near death experience narrative essay

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5 Credible Stories of Near-Death Experiences (Peer-Reviewed) 

When it comes to near-death experience stories, there are many unscientific writings based on the writers’ own agendas rather than actual evidence. However, there is also a growing body of legitimate research around near-death experience (NDE) reports, and peer-reviewed scientific journals have published several medical studies on the subject.

In this article, we’ll explore common elements of near-death experience stories, what it means when a near-death experience can be verified, and five credible near-death experience short stories. Plus, download a free NDE Cheat Sheet that outlines the top 5 things to remember about near-death experiences.

Common Elements in Stories of Near-Death Experiences

For a near-death experience to occur, one must have limited brain function  yet still have a sensory experience—without full use of their physical senses. In the United States alone, about 9 million people have reported experiencing an NDE.

The patients’ reports reveal a pattern of several recurring elements. These elements include:

• out-of-body experience
• accurate visual perception (while out of the body)
• accurate auditory perception (while out of the body)
• feelings of peace and painlessness
• light phenomena (encounter with loving white light)
• life review
• being in another world
• encountering other beings
• tunnel experience
• precognition

For a quick and sharable overview of near-death experiences, download a free Top 5 Things to Remember about NDEs fact sheet .

Three Ways to Verify a Report of a Near-Death Experience Story

In some cases, where patients undergo clinical death and then return to physical life, they report that they maintained consciousness during the clinical death (despite the absence of brain function). Since this clinical death often happens in a hospital setting with professional medical oversight, thousands of these near-death experiences have been sufficiently well-documented for scientific study.

• Veridical reported data
• Visual perception of blind
• Personal information about deceased individuals

Each of these kinds of evidence is verifiable by independent researchers after the fact, and all of them are exceedingly difficult (if not impossible) to explain by merely physical or physiological theories (such as hallucinations, anoxia, narcotics, etc.).

Veridical Reported Data and Visual Perception of Blind

Frequently, during near-death experiences , some transphysical component leaves the body but does not go immediately to an other-worldly domain. Instead, it remains in the resuscitation room or somewhat near the body.

Some of these reports have highly unusual or unique characteristics that are not part of ordinary resuscitation or hospital procedures. Additionally, some patients blind from birth report visual data accurately about their experiences during clinical death.

As such, the details of these near-death experience stories can be verified by hospital staff and others who were present at the time. When the claims of an NDE have been verified, the account is deemed “veridical.” Virtually every peer-reviewed study reports multiple instances of such veridical data.

Personal Information about Deceased Individuals

Similarly, many NDEers meet deceased relatives whom they had never met in their own lifetime. They can only identify the relatives later in a photo or by describing them to a living relative who knew the deceased.

Five Stories of Near-Death Experiences

Read some accounts of near-death experiences below.

Near Death Experience Story One: Finding Dentures

In a 2001 study by renowned cardiologist Pim van Lommel, a man who had been in a deep coma later told a nurse that he recognized her. He told her that he saw where she had placed his dentures during resuscitation efforts and then described the cart where she placed them. They were there precisely as he described it.

Near Death Experience Story Two: A Child Meets Relatives

One man who had an NDE as a child recalled the experience of meeting dead relatives:

“There were some presences there. There were some ladies. . . I didn’t know them at the time. . . They were so loving and so wonderful, and I just didn’t want to come back. . . I didn’t see any pictures of them until I was an adult, but then I said, ‘Oh, yeah’. . . They were my great-grandmothers who had died years before I was born.”

Near Death Experience Story Three: Life-Review

Often, people relay their near-death experiences as a review of their lives. Though life review experiences cannot be deemed scientifically veridical, they are worth noting. They can have a profound effect on the NDEer and sometimes cause them to re-examine their life and morals. Below is a doctor’s description of the life review of an NDE patient:

When he realized that collision was imminent, the patient said that time seemed to slow down as he hit his brakes and went into an uncontrolled slide. Then, he seemed to pop out of his body. While in this state, he had a life review, which consisted of brief pictures—flashes— of his life. His car struck the truck, and the truck bed crashed through the window, causing multiple injuries to his head and chest. Medical reports show that he was in a coma and nearly died. Yet he had a vivid sensation of leaving his physical body and entering into darkness. He had the feeling of moving up through a dark tunnel toward a point of light. Suddenly, a being “filled with love and light” appeared to him. Now he had a second life review [or life review proper], one guided by the being of light. He felt bathed in love and compassion as he reviewed the moral choices he had made in his lifetime. He suddenly understood that he was an important part of the universe and that his life had a purpose. 

Near Death Experience Story Four: Traveling through Walls

Some NDEers report stories of veridical out-of-body experiences, including traveling through walls to the waiting room where they see their relatives and friends. One patient reported traveling through a wall and seeing her young daughter wearing mismatched plaids, which was highly unusual. Another woman traveled through a wall and overheard her brother-in-law in the hospital waiting room talking to a business associate in a very derogatory manner; she was able to report this back to him later.

Near Death Experience Story Five: A Blind Woman Has Sight Restored

As mentioned above, some blind people report being able to see during their NDE . Psychiatrist Brian Weiss tells the story of a blind, elderly woman:

"[She] suffered a cardiac arrest during her stay in the hospital where I [Weiss] was the chairman of the psychiatry department. She was unconscious as the resuscitation team tried to revive her. According to her later report, she floated out of her body and stood near the window, watching [the resuscitation]. She observed, without any pain whatsoever, as they thumped on her chest and pumped air into her lungs. During the resuscitation, a pen fell out of her doctor’s pocket and rolled near the same window where her out-of-body spirit was standing and watching. The doctor eventually walked over, picked up the pen, and put it back in his pocket. He then rejoined the frantic effort to save her. They succeeded. A few days later, she told her doctor that she had observed the resuscitation team at work during her cardiac arrest. 'No,' he soothingly reassured her. 'You were probably hallucinating because of the anoxia [lack of oxygen to the brain]. This can happen when the heart stops beating.' 'But I saw your pen roll over to the window,' she replied. Then she described the pen and other details of the resuscitation. The doctor was shocked. His patient had not only been comatose during the resuscitation, but she had also been blind for many years."

What Can These Near-Death Experience Stories Tell Us about Consciousness, the Afterlife, and God?

The above studies of near-death experiences give considerable probative evidence of transphysical consciousness after bodily death, which is not explained by current physicalist explanations and is unlikely to be presented by future ones. Nor can it be explained by the medical world; this challenges certain ideas of consciousness. 

“These features and the occurrence of heightened mental functioning when the brain is severely impaired, such as under general anesthesia and in cardiac arrest, challenge the common assumption in neuroscience that consciousness is solely the product of brain processes, or that the mind is merely the subjective concomitant of neurological events.” —Dr. Bruce Greyson of the University of Virginia School of Medicine

For the Catholic, the preponderance of evidence for a positive, loving experience after bodily death gives us an ultimate context in which to interpret happiness and suffering. We no longer need to limit happiness to our physical existence and our bodily lifespan but can explore transcendent and eternal happiness both now and in our eternal future.

The Importance of Near-Death Experience Stories

There is a growing body of legitimate research around near-death experience reports, and peer-reviewed scientific journals have published a number of actual medical studies on the subject. Verified NDE stories provide evidence that the soul does indeed continue beyond death.

To learn more about what near-death experience stories can teach us about God and heaven (and hell, too), see our post , “ NDE: The Definitive Guide to Near Death Experiences .” For a quick and sharable overview of near-death experiences, download our cheat sheet, Top 5 Things to Remember about NDEs .

*Originally published August 31, 2020.

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The Mysterious Power of Near-Death Experiences

Over the course of my life, I’ve had a few close calls, incidents that, had they taken place a second or a minute later, might have changed my life—or ended it. I’ve never had the classic near-death experience, the one that includes an out-of-body moment, when one’s spirit floats away from one’s body, to hover in a state of heightened awareness from the ceiling or some higher plane. I don’t know what it’s like to have died and come back, only what it’s like to momentarily feel that I might have possibly come close to dying.

When I was in my mid-twenties, I bought my first car, with a six-figure mileage, from a friend of my father’s. I was a reluctant driver at best—a terrified one, really—and an overused lemon was not a good starter car for me. Once, when I was driving along a busy street in New Rochelle, New York, the car turned on its own and headed toward a garbage truck in the opposite lane. There were only a few inches between us when both the truck and my car miraculous stopped. If the truck had hit me at the speed we were both going, I might have died.

A few years ago, I was standing on the landing of the steps in front of a friend’s apartment in lower Manhattan. The front door was an entire story above the ground. It had snowed a few days before, then had warmed up, and then the temperature had plunged again. Black ice covered both the steps and the sidewalk below. I’d just pulled the door shut, and had my back to the steps, when I suddenly felt myself slipping. My arms flailed, and for a moment I felt as though I were flying. I somehow managed to catch the railing before I could freefall all the way down. Had I plunged backward and landed head first on the concrete, I might have been at least brain dead.

There was also the time, soon after my mother died, when I looked up from my phone while riding in the passenger seat of our family car and realized that my husband had accidentally driven onto the wrong side of a highway ramp. Had any cars been coming off the highway at high speed, nothing could have saved us. That particular brush with death made me think of all the close calls that I, and a few people I know, have had over the span of a lifetime. Some of those close calls happen so quickly that we barely notice them. Others are so intense that they might change the way we think about not just living but about constantly being close to dying.

Every once in a while, a friend with whom I have traded such stories will send me links to close-call videos on YouTube. In them, people cluelessly walk into the paths of speeding cars, buses, and trains that somehow don’t hit them. Dangers graze but don’t annihilate them. In that one moment, it looks as though these people are covered with some invisible death-protection shield. Or, as my mother might have said, “It just wasn’t their time.”

I have wanted to sit down and tally my close calls. (There have been a few others involving being caught in the middle of a police chase, a near-drowning, and a dodged bullet during a drive-by.) But I have been afraid to do it. What if I tempt fate, and tip the balance, by paying too much attention? What if my becoming fully aware of the frequency of such moments makes me terrified to leave my house? What if I start wondering if my house is even safe? After all, fifty-foot sinkholes have been known to spontaneously appear in Florida living rooms.

I once sat next to a woman in a commuter turboprop plane, who, as soon as the plane landed, started thanking God at the top of her voice. This same woman, at the start of the trip, had refused to change seats with another passenger who was travelling with a friend.

