Q&A With Steve Taylor: Author of Time Expansion Experiences

Time Expansion Experiences is a book unlike anything you have ever read. Exploring our perception of time, near death experiences and how we can control time. This mind-opening book is publishing on the 12th November 2024 and is available for pre-order now. In anticipation for its release, I asked Dr Steve Taylor a few questions to enlighten me on the subject of Time Expansion Experiences.

What first got you interested in researching Time Expansion Experiences (TEEs)?

It was when I had a car crash, which led to my own TEE. I’d heard about them before – in fact, I’d had TEEs before, in different situations. For example, I had a powerful ‘awakening experience’ – which I describe in the book – when I was walking by a beach on a rainy evening, when I felt as if time no longer existed, that I could have been there ten thousand years in the past or the future.

But when I had car crash on the motorway a few seconds of my car spinning around stretched ten or twenty times longer. I felt that I had a lot of time to try to deal with the situation, to contemplate what was happening, make decisions and take action. I felt strangely calm even though my life was in danger. My perception was very intense and detailed. Everything became silent.

So that experience encouraged me to research time expansion experiences, to find out how common they are and in what situations they occur.

Do you categorise accounts of near death experiences (NDEs) as something scientific, psychological, paranormal or spiritual? Are these categorisations useful?

NDEs are all of the above – apart from perhaps scientific. They certainly can’t be explained in standard scientific terms. There are so many attempts to explain them in neurological or physiological terms, but none of them make any sense.

In this book, for me the importance of NDEs is that they are experiences of extreme time expansion. They may also be experiences of time cessation. In ‘time cessation experiences’ (TCEs) time either disappears altogether, or it is seems to become a panoramic landscape, in which the past and the future exist alongside the present.

There are a plethora of books, films, comics and TV shows that depict time as something malleable. Can you think of a piece of fiction which best represents how you conceptualise time as a result of your research?

One of my favourite films is American Beauty, which portrays a near-death experience at the end. The main character, Lester Burnham, is shot by his neighbour. Suddenly he finds himself floating above his house and his town, serenely reliving some of the pivotal moments of his life. It’s a fantastic depiction of the ‘life review’ that NDEs often include. The character says:

I had always heard your entire life flashes in front of your eyes the second before you die. First of all, that one second isn’t a second at all, it stretches on forever, like an ocean of time…For me, it was lying on my back at Boy Scout camp, watching falling stars. And yellow leaves from the maple trees that lined our street. Or my grandmother’s hands, and the way her skin seemed like paper. And the first time I saw my cousin Tony’s brand-new Firebird…

What can readers expect from your new book: The Time Expansion Experiences?

• Explanations of why time passes at different speeds in different situations
• Why time speeds up as we get older, and when we’re having fun – then slows down in states of boredom and in accidents
• An understanding why ‘time expansion experiences’ and ‘time cessation experiences’ occur
• Strategies to slow down time – it is possible to control the passing of time and even induce time expansion experiences
• An explanation of why NDEs and precognition are authentic experiences, rather than illusions
• An explanation of why the ‘life review’ is not a hallucination, but gives us insight about the nature of reality

I’d like to thank Dr Steve Taylor for taking the time to answer my questions. Time Expansion Experiences is publishing on the 12th November 2024 and is available for pre-order now.