Actor-comedian John C. Reilly is a familiar face to most people, having acted in both dramatic movies like Chicago as well as in comedy romps such as Stepbrothers and Talledega Nights. And it turns out that Reilly has an interesting tale to tell related to the question of whether there is an afterlife.
Reilly was recently interviewed on NPR’s ‘Wild Card’, where the questions are randomly chosen from a special deck of cards. When Reilly chose the middle card of three pulled by host Rachel Martin, the question on that card was “Do you think there’s any part of us that lives on when we die?” Reilly responded emphatically with a “Yes, for sure”, before expanding on the reason for his certainty.
“My father died when I was 28 years old, you know, relatively young,” he explained. “The night that my father died, I was off doing a film. I was on the other side of the country. I was laying in bed and I had a dream.”
In the dream, I was laying in a rooming house. I was with my wife in a bed and we’d come in late into this rooming house and it was dark and they were like, “Yes, there’s a bed, but it’s in the common room upstairs. Be quiet cuz everyone else is sleeping.” So, we went up there. We got into this bed and there’s all these other beds in this room, this big wooden room. And we lay there and like, “Ah, man, it’s so late. We’re so tired. I just have to fall asleep.”
And all of a sudden, I hear rustling in the room. People are getting up. I’m like, “Oh my god, we got in here so late that now all these other people are waking up.” And I’m trying to go to sleep. And I was kind of annoyed. And I was like, “Just keep your eyes closed. Don’t open your eyes. Just keep your eyes closed.” And eventually I could feel people right next to our bed like going by. And I was like, “What is going on?” And I opened my eyes and right in front of me was my father.
And he was standing in this line of people. And the line was slowly moving like this. They were going out a door and I was looking, and I remember like, “Oh my god, that’s my Dad.” And I was staring at his face. And somehow I knew this is my last glimpse of him. Look at him. Look at him now. Remember what his face looks like. You know, like and then he kept moving. He kept moving.
And then the phone rang and woke me up from my sleep. And my wife came into the room and said, “It’s your sister”, and handed me the phone. She said, “Dad, just went.” You know, like what are the odds? My dad was very ill, but it wasn’t like death watch, you know…nobody was saying ‘get back to Chicago, he’s gonna go’.
Reilly here is describing a phenomenon known as a ‘crisis apparition‘ – a moment where a person sees a vision, hears a voice, or senses the presence of a loved one at the same time that the loved one is experiencing some sort of moment of crisis, which in the most oft-reported cases is their death. They have been studied by the likes of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) since the late 19th century: In the SPR’s ‘Census of Hallucinations’ which received responses from 17,000 people, 30 experiences of ‘death-coincidence’ crisis apparitions were reported, which the researchers calculated “was a rate of occurrence 440 times that which might be expected by chance alone”.
And in John C. Reilly’s case, he wasn’t even the only family member to report the phenomenon. On the same night as his dream, Reilly explained, “my sister had a dream about my Dad packing up his boat in Florida… She saw him outside the house getting ready to go on this voyage.” And his aunt also had a dream about his father departing.
Somehow like, all three of us, in different places in the world… You know, that’s metaphysical. That’s not just…I wasn’t having dreams like that every night. I had that dream one time that night. So who are we to say with certainty there is nothing left of us afterwards.
Here’s the video of John C. Reilly on ‘Wild Card’ discussing his experience:
(For more on the lines of evidence for the survival of consciousness beyond death, see my book Stop Worrying! There Probably is an Afterlife)