“My seat number is how they’ll identify my body if the plane crashes,” she said apologetically, though loud enough for everyone to hear. There had been some recent crashes involving the same type of plane in different parts of the world, I later found out, so her fear was justified. Surviving a routine plane ride had seemed like a close call to her, something to be extremely grateful for having lived through. She couldn’t fully trust that the plane would land and that we would all walk off and go on with our lives.

She had a point, I realized. After all, don’t most catastrophic events suddenly interrupt perfectly ordinary days? The “ordinary instant,” Joan Didion calls it, in “ The Year of Magical Thinking ,” her memoir describing her husband’s sudden death from a heart attack and the process of writing about it.

“Confronted with sudden disaster,” Didion writes, “we all focus on how unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable occurred, the clear blue sky from which the plane fell, the routine errand that ended on the shoulder with the car in flames.”

Unless a person is being executed, death rarely announces its exact place and time. Against the backdrop of the ordinary, it often feels abrupt, exceptional. And even if the circumstances right before death are extraordinary—if one is getting married, for example, or giving birth, or had just climbed Mt. Everest—how could these otherwise exceptional events not pale in comparison?

Among the first words Didion wrote after her husband died were, “Life changes in the instant.”

The ordinary instant.

“ Nou tout ap mache ak sèkèy nou anba bra nou ,” my mother had been casually saying for years. “We’re all carrying our coffins with us every day.” Or, “We are all constantly cheating death, ” which is how I usually translated that Creole phrase to my mother’s doctors and nurses whenever she asked me to, usually after they tried to reassure her, during some agonizing diagnostic test or another debilitating chemotherapy session for her stage IV ovarian cancer, that everything was going to be okay. “ Media vita in morte sumus ” might have also been another suitable translation: “In the midst of life, we are in death.”

The French essayist Michel de Montaigne was apparently afraid of death until he had a near-death experience of his own. One day, he was thrown off his horse after colliding with another rider. He ended up unconscious for several hours and believed himself to be dying. Then, as he recovered from his accident, Montaigne realized that dying might not be so bad. He’d felt no pain, no fear. The limbo state of being alive while feeling dead is what he found to be most intolerable.

“I can, for my part, think of no state so insupportable and dreadful, as to have the soul vivid and afflicted, without means to declare itself,” Montaigne wrote, in his essay “De L’Exercitation,” translated as “Use Makes Perfect.”

This is, perhaps, why we have so many tales of near-death experiences, firsthand testimonials and fictional accounts whose authors are attempting to understand—and explain—what it’s like to exist in a body that’s hovering between life and death. There’s so much to imagine, so much to project into that inexplicable void of people’s medical and spiritual purgatories as they swing between living and dying.

“The poets have feigned some gods who favor the deliverance of such as suffer under a languishing death,” Montaigne writes. The gods of which he writes might appear as dead relatives or heavenly figures, angels, spirit guides who offer the choice of either staying or going. Some writers, like Dante, in “Inferno,” have us travel with them through several circles of Hell, if only to possibly emerge frightened but cleansed, kinder and wiser than we were before.

While medical professionals might attribute these same type of visions and apparitions to neurochemicals working overtime, many of us would like near-death or half-dead experiences to be real, because we’d love to have a second shot at life, or we’d love to see our loved ones miraculously return from the brink before it’s too late. Or, as Dylan Thomas wrote, to “not go gentle into that good night,” and to “rage against the dying of the light.”

Writing about near-deaths means trying to penetrate that space where death could be imminent but living still remains a possibility. Whereas death is the end of life as we know it, and as others around us are living it, having a near-death experience means someone’s been given an opportunity that most other people haven’t had. Survivors might rightfully feel anointed—or guilty. A few might even wish they’d died, even though their survival had seemingly required supernatural interference or assistance from faith, if not fate. Their lives should have greater meaning now than mere existence. Or should they? Maybe there’s some larger mission to complete, something better to do, someone to love, or mourn.

Although it’s not a typical near-death narrative, my favorite close-call book is Michael Ondaatje’s “ The English Patient ,” a novel that is, among other things, about a man who escapes death only to spend the rest of his life mourning the woman he loved. Burnt beyond recognition, the so-called English Patient, Almásy, who is actually Hungarian, ends up in the care of a young nurse, Hana, who looks after him in an old Italian villa, at the end of the Second World War. Bedridden, Almásy is constantly thinking of Katharine, the married woman he fell in love with while exploring and mapping parts of the North African desert.

Even though the war has ended, the characters are still living with the constant likelihood of sudden death, particularly from the hidden explosives or mines that the retreating Germans left behind. Kip, the Sikh mine sapper and Hana’s lover, is the one who must dismantle many of those explosives, whether they’re hidden under bridges, in statues, or possibly in pianos.

Kip is constantly living in the shadow of death. The life expectancy of someone new to his job is ten weeks. Hana, too, has seen a lot of death as a nurse during the war. After helping Kip with one of his trickiest mines, Hana breaks down and declares:

I thought I was going to die. I wanted to die. And I thought if I was going to die, I would die with you. Someone like you, young as I am, I saw so many dying with me in the last year. I didn’t feel scared. I certainly wasn’t brave just now. I thought to myself, We have this villa, this grass, we should have lain down together, you in my arms, before we died.

Reading this, I think, Who would I want to be with before I die? Who would I want in my arms? Or whose arms would I want to die in? Certainly my husband’s. I would be hesitant, though, to subject my young children to watching me die. Would they be able to carry that memory with them for the rest of their lives? Would they be able to carry me?

Hana’s declaration also brings up the inescapable link between sex and death. One way the French refer to orgasm is as “ la petite mort, ” or “the little death,” an antidote to Freud’s “death instinct,” or what he saw as our longing to self-destruct and return to our preëxisting state through war and other means. Sex, after having just barely escaped death, would have been another way for Hana and Kip to continue to circumvent “ la grande mort ,” or “the big death,” and to counter one of Freud’s other notions: that we’re not convinced of our own mortality and can’t imagine our own deaths. (Though having watched my mother die, I can now perfectly imagine my own death.) Hana and Kip also cannot escape their mortality: it confronts them every day in the devastated landscape around them, and in the dying faces of their comrades and friends.

“In a painting of his imagining the field surrounding this embrace would have been in flames,” Kip thinks, soon after Hana falls asleep in his arms.

Yet both Kip and Hana survive. And the English Patient continues to live, even though some of his friends, as well as his beloved, have died. But always shadowing the survivors of this internal and exterior war is one of Almásy’s favorite words from his native Hungary, “ félhomály ” (“twilight”), the type of twilight that the French call “ l’heure bleu ” (“the blue hour”), or what Joan Didion refers to in “ Blue Nights ,” her memoir of her daughter’s death, from acute pancreatitis, twenty months after her husband died, as “the blue of the glass on a clear day at Chartres,” and that Michael Ondaatje calls the “dusk of graves.”

This type of sorrow-filled dusk offers itself as an atmospheric bridge between life and death. It is the dying of the light against which we are constantly raging, the light over which death might indeed have some dominion, as it is part sunset, part nightfall, the gloaming, eventide, or prologue to the end. It is, as Didion writes, “the fading,” so it would not be unusual for it to linger over the holiest of places, those even holier than Chartres or any other designated holy place.

Places can be holy, Almásy reminds us, not because we are told they are, but because we want and need them to be. Places can be holy because we are sharing them with someone we love, just as some places become cursed because they’ve taken people we love away from us.

“It is important to die in holy places,” Almásy thinks, toward the end of the novel. Though sometimes as we walk this earth, with the memories of our loved ones shadowing us, we might also become our own holy places: roaming churches, cathedrals, and memory mausoleums.

This piece is drawn from " The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story ," by Edwidge Danticat, which is out July 11th, from Graywolf Press.

The Science of Near-Death Experiences

Empirically investigating brushes with the afterlife

N ear-death experiences have gotten a lot of attention lately. The 2014 movie Heaven Is for Real , about a young boy who told his parents he had visited heaven while he was having emergency surgery, grossed a respectable $91 million in the United States. The book it was based on, published in 2010, has sold some 10 million copies and spent 206 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. Two recent books by doctors— Proof of Heaven , by Eben Alexander, who writes about a near-death experience he had while in a week-long coma brought on by meningitis, and To Heaven and Back , by Mary C. Neal, who had her NDE while submerged in a river after a kayaking accident—have spent 94 and 36 weeks, respectively, on the list. (The subject of The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven , published in 2010, recently admitted that he made it all up.)

Their stories are similar to those told in dozens if not hundreds of books and in thousands of interviews with “NDErs,” or “experiencers,” as they call themselves, in the past few decades. Though details and descriptions vary across cultures, the overall tenor of the experience is remarkably similar. Western near-death experiences are the most studied. Many of these stories relate the sensation of floating up and viewing the scene around one’s unconscious body; spending time in a beautiful, otherworldly realm; meeting spiritual beings (some call them angels) and a loving presence that some call God; encountering long-lost relatives or friends; recalling scenes from one’s life; feeling a sense of connectedness to all creation as well as a sense of overwhelming, transcendent love; and finally being called, reluctantly, away from the magical realm and back into one’s own body. Many NDErs report that their experience did not feel like a dream or a hallucination but was, as they often describe it, “more real than real life.” They are profoundly changed afterward, and tend to have trouble fitting back into everyday life. Some embark on radical career shifts or leave their spouses.

Over time, the scientific literature that attempts to explain NDEs as the result of physical changes in a stressed or dying brain has also, commensurately, grown. The causes posited include an oxygen shortage, imperfect anesthesia, and the body’s neurochemical responses to trauma. NDErs dismiss these explanations as inadequate. The medical conditions under which NDEs happen, they say, are too varied to explain a phenomenon that seems so widespread and consistent.

Recent books by Sam Parnia and Pim van Lommel, both physicians, describe studies published in peer-reviewed journals that attempt to pin down what happens during NDEs under controlled experimental conditions. Parnia and his colleagues published results from the latest such study, involving more than 2,000 cardiac-arrest patients, in October. And the recent books by Mary Neal and Eben Alexander recounting their own NDEs have lent the spiritual view of them a new outward respectability. Mary Neal was, a few years before her NDE, the director of spinal surgery at the University of Southern California (she is now in private practice). Eben Alexander is a neurosurgeon who taught and practiced at several prestigious hospitals and medical schools, including Brigham and Women’s and Harvard.

It was Alexander who really upped the scientific stakes. He studied his own medical charts and came to the conclusion that he was in such a deep coma during his NDE, and his brain was so completely shut down, that the only way to explain what he felt and saw was that his soul had indeed detached from his body and gone on a trip to another world, and that angels, God, and the afterlife are all as real as can be.

