Patrick Coghlan was dying. He was peaceful and motionless, and his daughter, Mairead O'Connor, sat by his bedside, knowing the end was not far. Suddenly — shockingly — he roused from his unconscious state, sat bolt upright, opened his eyes wide, and waved at something or someone only he could see. Mrs O'Connor likes to think it was her late mother. "His face looked radiant and happy," she remembers. "I knew I was witnessing something special." Moments later, he died. For a long time, deathbed visions such as Mr Coghlan's have been relegated to the realm of religion and superstition. But increasingly, doctors are applying the rigours of science to a phenomenon they have seen too often to dismiss as the hallucinations of a failing mind. One of those doctors is Australia's Michael Barbato, a retired palliative care expert who has watched hundreds of patients pass away during his decades in medicine, and whose fascination with the mysteries of dying led him to conduct groundbreaking