Prof. Dr. Oliver Lazar studied medicine and is today professor of business informatics at FOM Hochschule in Düsseldorf. As a trained natural scientist and engineer, he spent – in his own words – 43 years living inside a strictly materialist world view. A decisive personal event changed that and eventually led him to one of the largest systematic studies of mediumistic afterlife contact in the German-speaking world: the EREAMS study. The acronym stands for Empirical Research of the Effectiveness and Authenticity of Mediumistic Messages from Spirit. He published the results in 2021 in his book Jenseits von Materie. Below is a summary of the WissensWerteWelt interview with Lazar. The original is in German; this article makes it accessible for English readers.
The starting point: a traffic accident on 9 October 2017
Lazar is driving his daughter (13, 8th grade) to school. On the way they both witness a concrete-mixer truck turning and running over a cyclist in its blind spot. Only hours later does it become clear: the victim was a classmate of the daughter – a girl Lazar himself barely knew. What unsettles him is not the shock itself but an indescribably deep grief that descends on him and that ordinary compassion cannot explain.
"A grief that pulled the ground out from under my feet. And I didn't even know this girl."
The key experience: twelve weeks later
About twelve weeks after the accident Lazar is sitting alone in his room, thinking. Then, as he describes it, an inner vibration begins, goose bumps run up and down his left side, and then – a wave of "infinite love" streams through him. Not a feeling from within, but something that clearly comes from outside.
"It was as if the whole universe was radiating. Tears of joy were streaming down my face – and at the same time I still carried that infinite grief inside me."
At that point Lazar knew neither the near-death literature nor spiritual concepts. He only started reading afterwards – and discovered that what he had experienced matches what many NDE experiencers report.
Two independent mediums – the same statement
Some months later Lazar books a reading with the medium Nina Herzberg. Without mentioning the accident, she speaks of a girl who died in a bicycle accident – and delivers specific details: the girl's love of horses (Lazar had never spoken to the girl, but could later have it confirmed by the parents), the number sequence "1-1", which neither he nor the medium can place. Weeks later, visiting the parents, the pattern becomes clear: shortly before the accident the girl had taken first place twice at a riding tournament. No one present had known this in advance.
Two or three weeks after the first reading Lazar seeks out a second, independent medium: Bettina-Suvi Rode from the Ruhr area. In the opening round of a seminar, before Lazar has mentioned the accident at all, Bettina-Suvi Rode interrupts him. Almost word-for-word, she repeats what Nina Herzberg had said – that the girl is present and that a specific reincarnation statement is being conveyed. She adds details about the accident that Lazar himself did not know and could only verify afterwards with the parents.
"I get the same highly specific story told twice – by two mediums who do not know each other and have not coordinated. That was absolute proof to me."
The EREAMS study: design
Lazar decides to work this up scientifically. Together with three others he builds the EREAMS study:
- Prof. Dr. Oliver Lazar – scientific methodology and evaluation.
- Bettina-Suvi Rode (Essen) – medium, co-initiator.
- Tanja Schlömer (Bottrop) – second medium.
- Kathrin Stefan (Tübingen) – clinical psychologist / psychotherapist, contributing the clinical perspective on grief.
The design is deliberately different from classical blinded studies (such as those of Julie Beischel or Gary Schwartz): the medium and the sitter see each other, because Lazar regards the personal bond between medium, deceased and bereaved as an essential part of the reading. The methodological refutation of cold reading (psychological tricks) is not achieved by blinding, but by focusing on highly specific evidence – information that is neither researchable nor obtainable through observing the sitter.
243 participants took part, from Germany, the US, France, Spain, Luxembourg and Denmark. The questionnaire was only sent three to four weeks after the session – in order to filter out the immediate euphoria effect and to leave time to verify items (like the "1-1" message above) that cannot be checked on the spot.
What "highly specific" actually means – two examples
Lazar draws the line carefully. A generic statement like "Your father loves you" is not proof, because it is neither testable nor exclusive. In his sense, highly specific means information that (a) the bereaved did not know at the time of the reading, (b) is not researchable anywhere, and (c) can be verified afterwards.
- The lost child. A woman receives a message from her deceased mother during the reading, saying that the mother had once lost a child. The bereaved had never heard of this. Asking her sister-in-law afterwards confirmed it – the mother had indeed suffered a miscarriage and had never spoken of it.
- The jacket on the bridge railing. A mother who had lost her son is told in the reading that her son's jacket was lying on the railing of a bridge. She did not know this. Asked later, the police officer in charge of the investigation confirmed it exactly – that was precisely where they had found the jacket.
Further items in the study include: specific pet combinations ("a rabbit and a single fish"), objects that were placed in the coffin, the content of letters placed in the coffin, word-for-word last words from the deathbed, dialects or speech impediments of the deceased that the medium imitates during the session. Things that cannot be derived from Instagram profiles, Facebook posts or observing the sitter.
Results: authenticity and comforting impact
The two central research questions of the study are authenticity (is the message genuine and from the deceased?) and comforting impact (does the contact have a lasting consoling effect on the bereaved?).
- Authenticity: over 90 % of participants report having received at least one highly specific item of evidence in the sense defined above.
- Comforting impact:82 % of participants tick "very comforting", a further 14 % tick "somewhat comforting" – a combined 96 % positive effect.
The obvious objection – that grieving parents will tick anything sounding like consolation – Lazar counters with reference to the psychological co-author Kathrin Stefan:
"There are no more critical people than bereaved parents. You cannot talk them into anything. They really want to know whether their child is still there – and they only say 'comforting' if they can actually believe it."
Context
EREAMS is not a randomised, blinded study in the strict sense – and that is its deliberate methodological choice, not its oversight. Where Gary Schwartz and Julie Beischel work with blinding, Lazar reverses the logic: if I rule out cold reading by restricting the evidence to highly specific, afterwards independently verifiable information, I no longer need blinding – because the relevant information was not accessible to the medium, the sitter or the internet. That is a defensible but debatable position.
For Heaven Connect readers, Lazar's findings fit into the bigger picture that we also illuminate from other perspectives: the neurological and medical evidence for consciousness without brain function, the philosophical structuring of the debate by Godehard Brüntrup, and the children's study of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. One question remains in the background: why are these findings so little discussed in public? See our article "Majority vs. Experts".
Lazar's own motivation
Asked why he, as an established scientist, puts himself through this, Lazar answers soberly: his aim is not to denigrate science or to elevate spirituality. His aim is to find the best arguments and not to go searching for confirmation of a preset world view.
"You mustn't start from a world view and look for arguments. You have to look at the arguments first – and then they lead to a world view."
The other driver is practical: the effect on grieving survivors. Lazar has met many bereaved parents and seen how an authentic contact works where conventional grief counselling and mainstream medicine reach their limits. His conclusion is a combination of professional grief counselling and – where the bereaved wishes it – a reputable mediumship reading. Not as a replacement, but as a complementary offer.
Source:Eine Studie belegt das Leben nach dem Tod | Oliver Lazar im Gespräch, WissensWerteWelt (YouTube, in German), youtube.com/watch?v=LwEKH4hAuwc. Quotations translated by us; otherwise a paraphrased summary. The book accompanying the study: Oliver Lazar, Jenseits von Materie, Giga-Verlag 2021.
For more, see our curated knowledge collection – it links to further articles and videos on mediumship readings, near-death experiences and the scientific debate, including the EREAMS interview itself and related work by Julie Beischel and Patrizio Tressoldi.