Alexander has not published his medical findings about himself in any peer-reviewed journal, and a 2013 investigative article in Esquire questioned several details of his account, among them the crucial claim that his experience took place while his brain was incapable of any activity. To the skeptics, his story and the recent recanting of The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven are just further evidence that NDEs rank right up there with alien abductions, psychic powers, and poltergeists as fodder for charlatans looking to gull the ignorant and suggestible.

Yet even these skeptics rarely accuse experiencers of inventing their stories from whole cloth. Though some of these stories may be fabrications, and more no doubt become embellished in the retelling, they’re too numerous and well documented to be dismissed altogether. It’s also hard to ignore the accounts by respected physicians with professional reputations to protect. Even if the afterlife isn’t real, the sensations of having been there certainly are.

There is something about NDEs that makes them scientifically intriguing. While you can’t rely on an alien abduction or a spiritual visitation taking place just when you’ve got recording instruments handy, many NDEs happen when a person is surrounded by an arsenal of devices designed to measure every single thing about the body that human ingenuity has made us capable of measuring.

What’s more, as medical technology continues to improve, it’s bringing people back from ever closer to the brink of death. A small, lucky handful of people have made full or nearly full recoveries after spending hours with no breath or pulse, buried in snow or submerged in very cold water. Surgeons sometimes create these conditions intentionally, chilling patients’ bodies or stopping their hearts in order to perform complex, dangerous operations; recently they have begun trying out such techniques on severely injured trauma victims, keeping them between life and death until their wounds can be repaired.

All of this makes NDEs perhaps the only spiritual experience that we have a chance of investigating in a truly thorough, scientific way. It makes them a vehicle for exploring the ancient human belief that we are more than meat. And it makes them a lens through which to peer at the workings of consciousness—one of the great mysteries of human existence, even for the most resolute materialist.

Which is how I found myself last summer in Newport Beach, California, at the annual conference of the International Association for Near-Death Studies ( IANDS) , which has been a formal organization since 1981. I wanted to know: What makes a person start believing that he has truly seen the other side? Why does one person’s other side look so similar to so many other people’s? And is there a way for science to get at what’s really going on?

An animated exploration narrated by the author

The conference had the joyous, clubby atmosphere of a reunion; many of the people had clearly known one another for years. Attendees wore strips of ribbon in different colors bearing legends such as SPEAKER , PANELIST, VOLUNTEER , and, for those who have had a near-death experience, EXPERIENCER . The program included panels and workshops on everything from “What Medical Neuroscience Can Learn From NDEs” to “Sacred Geometry Dance: Creating a Vortex to Open to the Divine” and “Group Past-Life Regression.”

The opening talk, by Diane Corcoran, the association’s president, was clearly for newbies; the main ballroom, which seats about 300 people, was almost empty. She began by outlining the wide variety of circumstances in which people have NDEs—“heart attack, near-drowning, electrocution, terminal illness, combat fatigue”—then moved on to the typical characteristics of the experience. She referred to Bruce Greyson, one of the first doctors to study NDEs seriously, who developed a scale that rates the intensity of an experience on 16 separate counts, such as feelings of joy, encountering spiritual beings, and a sense of being separated from one’s body. The scale assigns a score of 0 to 2 for each count, allowing for a maximum possible score of 32. A 7 or higher is classified as an NDE, and according to one study, the average score among people who report such an experience is about 15.

However, Corcoran emphasized, the long-term effects of an NDE are as important an indicator of whether you’ve had one as the experience itself. Many people, she said, don’t realize for years that they’ve had an NDE, and piece it together only after they notice the effects. These include heightened sensitivity to light, sound, and certain chemicals; becoming more caring and generous, sometimes to a fault; having trouble with timekeeping and finances; feeling unconditional love for everyone, which can be taxing on relatives and friends; and having a strange influence on electrical equipment. At one conference of NDErs, Corcoran recounted, the hotel’s computer system went down. “You put 400 experiencers in a hotel together, something’s gonna happen,” she said. The scattered audience chuckled approvingly.

Corcoran herself wore two name badges. One said her name and trailed a multicolored strip of ribbons like an unrolled window blind reading 35 YEARS , LEGACY SOCIETY , ASK ME , and HERE TO SERVE . (“It started as a joke,” she told me of adding ribbons at each conference, “and it became a tradition.”) The other badge said The Colonel : her long career includes a series of senior nursing posts in the Army Nurse Corps (she has a doctorate in nursing management). She first encountered NDEs when, as a junior nurse, she served at Long Binh, the largest army base in Vietnam, in 1969.

“Nobody was talking about them,” Corcoran said when we met over breakfast. “A young man told me about [an NDE] and I had no idea what he was talking about, but I could see the emotion and intensity of it for him.” Since then, she has been trying to get the medical profession to take NDEs more seriously. “Death and dying is not something most physicians deal with very well to begin with,” she noted drily. “So when you start to talk about phenomena where you leave your body and see and hear things, you’re way out of their ballpark.”

More recently, she had been trying, with difficulty, to find veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars who were willing to talk about any NDEs they might have had. “I was always adamant in the Army that this is a medical issue. I tell [doctors] they have to make up their own minds, but there are lots of patients who’ve had this experience, and if you’re going to take care of them, you have to have this information.”

Written accounts of near-death experiences—or things that sound like them—date back at least to the Middle Ages, and some researchers say to ancient times. The medical journal Resuscitation recently published a brief account of the oldest known medical description of an NDE, written by an 18th-century French military doctor. But the modern era of research into near-death experiences is generally said to have begun in 1975. That was the year Raymond A. Moody Jr., a philosopher turned psychiatrist, published Life After Life , a book based on interviews with some 50 experiencers.

Moody’s book set off a steady stream of memoirs, TV shows, and articles. Since then, a small community has emerged of psychiatrists, psychologists, cardiologists, and other specialists. They share Moody’s belief that consciousness—the mind, the soul, call it what you will—may exist in some nonmaterial form, independent of but closely connected to the brain, and that NDEs may be able to provide evidence of it. The leading members of this coterie have distinguished careers at respectable universities and hospitals. They blurb one another’s books and give talks on spirituality and the nature of consciousness.

Of those books, probably the single best overview is The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences: Thirty Years of Investigation , an anthology published in 2009. As The Handbook outlines, by 2005 dozens of studies involving nearly 3,500 subjects who reported having had NDEs had become material for some 600 scholarly articles. Many of these articles are in the Journal of Near-Death Studies , the IANDS house journal—which, the association proudly notes, is peer-reviewed. But many others are in mainstream medical publications. A search in February on PubMed, a database that is maintained by the National Library of Medicine (and that doesn’t include the IANDS journal in its index), turned up 240 papers mentioning near-death experiences.

Most of the NDE studies have been retrospective, meaning the researchers looked for people who’d had such an experience to come forward and be interviewed. That poses a couple of problems, scientifically speaking. It means the subjects were self-selecting, so they might not be representative. For instance, people who’d had scary NDEs might have been less eager to tell their stories than people who’d had uplifting ones. (One of the arguments you hear for why NDEs are not hallucinations of the dying brain is that so many of the stories contain similar features; but it’s notable that, while some studies indeed report only the well-known positive experiences, unpleasant NDEs account for a combined 23 percent of reports across a dozen different studies. They get far less attention, and certainly don’t seem to sell nearly as many books.) Most of the interviews took place years after the fact, so memories might have been faulty. And most important, retrospective studies make it pretty much impossible to obtain reliable data on what was actually happening to the subjects’ bodies and brains while they felt their souls were elsewhere.

About a dozen prospective studies have been published, several of them in recent years. In these, researchers typically arrange for every consenting patient who survives a specific medical emergency (such as a cardiac arrest) at a hospital to be interviewed as soon as possible thereafter. The patients are asked open-ended questions about what, if anything, they experienced while doctors were trying to revive them. If they report anything unusual, the researchers check their medical records and the accounts of people who treated them, looking for things that might explain the experience or show that their brain was shut down at the relevant time. All told, these studies have collected the near-death experiences of just under 300 people.

The goal for those who believe the mind really does leave the body is to find a verified case of what one prominent researcher has termed “apparently nonphysical veridical perception”—in other words, having an experience during which you see or hear things you otherwise couldn’t have perceived that are later confirmed to have actually happened. ( Veridical means “not illusory.”) An out-of-body experience is only one of the 16 possible elements of a near-death experience on the Greyson scale, and the proportion of experiencers who report having had one varies widely from one study to another.

As the only stage in an NDE that involves perceiving the physical rather than the spiritual world, an out-of-body experience has the most potential to convince skeptics. If you could prove that someone saw or heard things that brain science says they could not have seen or heard, you would have, at the very least, evidence that our understanding of the brain is even more incomplete than we thought, and at most, a sign that a conscious mind can exist apart from a living body.

As a result, reports of veridical perception have a totemic significance among NDErs. One of the most celebrated is the story of “Maria,” a migrant worker who had an NDE during a cardiac arrest at a hospital in Seattle in 1977. She later told her social worker that while doctors were resuscitating her, she found herself floating outside the hospital building and saw a tennis shoe on a third-floor window ledge, which she described in some detail. The social worker went to the window Maria had indicated, and not only found the shoe but said that the way it was placed meant there was no way Maria could have seen all the details she described from inside her hospital room.

That social worker, Kimberly Clark Sharp, is now a bubbly 60-something with a shock of frizzy hair who acted as my informal press officer during the conference. She and her story are an IANDS institution; I heard several people refer to “the case of Maria’s shoe” or just “the tennis-shoe case.”

But while Maria’s shoe certainly makes for a compelling story, it’s thin on the evidential side. A few years after being treated, Maria disappeared, and nobody was able to track her down to further confirm her story.

A case with a lot more evidence is that of Pam Reynolds, a singer-songwriter. In 1991 Reynolds, then 35, underwent surgery to remove a huge aneurysm at the base of her brain. Worried that the aneurysm might burst and kill her during the operation, her surgeon opted for the radical move of “hypothermic cardiac arrest”—chilling her body to 60 degrees Fahrenheit, stopping her heart, and draining the blood from her head. The cooling would prevent her cells from dying while deprived of oxygen. When the doctors restarted her heart and warmed her body back up, she would, in effect, be rebooted.

