If it is any comfort to anyone out there, it is quite possible that even violent death is not as immediately and horribly experienced as we might think. Has anyone here read Charles Pellegrino's book, Ghosts of Vesuvius: A New Look at the Last Days of Pompeii, How Towers Fall, and Other Strange Connections? Here the author discusses his own near-death experiences and says that in moments of acute, life-threatening danger a kind of mental distancing or dissociation occurs - you see what is happening to you, and react to it, but it is as if at the same time it is happening to someone else and you are above or outside of it. Simultaneously, he says, there is an expansion of time and every moment seems to last forever. When he was near death himself (at one point from a bomb blast) he remembers thinking, "Well, it's not so bad after all." This is not to take away from the terrible suffering of murder victims but to give some comfort to those who survive them - the terror is apparently experienced at one remove for many. This dissociation might also explain why so many survivors of acute trauma cannot actually remember the trauma itself in the immediate aftermath of it, and then sometimes only in bits and pieces long afterwards.