the man who chopped his mother and father up into pieces right it's not your kids or your wife anyone that's the reflections that come up from this wow what a career you've had this conversation has been incredible the father of NDE they call you dr moody this has just been so enlightening and different right back to you guys you guys are great this is terrific we are just so grateful to have you and enthused and yeah like joshua was saying I just I'm trying to go to a dinner party at your house um because this is the type of conversation that I thoroughly enjoy and you brought up lots of you know really cool insights that me myself I'm going to you know process as the day moves forward lots of kind of timbits there and you have a lots of resources available there's lots of information on dr moody on the interwebs and so we encourage you all to explore as you see fit and this is definitely no doubt in my mind planted seeds for seeds of curiosity for many of our listeners so I hope everyone has enjoyed this episode and it's been great we hope to have you on again in the future thank you so much for that I'd love to