To make absolutely sure that Reynolds’s brain was completely inactive during the operation, the medical team put small speakers into her ears that played rapid, continuous clicks at 100 decibels—a sound level described as equivalent to that produced by a lawn mower or a jackhammer. If any part of her mind was working, that insistent clicking would show up as electrical signals in the brain stem, which the surgeons were monitoring on an electroencephalogram.

The machine confirmed that for a number of minutes Reynolds was effectively dead in both brain and body. Yet after the surgery she reported having had a powerful NDE, including an out-of-body experience, and accurately recalled several details about what was going on in the operating room, such as the shape of the bone saw used on her skull, snatches of conversations between the medical staff, and the staff listening—rather inappropriately, she remembered thinking—to “Hotel California” (“You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave”). For the near-death-experience community, Reynolds is Exhibit A.

But none of Reynolds’s reported veridical perceptions happened while her EEG recorded a flat line. They all took place before or after, when she was under anesthetic but very much alive. “Anesthesia awareness” is generally estimated to affect roughly one in 1,000 patients. (See “Awakening,” by Joshua Lang, in the January/February 2013 Atlantic .) Therefore, the skeptical argument goes, Reynolds could have heard snatches of conversation; she might have deduced some things about the bone saw from the noise it made or the vibration of it against her skull; and she might have reconstructed some false memories out of details she’d noticed before or after the operation.

In 2011, a year after Reynolds died (of heart failure), the Journal of Near-Death Studies devoted an entire issue to a debate about her case, in which a skeptic and two believers argued over such minutiae as the duration of the noise played by the speakers in her ears, the way bone conducts sound, and esoteric theories of how exactly a nonphysical mind might be able to perceive physical stimuli. Summing it up, Janice Miner Holden, the journal’s editor, concluded that cases like Reynolds’s “provide imperfect data that probably can never result in definitive evidence.”

Other cases of apparent veridical perception are, at the very least, intriguing—but there are surprisingly few. For a chapter she wrote in The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences , Holden scoured the literature in search of such accounts. Leaving out sources like the personal memoirs published after Raymond Moody’s 1975 book and focusing mostly on books published before 1975 and systematic studies by researchers and medics, she collected about 100 reports of veridical perception during a near-death experience. Only 35 included accounts of details that the authors were able to verify as fully accurate with a source other than the experiencer. There was not a single clincher—an absolutely inarguable case of someone seeing something that only a disembodied spirit could have seen.

Which is why a few studies have tried to take advantage of the unique circumstances under which NDEs tend to happen, to create a foolproof method for testing veridical perception.

To get the kind of evidence for a disembodied consciousness that would satisfy a scientist, you need a good study protocol. Turns out, it’s not hard to devise one. In The Handbook , Janice Holden outlines it:

In a place where NDEs are likely to occur, plant some perceptual stimulus and then interview everyone who survives a near-death episode in the vicinity of that stimulus to determine whether they perceived it … Place the stimulus so that it is perceivable by an NDEr but not by other people in the area; in fact, to rule out the possibility that an interviewer or others might intentionally or unintentionally convey the content of the stimulus to the NDEr through normal—or even paranormal—means, arrange it so that the stimulus is not known even to the research team or associates.

To date, six studies have tried some form of this method, mostly on cardiac-arrest patients, and all have failed to find an ironclad case of veridical perception. All involved placing some stimulus—a picture or a symbol on, say, a piece of paper or an electronic display—in a high location, visible only if you were floating near the ceiling. The research designers did their best to make sure that nobody—not the doctors or nurses, not the patient, and not whoever interviewed the patient afterward—would know what the stimulus was until after the interviews were over. (Getting the hospital staff to respect this protocol, Holden reports, wasn’t always easy.)

The latest and largest such attempt was the so-called Aware study, led by Sam Parnia of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, published in Resuscitation last October. In it, 15 participating hospitals in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Austria installed shelves bearing a variety of images in rooms where cardiac-arrest patients were likely to need reviving.

The results of the Aware study immediately highlight the key problem with this kind of research: it’s very hard to get enough data. Over four years, the study recorded a total of 2,060 cardiac arrests. (There were more than that, but the researchers weren’t able to record them all.) Of those patients, 330 survived, 140 of whom were judged well enough to be interviewed and agreed to participate. Of those 140, 101 made it past a screening interview; the others were unable to continue, “predominantly due to fatigue.” Of those 101, nine remembered experiences that counted as an NDE on the Greyson scale, and two remembered an out-of-body experience. Of those two, one became too ill to interview further. That left just one subject who could recount what he’d seen in detail.

That one case is tantalizing. The patient, a 57-year-old man, described floating up to a corner of the room, seeing medical staff work on him, and watching himself be defibrillated. According to Parnia’s paper, several of the details he described checked out. What’s more, after triangulating the patient’s description with the workings of the defibrillator, the researchers think he may have seen things that happened for as long as three minutes after his heart stopped.

If true, that would be remarkable. On an EEG, the brain typically flatlines within about 20 seconds of the heart stopping. Cardiopulmonary resuscitation gets enough blood flowing to slow cell death, but not enough to fire up the brain. Unlike the brain of someone under anesthetic or in a coma, this patient’s brain should have completely switched off until his heart started beating on its own again.

Still, the clinching evidence remains elusive. Even though the Aware study’s hospitals collectively installed about 1,000 shelves with the special images at various locations, only 22 percent of the cardiac arrests happened somewhere with a shelf nearby. The star patient’s wasn’t one of them.

It’s little wonder that, next to transcendent NDE stories, experiencers find the explanations that science has to offer unsatisfying. There is no shortage of scientific theories about what causes near-death experiences—or at least, what might—but they are cold, unappealing, and incomplete by comparison with what NDErs say happened to them.

It’s well established, for instance, that an oxygen shortage (hypoxia), which is a common result of a cardiac arrest, can lead to disorientation, confusion, or hallucinations. A glitch at the temporoparietal junction, a part of the brain that acts as a kind of integrator of data from all your senses and organs and plays an important role in assembling them into your overall perception of your body, can produce an out-of-body experience. It’s been suggested​ ​that too much carbon dioxide (hypercarbia) ​may​ give people a feeling of separation from their body or of being in a tunnel​ (though there’s not much evidence of this)​. Neurochemicals might play a part in triggering hallucinations or creating a sense of peace. And so on.

Doctors who are sympathetic to experiencers’ claims have no shortage of rebuttals to these materialist explanations. Sam Parnia, Pim van Lommel, and others devote lengthy sections in their books to them. Ultimately, what the rebuttals boil down to is that while these explanations may look plausible, there’s no evidence that they actually do explain what’s going on. Many NDEs happen without one or another of the above scientifically measurable conditions. And those conditions often happen without an NDE. Enough data simply haven’t been recorded to establish correlation, let alone causation.

What’s more, it’s hard to see how there can be enough data, at least when the experimental method is to look at records of cardiac-arrest cases. Parnia’s Aware study turned up just nine patients with NDEs at 15 hospitals in four years. A Slovenian prospective study published in 2010, which did find a correlation between NDEs and hypercarbia in heart-attack patients—though no correlation with hypoxia—had only 52 patients in the sample, and only 11 of them reported NDEs.

There is one newish bit of research that the materialist camp has seized on. A study at the University of Michigan, published in 2013, took anesthetized rats and stopped their hearts. Within 30 seconds, the rats’ EEG brain signals flatlined—but first they spiked, with an intensity that suggested that different parts of the brain were communicating with one another even more actively than when the rats were awake.

This sort of communication is thought to be a key step in perception; effectively, the brain’s various areas are comparing notes on the stimuli they’re getting. If humans experience the same death spike as rats, it may mean that the brain goes into a final, hyperactive spasm when its oxygen supply is cut as it tries to figure out what is happening. If so, that heightened activity might explain why people who say they had an NDE report that what they experienced seemed more real than the physical world.

But once again, the fact that the explanation is plausible doesn’t make it true. If researchers like Parnia can convincingly show that a patient like the man in the Aware study can have flashes of conscious awareness minutes or more after the heart stops, the whole debate will flare up again. For now, the death spike remains just one more disjointed piece of the NDE puzzle, which we have not yet figured out how to assemble.

So where next for the science of near-death experiences?, I asked Susan Blackmore, a British psychologist who is perhaps the best-known scientific skeptic of the spiritualist explanations for NDEs. After having her own powerful out-of-body experience as a young woman, she started investigating paranormal claims, and devoted much of her career to scientifically explaining them.

As far as Blackmore is concerned, the mystery has mostly been solved. We already know, she says, that a hyperactive brain under the stress of approaching death can trigger any or all of the above phenomena. The big remaining question, she wrote in an e-mail, is this:

We see all of these aspects in isolation—spontaneously, with various drugs, in illness and so on—but in the NDE they tend to unfold in a specific order. Why is this? We might guess that it has something to do with a cascade of neurotransmitters or possibly the way hyperactivity spreads or … ? I do not know the answer here but I guess we will soon find out.

I think that a scientific answer to Blackmore’s question—why so many NDEs follow a similar sequence—would do more than merely complete the puzzle of how they happen. It would also help us understand why NDEs have such a profound effect on those who experience them. One of the speakers at the conference, Alana Karran, an executive coach who led a guided meditation that retraced the steps of a typical NDE, helped me understand the significance of that sequence. It is, she pointed out, similar to the hero’s journey, or quest narrative, the structure that the American writer and mythologist Joseph Campbell identified and named the “monomyth” in 1949. The quest underlies just about every form of storytelling, from religious myth to Greek epic to Hollywood blockbuster to personal memoir. In this structure, a protagonist is shaken out of his normal way of life by some disturbance and—often reluctantly at first, but at the urging of some kind of mentor or wise figure—strikes out on a journey to an unfamiliar realm. There he faces tests, battles enemies, questions the loyalty of friends and allies, withstands a climactic ordeal, teeters on the brink of failure or death, and ultimately returns to where he began, victorious but in some way transformed.

Many of the NDEs people relate follow some version of this structure. In Proof of Heaven , Eben Alexander describes his experience as beginning with him trapped in a dark place, a kind of semitransparent mud or “dirty Jell-O,” filled with “grotesque animal faces,” that comes to feel progressively more claustrophobic and frightening. Eventually, something pulls him up into “the strangest, most beautiful world I’d ever seen”—an idyllic countryside. There he encounters a beautiful girl riding on a butterfly’s wing, who tells him he is “loved and cherished, dearly, forever,” and accompanies him on a trip to a light-filled void where he meets a divine being who unlocks for him many secrets about the universe. After spending some time going back and forth between the two realms, he descends one last time into the dark place where he began, only this time the grotesque creatures have been replaced by the faces of people praying for him.

The hero’s journey is so pervasive in storytelling (indeed, some would say Campbell ruined modern entertainment by identifying it) because it is so aspirational. It offers the possibility of an escape from something that holds you back, and a transformation into something better.

Nobody at the conference better personified the hope for redemption and transformation than Jeff Olsen, one of the two keynote speakers. Olsen’s story, which he has told in two books and in various videos on YouTube, is gut-wrenching: His car crashed after he fell asleep at the wheel while driving his family back from vacation. Lying in the wreckage with his back broken, one arm nearly torn off, and one leg destroyed, he was for a while conscious enough to register that his 7-year-old son was crying but his wife and infant son were silent. In I Knew Their Hearts , one of his books, he writes, “What do you say to a man who feels responsible for the death of half his family?”

The answer—at least if you are a spiritual being—is “You are perfect; you are my son as much as anyone ever was; and you are divine.” That is what Olsen recounts hearing—or feeling, or having somehow transmitted to him—as part of a “brain dump” during his near-death experience. He seemed to find himself in a room with a crib, holding the son who had been killed. When he picked him up, he in turn felt himself being enveloped by a loving presence that he understood to be his “divine creator.”

This is key to what makes near-death experiences so powerful, and why people cling so strongly to them regardless of the scientific evidence. Whether you actually saw a divine being or your brain was merely pumping out chemicals like never before, the experience is so intense and new that it forces you to rethink your place on Earth. If the NDE happened during a tragedy, it provides a way to make sense of that tragedy and rebuild your life. If your life has been a struggle with illness or doubt, an NDE sets you in a different direction: you nearly died, so something has to change.

And that brings us back to Susan Blackmore’s question: If NDEs are only the result of your brain going haywire, why do so many of them follow a sequence that just happens to track our most basic narrative structure of transformation and renewal?

There appeared to be nobody at the conference who thought that near-death experiences are just a product of physical processes in the brain. But there were several people whose talks promised to address the science of NDEs.

Alan Hugenot is a middle-aged mechanical engineer who walks and talks with a kinetic intensity, as if he can barely keep himself from ricocheting off the walls. His session was called “Leading-Edge Science of the Afterlife.” Taking the audience through a hodgepodge of advanced physics and mysticism, he concluded that the entire universe is conscious and that this explains both near-death experiences and certain paradoxes of quantum theory.

As someone with a physics degree, I know that Hugenot’s theory is full of holes, but I also know that the basic idea of a conscious universe is neither crazy nor new. Erwin Schrödinger, one of the fathers of quantum physics, was an avid student of Hindu philosophy, and believed something similar. There’s a long tradition of leading scientists holding religious and mystical beliefs.

But what makes them scientists is that they know and maintain the distinction between scientific theories, which must be testable against observable evidence, and mysticism or speculation. So at the end of Hugenot’s talk, I asked him to tell me how his theory is testable. He didn’t answer the question at first, but eventually said that there are experiments that could be designed.

Had he designed them?, I asked.

“No, I haven’t had the chance to do that yet.”

More sedate was Robert Mays, a professorial figure with a Sigmund Freud beard who outlined a detailed theory he’d developed with his wife, Suzanne. Mays proposed that a nonmaterial consciousness—a “mind entity”—could direct the physical brain, like the Wizard of Oz pulling levers behind a curtain. This, Mays said, is the explanation that resolves both the problem of how a series of electrical impulses in the brain becomes the sensation of consciousness and the mystery of near-death experiences.

Mays, at least, was extremely specific about which brain cells he thinks the mind entity interacts with in order to control the brain. He even has some ideas about what the mind entity might be in physical terms: “a finely differentiated structure of minute oscillating electric or magnetic dipoles,” he and Suzanne have written. When I asked him how his theory might be tested, he said that one could measure the influence of a person’s “energetic field” on “living neurons in vitro.” Which would be fine, except that his idea of the energetic field is something no physicist has ever seen.

For all their differences in style and subject matter, Mays, Hugenot, and others are offering similar visions: large, all-encompassing explanations that link things people know to be true with things they would like to be true and that bring a sense of order to the universe. It makes sense that NDErs would find such stuff compelling.

But why was there so much resistance at the conference to real, solid science? At my breakfast with Diane Corcoran, I asked her why nobody at the conference seemed to be discussing the materialist position.

“Over the years, and with the research that’s been done, we’ve moved past that,” she said. “There’s always a skeptic or two, but we don’t bring them into this environment, because this is meant to be a supportive environment, not a questioning one.” She added, “We put out a call for papers, but we’ve never had a skeptic put in a paper.”

“They probably feel that they wouldn’t be welcomed,” I said.

“That’s probably true!” she replied. “But we’re trying to expand the field, and there’s a lot of work in consciousness existing outside the brain.” One prominent researcher, she said, argues that “when someone publishes a paper saying ‘This is the explanation,’ it’s not even worth responding to. Most people who do that have not investigated the field in any serious way.”

At some level, I find this reasonable. A lot of writing about NDEs does not merely question experiencers but ridicules them. And it’s true that the scientific explanations, while plausible, aren’t conclusive.

Nonetheless, at the conference I encountered not just resistance to but a great many misconceptions about science. In the hotel corridors, I ran into Hugenot. The whole point of scientific theories, I said, is that they have to be testable. Testable means falsifiable: you have to be able in principle to do an experiment that might show a theory to be wrong. If I were to drop the cup of coffee I was holding, for instance, and it didn’t go all over the floor but instead floated off down the corridor, that would falsify the theory of gravity. Every time the theory survives such a test, our confidence in it increases. But our belief in the theory always remains provisional: we’re constantly on the lookout for situations in which it might not hold true. So how, I asked, is a conscious universe testable?

He parried the question with sophistry: If you let the coffee cup go, you say it’ll fall down. But which way is down? If you change perspective and imagine the ground above us, maybe down is up. I moved to hold the cup up over his head and offered to test that theory. He laughed loudly and nervously.

By the third day of the conference, I was starting to despair of finding a voice of reason. Everyone seemed to be on a spectrum ranging from pseudoscience to full-blown mysticism, with a lot of sheer ignorance in the middle. That’s when I encountered Mitch Liester.

Liester, a tall, craggily handsome psychiatrist who trained at the University of Colorado and the University of California at Irvine, has a gentle, accepting manner that makes you want to tell him everything. His medical training made him skeptical about near-death experiences, he told me. But while he was in school his grandfather had one, and then he kept on meeting other experiencers—not always patients. “People just began talking to me.”

Liester also allowed that he himself had had a “near-death-like experience”—something with the features of an NDE, though he wasn’t near death or on any hallucinogens when it happened. So, I asked him, where does he himself stand on the idea that mind and body are separate?

“My rational brain doesn’t quite believe it but, having experienced it, I know it’s true. So it’s an ongoing discussion I’m having with myself.”

Is there a middle ground, I asked, between the spiritualists and the materialists? It’s hard to find one, he conceded. “A lot of materialist scientists don’t seem to think it’s a serious field of scientific inquiry … Meanwhile, many people who’ve had near-death experiences aren’t that interested in the science.”

Every Monday, Liester has breakfast with a small, eclectic group. It includes a physicist, a materials scientist, an artist, a chaplain with a philosophy degree, and a hospice counselor who is also a Native American sun dancer. They talk about how to take NDE research forward with a rigorous scientific attitude but an open mind. “I think there is a way to bridge the gap,” he said.

In our conversation and in a subsequent e-mail, Liester outlined a few areas that researchers might pursue more deeply. They could image the brains of people while they’re in trances or other “transcendental” states. They could study people who claim special spiritual powers, such as shamans. They could try to probe the nature of the memories formed during NDEs, and how they differ from ordinary memories (Liester is working on this). They could devise experimentally sound ways to test the claims of people who say they have become sensitive to electromagnetic fields or can interfere with electronic devices. They could do more research into the death spike that the University of Michigan researchers found in rats, and perhaps even attempt to isolate it in human patients. And so on.

Above all, he said, no matter how you explain them, near-death experiences are pivotal events in people’s lives. “It’s a catalyst for growth on many different levels—psychologically, emotionally, maybe even physiologically.”

Even if research ultimately shows —as most scientists assume it will—that NDEs are nothing more than the product of spasms in a dying brain, there is a good reason to pursue the investigation, which is that they pose a challenge to our understanding of one of the most mysterious issues in science: consciousness.

The boundary between life and death, which used to be thought sharp, has grown ever fuzzier. In a recent overview paper titled “Death and Consciousness,” Sam Parnia acknowledged research confirming that, contrary to popular belief, what causes brain damage when you stop breathing for more than a few minutes isn’t only the lack of oxygen per se. Brain cells deprived of oxygen can take many hours to decay to the point of no return, especially if kept cold—hence the cases of people reviving after being buried in snowdrifts or falling into freezing lakes. What causes much of the damage, rather, is the sudden return of oxygen to brain cells in a rush of blood and chemicals, known as “post-resuscitation syndrome.” New medical techniques are making it increasingly possible to prevent such damage and reanimate people who would once have been declared unequivocally dead.

To some people, this is simply further evidence that the mind must be able to exist independently of the body—or else where does it go when the brain is dead? To materialists, it is evidence of the opposite: the mind doesn’t “go” anywhere, any more than the image from a slide projector goes somewhere when you switch the projector off. Rather, it shows that the mind and consciousness are emergent properties of the brain, knitted together somehow by all the physical and chemical processes in our nervous system.

But if so, then how does that knitting occur? This is the crucial question for consciousness studies. George A. Mashour, one of the co-authors of the University of Michigan study on rats, is firmly in the materialist camp. He notes that if it’s hard to explain how a healthy brain produces consciousness, it’s even harder to explain how an impaired brain near death produces such vivid, “hyper-real” sensations. “Whether there can be a scientific explanation for NDEs is a critical flash point for the science of consciousness,” he told me.

If we could establish that spikes in neural activity occur in a dying human brain like the ones Mashour and his colleagues saw in rats, that could both help explain near-death experiences and give us some clues about the neurobiological nature of consciousness. Humans aren’t rats, though. Mashour says it’s unlikely that we can collect enough useful data on people who’ve had NDEs in the midst of a cardiac arrest and lived to tell the tale. But his study on rats, he says, at least “illuminated the possibility” that to explain near-death experiences you need not “abandon the connection between the brain and consciousness.”

The question of how consciousness emerges is in fact likely to be one of the defining problems of the 21st century, when we might first be able to create machines as complex as the human brain. Will those machines be conscious? How will we be able to tell? Will consciousness be for them anything like it is for us? And what will the implications be for us as their creators? These are questions we will be able to answer only by understanding intimately what our own consciousness consists of.

Finally, it’s worth doing rigorous research on near-death experiences if for no other reason than to rule out at least some of the spiritual explanations. Those who believe fervently in an afterlife may never be swayed. There are, after all, plenty of beliefs that people hold despite overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary (think vaccines, or global warming). But science advances only by acknowledging the limits of what it knows and slowly pushing them back. There are no grounds for sneering at people’s beliefs about NDEs until the work has been done to debunk them.

Let’s say experiments are done, and there is finally a comprehensive, scientifically rigorous, and materialist account of what causes an NDE. What then? Does it mean that all the stories people tell of seeing angels and meeting their deceased relatives are just fairy tales to be ignored?

I would say no. What I saw at the conference—even at its most bizarre—showed me that even a hard-core materialist can learn a great deal from NDEs about how people make sense of the things that happen to them—and above all, about the central role that the stories we tell play in shaping our sense of who we are.

On this, Susan Blackmore, the arch-skeptic, feels similarly. She concluded her e-mail to me by scolding those who persist in

the false and unhelpful black and white comparison between NDEs as “true, wonderful, spiritual etc. etc.” [versus] NDEs as “JUST a hallucination of no importance.” The truth, it seems to me, is that NDEs can be wonderful, life-changing experiences that shed light on the human condition and on questions of life and death.

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The notion that death represents a passing to an afterlife, where we are reunited with loved ones and live eternally in a utopian paradise, is common in the anecdotal reports of people who have encountered a “near-death experience” (NDE). These experiences are usually portrayed as being extremely pleasant including features such as a feeling of peacefulness, the vision of a tunnel leading to a brilliant light, the sensation of leaving the body, or the experience of a life review. NDEs are increasingly being reported as a clearly identifiable physiological and psychological reality of clinical and scientific significance. The definition and causes of the phenomenon as well as the identification of NDE experiencers are still matters of debate. The phenomenon has been thoroughly portrayed by the media, but the science of NDEs is rather recent and still lacking rigorous experimental data and reproducible, controlled experiments. It seems that the most appropriate theories to explain the phenomenon tend to integrate both psychological and neurobiological mechanisms. It is remarkable to observe the richness and intensity of the memory despite a critical cerebral context. This challenges our conception of consciousness and offers a unique opportunity to better understand the neural correlates of consciousness. In this chapter, we will attempt to describe NDEs and how to identify them. We will also briefly discuss the NDE experiencers’ characteristics. Finally, we will address the main current explicative models and the science of NDEs.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the University and University Hospital of Liège, the Belgian National Funds for Scientific Research (FRS-FNRS), the BIAL Foundation, the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Framework Programme for Research and Innovation under the Specific Grant Agreement No. 945539 (Human Brain Project SGA3), the FNRS PDR project (T.0134.21), the ERA-Net FLAG-ERA JTC2021 project ModelDXConsciousness (Human Brain Project Partnering Project), the fund Generet, the King Baudouin Foundation, the Télévie Foundation, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Belgian Federal Science Policy Office (BELSPO) in the framework of the PRODEX Programme, the Public Utility Foundation “Université Européenne du Travail,” “Fondazione Europea di Ricerca Biomedica,” the Mind Science Foundation, the European Commission, the Fondation Leon Fredericq, the Mind-Care foundation, the DOCMA project (EU-H2020-MSCA–RISE–778234), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Joint Research Project 81471100), and the European Foundation of Biomedical Research FERB Onlus.

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Fritz, P., Lejeune, N., Cassol, H., Laureys, S., Gosseries, O., Martial, C. (2023). Near-Death Experiences: What Do We Know?. In: Schnakers, C., Laureys, S. (eds) Coma and Disorders of Consciousness. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-50563-8_13

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Qualitative thematic analysis of the phenomenology of near-death experiences

Contributed equally to this work with: Helena Cassol, Benoît Pétré

Roles Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Project administration, Visualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

* E-mail: [email protected]

Affiliation Coma Science Group, GIGA-Consciousness, University and University Hospital of Liège, Liège, Belgium

Roles Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Methodology, Project administration, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

Affiliation Department of Public Health, University of Liège, Liège, Belgium

Roles Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Methodology, Writing – review & editing

Roles Conceptualization, Data curation, Investigation, Writing – review & editing

Roles Data curation, Investigation, Writing – review & editing

Affiliation Family Medicine Department, University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne, Reims, France

Roles Conceptualization, Writing – review & editing

Roles Conceptualization, Funding acquisition, Project administration, Resources, Supervision, Writing – review & editing

¶ ‡ These authors also contributed equally to this work.

• Helena Cassol, 
• Benoît Pétré, 
• Sophie Degrange, 
• Charlotte Martial, 
• Vanessa Charland-Verville, 
• François Lallier, 
• Isabelle Bragard, 
• Michèle Guillaume, 
• Steven Laureys

• Published: February 14, 2018
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Near-death experiences (NDEs) refer to profound psychological events that can have an important impact on the experiencers’ (NDErs) lives. Previous studies have shown that NDEs memories are phenomenologically rich. In the present study, we therefore aimed to extract the common themes (referred to as “features” in the NDE literature) reported by NDErs by analyzing all the concepts stored in the narratives of their experiences. A qualitative thematic analysis has been carried out on 34 cardiac arrest survivors’ NDE narratives. Our results shed the light on the structure of the narratives by identifying 10 “time-bounded” themes which refer to isolated events encountered during the NDE and 1 “transversal” theme which characterizes the whole narrative and generally appears as a retrospective comment of self-reflection on the experience. The division of narratives into themes provides us with detailed information about the vocabulary used by NDErs to describe their experience. This established thematic method enables a rigorous description of the phenomenon, ensuring the inclusion of all self-reported manifestations of themes in narratives.

Citation: Cassol H, Pétré B, Degrange S, Martial C, Charland-Verville V, Lallier F, et al. (2018) Qualitative thematic analysis of the phenomenology of near-death experiences. PLoS ONE 13(2): e0193001. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0193001

Editor: Huso Yi, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, HONG KONG

Received: March 22, 2017; Accepted: February 2, 2018; Published: February 14, 2018

Copyright: © 2018 Cassol et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Data Availability: Due to ethical restrictions, data are available from the Ethics Committee of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Liège ( [email protected] ) for researchers who meet the criteria for access to confidential data.

Funding: This research was funded by University and University Hospital of Liège ( http://www.ulg.ac.be/ ), the Belgian National Funds for Scientific Research (FRS-FNRS) ( http://www.fnrs.be/ ), the European Commission ( https://ec.europa.eu/ ), Luminous (grant number: 686764; http://www.luminous-project.eu/ ), Center-TBI (grant number: 602150; https://www.center-tbi.eu/ ), Human Brain Project (grant number: 720270; https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/ ), the James McDonnell Foundation (grant number: 15040574-08; https://www.jsmf.org/ ), the European Space Agency (grant number: C4000105971; http://www.esa.int/ESA ), Belspo ( http://www.belspo.be/ ), the “Fondazione Europea di Ricerca Biomedica” ( http://www.ferbonlus.com/ ), the BIAL Foundation (grant number: 503 323 055; https://www.bial.com/ ), the Wallonia Brussels Federation Concerted Research Action (grant number: ARC 12/17/01), and the Mind Science Foundation ( https://www.mindscience.org/ ). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Introduction

After facing a life-threatening situation, some people (so-called “near-death experiencers”; NDErs) report profound psychological experiences that may include features such as an intense feeling of peacefulness or joy, out-of-body experiences (OBEs), meeting a deceased relative or a spiritual figure, or seeing a brilliant light [ 1 ]. Such episodes, classically happening during an altered state of consciousness, have been termed “near-death experiences” (NDEs). Although there is still no single accepted definition of the phenomenon, a NDE can be referred to as “a profound psychological event including transcendental and mystical elements, typically occurring to individuals close to death or in situations of intense physical or emotional danger” [ 2 ].

Since the best seller “ Life After Life ” [ 1 ], testimonies of NDEs have been increasingly reported. This is not surprising, knowing that 6.3 to 23% of cardiac arrest survivors have experienced this phenomenon [ 3 , 4 ]. This important percentage reflects the fact that NDEs are widespread rather than sporadic events. Furthermore, some authors have shown that NDEs will generally change NDErs’ further attitudes and beliefs [ 5 ], and can even be distressing in case of negative NDEs (in some cases reported as “hellish experiences”) [ 6 ].

Many authors have contributed to the description of NDEs’ phenomenology. Moody [ 1 ] has delineated 15 recurrent characteristics notably including feelings of peacefulness and calm, hearing unusual voices, seeing a dark tunnel, being out of the body, meeting "spiritual entities" or seeing a panorama of one’s life events. A few years later, Ring [ 7 ] identified a 5-steps sequence that might tend to appear in the following order: 1) peace and well-being, 2) separation from the physical body, 3) entry in a dark area, 4) vision of a dazzling light, and finally 5) entry through the light into another realm. Later, other authors developed scales in order to rigorously investigate this phenomenon. Currently, the most used tool is the Greyson NDE scale [ 8 ]. This scale is a validated 16-item multiple-choice questionnaire used to quantify the intensity of the experience and to assess core content components of 16 NDE features [ 8 , 9 ].

Despite the significant number of people who reported to have had a NDE, there is still no theory that may account for all the characteristics classically described. Moreover, although it is now widely admitted that this experience is a physiological and psychological reality, a commonly accepted definition of the phenomenon is still lacking. Indeed, NDEs were initially named so because of their connection with death or fear of death [ 10 ]. More recently, however, similar experiences were reported in the absence of a physical or emotional threat (i.e., “NDE-like experiences”) [ 10 – 12 ]. Such experiences have been related, for instance, after meditation [ 13 ], syncope [ 14 ] and sleep [ 15 ]. Finally, Charland-Verville and collaborators [ 16 ] have shown that scores of NDE intensity (using self-reported responses on the Greyson NDE scale; [ 8 ]) do not differ between “real NDEs” experienced after a coma and “NDE-like” experiences occurring after non-life threatening events. Further systematic investigation is therefore required to better characterize these experiences and better describe their phenomenology.

Although a few studies have been conducting text analysis on NDEs narratives [ 17 , 18 ], reports of cardiac arrest survivors have never been, to our knowledge, analysed using a rigorous qualitative thematic method. Thematic analysis is “a method for identifying, analyzing and reporting patterns within data” [ 19 ] commonly used in qualitative research [ 20 ]. This method promotes the classification of the data into thematic categories as well as the examination of “all the cases in the study to make sure that all the manifestations of each theme have been accounted for and compared” [ 20 ]. Themes are patterns across data sets that are essential to a better description of a phenomenon. Therefore, thematic analysis can be used to develop taxonomies or classifications about a phenomenon [ 20 ]. Furthermore, well-established guidelines for applying and assessing qualitative methods are nowadays available [ 21 , 22 ], which have increased their use in medical disciplines [ 23 ].

The description of a NDE using closed scales can result in the overlooking of relevant features that might have been experienced by NDErs but that are not listed in NDE questionnaires. Therefore, this study aims to explore the interest of a qualitative approach, specifically thematic analysis, to better portray NDEs that follow a cardiac arrest based on self-reported narratives.

Materials and methods

Sample and recruitment.

The study was approved by the ethics committee of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Liège. NDErs were recruited via the websites, the appearances in local media and the publications of the International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS France) and the Coma Science Group (GIGA Research Center, University and University Hospital of Liège, Belgium). Participants who contacted us indicated their consent by signing a written consent form. They then completed questionnaires requesting socio-demographic information (gender and age at interview), their age when they experienced the NDE, the time elapsed since the NDE and if the NDE has occurred during a life threatening event.

In addition to these questions, participants were asked to write a detailed narrative of their experience. No limits regarding the number of pages were specified. The Greyson NDE scale [ 8 ] was then used to identify the presence of a NDE. This 16-item multiple-choice validated scale [ 8 , 9 ] allows the quantification of the intensity of the experience (i.e., total score ranging from 0 to 32) and enables a standardized identification of NDEs (i.e., cut-off score of 7). For each of the 16 items, the scores are arranged on an ordinal scale ranging from 0 to 2 (i.e., 0 = “not present,”1 = “mildly or ambiguously present,” and 2 = “definitively present”; [ 8 , 9 ]). NDEs being frequently reported after cardiac arrests, we included participants whose experience was secondary to a cardiac arrest and who met the accepted criteria of a NDE (i.e., Greyson NDE scale’s total score ≥ 7; [ 8 ]). Table 1 shows the descriptive data of the study sample calculated using SAS version 9.3 for Windows statistical package).

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0193001.t001

Thematic analysis

According to the recommendations required for this method [ 19 , 24 ], an iterative step-by-step thematic analysis has been carried out on all anonymized 34 NDE narratives using NVivo software (version 9.2 for Windows). An inductive proceeding was chosen to analyze the data: themes were inductively defined from the raw data that were explored without any predetermined classification.

In the first step, two expert researchers in thematic analysis (SD and BP) read the narratives several times in order to familiarise themselves with the information.

In the second step, emergent themes were developed following a series of coding stages: first, open coding was used and initial codes were generated. Next, initial codes were grouped into categories according to their similarities.

In the third step, these categories were organized into themes. It involves combining codes into overarching themes that accurately depict the data. According to Braun and Clarke [ 19 ] “a theme captures something important about the data… and represents some level of patterned response or meaning within the data set”. This work led to a first analysis grid (i.e., list of themes).

In the fourth step, both experts independently extracted and classified all quotations (i.e., phrases or paragraphs) that corresponded to a theme of the analysis grid and preserved the quality of the writings as produced. To ensure the reliability of the coding and classification process, coding comparison query that enables to compare coding done by two experts in Nvivo, was performed by calculating a Cohen’s kappa coefficient. The kappa coefficient can range from -1 to +1 (+1 corresponding to a perfect concordance between the two experts). In the first instance, readers obtained a Cohen’s kappa coefficient of 0.46 demonstrating a moderate agreement [ 25 ]. That relatively poor result forced them to revise the analysis grid. According to the criteria of univocality and exclusivity (i.e., to ensure that themes are understandable in the same way by anyone and that quotations can be classified only in one single category), a new arrangement and a more precise definition of the themes have been proposed. Based on the revised grid (see Table 2 ), a new extraction and classification of quotations was achieved and led to a Cohen’s kappa coefficient of 0.73 between both readers corresponding to a substantial agreement [ 25 ].

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0193001.t002

The fifth step was made of a comprehensive analysis to examine the extent to which the themes contributed to an understanding of the data. For each theme, all the included quotations were synthesized to bring out the main ideas (i.e., a summary of the content provided by the participants).

The sixth step involved writing the report and led to a detailed description of the results. To ensure robustness, descriptive results were accompanied by quotations that illustrate that description. In addition, the number of NDErs who discussed the theme and its different characteristics was reported in order to summarize the results in a more illustrative and comprehensive form. A native English speaker translated the quotations included in the present article from French to English in order to preserve the NDErs’ subjective points of view.

Validity and reliability of analysis

As recommended [ 22 , 24 ], several quality criteria were used to ensure the validity of the results and their interpretation: 1) triangulation: two complementary researchers (SD and BP) with different backgrounds (respectively MS in psychology and PhD in public health) performed the analysis; 2) researchers were experimented in qualitative research but novices in the NDE topic, which stimulates the exploration of new insights; 3) for each theme, the number of quotations were counted to get a more precise idea of their importance; 4) intercodage: a Cohen’s kappa coefficient was calculated; 5) theoretical validation: done by comparing the results with existing scientific data (see Discussion ); 6) an iterative process was then performed. If a new code was introduced, all of the narratives were read again to ensure that the data extraction was complete and to verify that the initial classification was accurate.

Extracted themes

The length of the narratives varied from 4 lines to 3 pages. The analysis conducted on the 34 narratives allowed us to distinguish 11 main themes, among which we identified 10 time-bounded themes and 1 transversal theme. A time-bounded theme refers to an event that is relatively isolated within narratives and only occurs during a part of the experience, whereas a transversal theme characterizes the whole experience and is not described as an isolated moment. Moreover, the transversal theme generally appeared in narratives as the result of a retrospective consideration and as a comment of self-reflection on the experience. Arbitrarily selected illustrative verbatim are given in Table 3 . Themes are detailed in the paragraphs below.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0193001.t003

Time-bounded themes.

Light : Considering all narratives, 25 NDErs mentioned seeing a light. This light was attached to a feeling of attractiveness for 10 NDErs. 2 NDErs felt enveloped in this light. The description of the light comprised the following characteristics: intense (n = 16), white (n = 15), indescribable/unusual (n = 5), soft and diffuse (n = 3), not dazzling (n = 3), and yellow (n = 1). The physical sensations reported during this experience were an absence of body (n = 3) and an absence of pain (n = 1). NDErs expressed a feeling of happiness, serenity and tranquility (n = 15). The origin of the light was at the end of a tunnel or a corridor (n = 9), diffused (it came from everywhere; n = 7), or from an unknown origin (n = 1).

Return : 19 NDErs detailed the moment they got back from the NDE. 5 NDErs received a message that compelled them to get out of the experience. 4 of them reported being expelled or ejected from the experience. Getting back from the NDE was associated with an intense sleep (n = 2) or with a state of confusion (n = 2). 1 NDEr mentioned he had woken up after a period of dark night and 3 others characterized the return as brutal, without transition. 2 narratives included the idea of being brought back into the body. 2 NDErs did not remember how it happened. 1 NDEr attempted to live the experience again (which ended up in failure) and 12 NDErs mentioned an opposition between the feeling of well-being during the NDE and the problems they encountered when they got back to “everyday life”.

Meeting/encounter : A meeting with other beings (human or imaginary) was described in 15 narratives. The environment in which this meeting happened varied: a landscape (n = 1), a waiting queue (n = 1), an office (n = 1), in a light (n = 4), during a walk (n = 1), and on a river (n = 1). The message/the content of the interaction was mostly about getting back to life (n = 7). The type of interaction with the being also varied: unilateral message (only one being communicates towards the other; n = 4), telepathy (n = 4), or dialogue (n = 3). NDErs mainly saw their interlocutor (n = 11), however, others described the sensation of a presence (n = 2). The meeting happened with human beings that were unknown to the individual, relatives, family members (deceased (n = 8) or not (= 3)), and non-human beings. This experience was accompanied by a feeling of well-being (n = 4), an absence of pain (n = 3), fear (n = 2), unbearable sadness (n = 2), pain (n = 1), and confidence (n = 1).

Hyperlucidity : 14 NDErs reported a feeling of power and extreme lucidity. Hyperlucidity was associated with absolute clarity/understanding (n = 3), the feeling of being a genius (n = 2), clear and quick wit (n = 2), or exceptional intelligence (n = 1). This experience was in some cases accompanied by a physical release (n = 4). 5 NDErs described this experience as being accompanied by a sense of power and omniscience: direct control over the thoughts of others (n = 2), omnipotence (n = 2), or having an answer to everything (n = 1). 3 NDErs linked this supreme intelligence to the fact of being united with everything that surrounded them, to the global and universal character of this theme. This experience was associated with a feeling of well-being (n = 6), a lack of physical pain (n = 4), astonishment (n = 4), and an inability to describe the feeling (n = 1).

Description of scenes : 14 NDErs provided a detailed description of the setting in which they were immersed. 6 NDErs highlighted the indescribable aspect of the place (i.e., they showed difficulties in finding words). 4 NDErs evoked the idea of nature (e.g., vast meadow). This experience was accompanied by an intense feeling of well-being (n = 10), a feeling of infinity (n = 5), a lack of pain (n = 4), astonishment (n = 3), and fear (n = 1).

Darkness : 13 NDErs mentioned the idea of “black” or “dark”. They described a gloomy/dark environment with no objects or way out. For several NDErs (n = 7), this darkness occurred in contrast to or following a bright environment. More specifically, NDErs mentioned an absolute darkness (n = 7), a gloomy environment (n = 5), a gloomy tunnel (n = 2), a period of dark night (n = 1), and a waiting room with no walls (n = 1). 2 NDErs described an idea of movement (i.e., passing through a dark night). This experience was associated with the absence or the presence of sound (respectively n = 2 and n = 1), and the absence of sight (n = 2). This theme was linked to varied emotions: fear (n = 1), calmness (n = 1), and amazement (n = 1).

Out-of-body experience : 12 NDErs reported leaving their body. NDErs “saw” themselves (i.e., observer’s perspective). 4 NDErs evoked the awareness of being out of their bodies. A detailed visual description of the emergency situation was reported by 9 NDErs. 6 of them reported observing the scene from a higher position (positioned above). 3 of them reported having felt a real detachment of their body and 1 expressed the feeling of reintegrating his body. 2 NDErs said they wanted to communicate with the people they were observing, in vain. This experience was accompanied by an absence of pain (n = 3), thirst (n = 1), extreme cold (n = 1), and body perception (n = 1). The experience was also accompanied by a feeling of well-being (n = 7), amazement (n = 3), exasperation (n = 1), and rejection of the observed body (n = 1).

Awareness of death : 9 NDErs stated being aware that they were dying.

Life events : 8 NDErs out of 34 described a past or future life event. During these visions, NDErs perceived different moments of their past or future lives. Life was reviewed (n = 5) or relived (n = 2). The vision referred to the future life (n = 1) or, in the majority of cases, to the past life (n = 6). 3 NDErs stated that life passages comprised an alternation between happy and unhappy moments. These passages were imposed (n = 2) or selected (n = 1). This life review was associated with curiosity or surprise (n = 3), happiness (n = 2), difficulties in reviewing (n = 2), or with a feeling of indifference (n = 1).

Entrance in the NDE : 6 NDErs detailed the moment they entered the NDE. For 3 of them, the entrance was progressive and soft. For 2 others, the entrance followed a period of dark night. Another NDEr wrote he did not know how it all started.

Transversal theme.

Altered time perception : 16 NDErs mentioned a change in the perception of time during their experience. 8 NDErs expressed a total loss of time marker. 6 NDErs reported an impression of slow motion or the feeling that time had stopped. Finally, 3 NDErs reported an unusual and ineffable perception of time, and therefore described it in an uncommon way (e.g., “integrated time”).

Since the past three decades, considerable work has been undertaken to describe NDEs in sufficient details, however, most studies have been using closed NDE questionnaires in order to identify the presence of an NDE and assess this phenomenon (e.g., [ 16 , 26 ]). Yet, previous studies [ 26 – 29 ] have shown that NDEs memories contained more characteristics than other memories of imagined and real events, which highlights the fact that we possess very rich and detailed narratives of these experiences. We therefore aimed to examine all the details stored in NDEs narratives using a qualitative thematic analysis.

One of the major contributions of our study is that it sheds a different light on the structure of the narratives by identifying 1 “transversal” theme and 10 “time-bounded” themes. More specifically, “transversal” themes characterize the whole narrative and do not correspond to a specific moment of the experience. Moreover, the transversal theme (i.e., “altered time perception” in this particular case) is generally addressed retrospectively by NDErs as they reflect upon their experience. On the contrary, “time-bounded” themes have more limited time duration and are generally described as clear isolated events (e.g., “OBEs”).

The originality of our approach also resides in the design of the study intended to provide new insights regarding the extracted themes. Firstly, the aetiology group of our participants was not revealed to the readers until the end of the analysis, and secondly, they were not experts in the field of NDEs. Obviously, NDEs are regularly discussed in the lay literature and the readers may not have been fully blinded, however, we wanted to enhance methodological rigor and reduce measurement biases by limiting any substantial influence of existing literature and preconceived notions on the processing of the narratives. For example, researchers’ knowledge of existing quantitative scales (e.g., Greyson NDE scale; [ 8 ]) could have had an incidence on the extraction process of the themes. By proceeding on this basis, we notably aimed at highlighting themes which might have been left aside in previous studies.

In the end, we identified the “altered time perception” as a transversal theme. This loss of time marker has already been reported in the NDE literature as a defining NDE feature (e.g., [ 5 , 8 ]). Concomitantly, 10 time-bounded themes have also emerged from our analysis, among which 7 are similar, or even identical, to the features that are described in the Greyson NDE scale [ 8 ] and the WCEI [ 7 ]: the vision of a “light”, a “meeting”, “hyper-lucidity”, “darkness”, “OBEs”, “life events”, and “awareness of death”. It is worth noting that some of the themes that have emerged from our qualitative thematic analysis include several features of the Greyson NDE scale (e.g., “life events” include “life reviews” as well as “precognitions”). Besides, some of the components we have identified are less specific. For instance, we identified the theme “light” whereas the Greyson NDE scale focuses on a “brilliant”, “unusual” or “mystical” light.

In parallel, readers identified 3 additional themes that partly overlap with the features identified by Greyson [ 8 ] and Ring [ 7 ]–namely, “entrance in the NDE”, “return” and “description of scenes”. These themes seem however to be described differently and to integrate complementary information and details. Indeed, for the theme “entrance in the NDE” some NDErs remembered and spontaneously detailed the way their NDE began, abruptly or progressively. As regard to the other two themes, “return” and “description of scenes”, it must be noted that they somehow overlap with existing features assessed by the widely used Greyson-NDE scale. If we consider, in the first instance, the theme “return”, we can establish the link with the concept of “border” raised by the Greyson NDE-scale. Indeed, the theme encompasses the decision to get back to life and the fact that some NDErs felt like they were sent back against their will. Yet, the theme “return” is broader than Greyson’s feature as it also comprises the way NDErs felt when returning to “usual awareness” and the substantial gap that exists between the emotions experienced during the NDE and during everyday life. Indeed, part of the NDErs emphasized the opposition between the feeling of well-being during the NDE and the problems encountered or the pain they felt when they got back from their NDE. It is our view that this latter finding could at least partially explain some of the beneficial consequences of NDEs such as a reduced fear of death [ 30 ]. The way NDErs came back from their NDE [ 1 ] and how resentful and frustrated they could feel about it [ 4 ] have already been brought to light by some authors, and we therefore believe that this issue deserves careful consideration in the future. Second, the theme “description of scenes” could lead one to think to the unearthly world reflected in the Greyson NDE-scale. Nonetheless, this theme not only includes unfamiliar and mystical places but also comprises the description of the setting in which NDErs found themselves during their NDEs (e.g., an operating room or the scene of the incident). Interestingly, even though some of the places they saw were portrayed as ineffable and indescribable, participants endeavored to detail them.

To our knowledge, no NDE questionnaire formally investigates those 3 themes and we believe that further work should be done to collect them more systematically. Furthermore, it could be interesting to explore the way they are described in narratives relating NDEs of other aetiologies.

Overall, these results corroborate the content of existing tools such as the Greyson NDE-scale [ 8 ], but also highlight new aspects of NDEs that could be further investigated in future studies. This recurrence in the extracted themes/features supports the view of authors such as Facco and collaborators [ 31 ] who suggest that NDE testimonies from all around the world show sufficient commonality to consider NDEs as “universal human experiences”.

In addition to outlining the structure of narratives, text analyses explore the context of reported themes and provide detailed descriptions of NDEs. In our sample, the “light”, usually qualified as “brilliant”, “unusual” or “mystical” in the NDE literature (e.g., [ 8 ]), is also described as “soft”, “diffuse” and “white”–interestingly, a majority the NDErs who saw the light depicted a white light. Besides, a majority of NDErs evoked a variety of strong feelings to describe most of the extracted themes and depicted a wide range of emotional states. Indeed, NDErs not only mentioned feelings of peace or joy but also reported feelings of astonishment, amazement, surprise and fear to describe the identified themes. In addition, it is worth noting that negative feelings such as fear are also comprised in positive NDEs. This wide range of emotions partly explains the fact that the feature “feelings of peace, pleasantness or joy”, consistently reported in other studies on cardiac arrest survivors (e.g., [ 3 , 16 , 32 ]), has not been high-lightened as a key element following our analysis. Even though pleasant feelings were frequently reported, readers considered that their identification as a key theme would have masked the diversity of the emotions felt by NDErs, especially negative ones. In addition, readers judged that positive feelings, such as pleasantness or joy, did not appear as a theme on their own but rather characterized some of the other themes that have been identified by the readers. As a matter of fact, “light”, “hyper-lucidity”, “OBEs” and “awareness of death” are generally associated with positive feelings (e.g., well-being, happiness, serenity or amazement). On the contrary, “meeting”, “darkness”, “life events”, “description of scenes” and “return” are related to conflicting emotions. Finally, “entering the NDE” and “altered time perception” rarely have an emotional value. In most cases, NDErs seem to use a wide range of qualifiers to describe their experience, which makes each narrative unique. In a nutshell, it has to be underlined that the “keyness” of a theme in qualitative analysis does not fundamentally lie on quantifiable measures but rather depends on the researcher’s judgement based on the content of the accounts [ 19 ].

Existing questionnaires, such as the Greyson NDE scale, allowed researchers to gather data and identify NDErs. Nonetheless, these tools do not offer the possibility to distinguish between NDEs of different aetiologies, or between classical NDEs and “NDE-like” experiences. In addition to the use of those scales, we believe that thematic analysis, combined with other types of qualitative analysis methods such as discourse analysis [ 33 ], should help to explore this issue further. Yet, qualitative analysis methods require good quality narratives and appropriate data collection. In this sense, it would be interesting to have a more systematic approach for data collection in order to obtain more detailed narratives. Semi-structured interviews are recommended in such a framework, requiring well-constructed interview guides. Moreover, it could be of a great interest to look into the meanings attached to such experiences and to analyze how NDErs reflect upon NDEs and their consequences on their lives. Besides, out of concern for methodological rigour, only narratives that scored 7 or more on the Greyson NDE scale were included in our study sample. Still, it would be interesting to carry out analyses on the narratives of all the NDErs who have contacted us after a cardiac arrest, without taking any cut-off score into account.

Finally, some issues remain to be addressed. First, the sample size in the present study is limited. Qualitative research is, however, very intensive and time consuming, which makes analysis of large samples impractical. Indeed, sample size in qualitative research is frequently much smaller than in quantitative study and generally does not exceed 50 participants [ 34 ]. Besides, given the preliminary use of the presented methodology, we decided in the first instance to restrict the analysis to the narratives of people who had lived comparable life-threatening situations, namely a cardiac arrest. As already mentioned above, it would however be of a great interest to invest in further analysis of reports depicting other types of experiences such as “NDEs-like” or close brushes with death that did not lead to a NDE. Second, because NDErs voluntarily contacted us, our sample might suffer from a self-selection bias. Due to the mystical connotation of these experiences, and because they may be perceived as negative and upsetting, some people might feel reluctant to share these events. Lastly, narratives were collected retrospectively and time elapsed since the NDE varies which could represent a source of potential bias. Indeed, one can hypothesize that NDErs’ narratives may have been tainted by descriptions of the phenomenon in medias and in lay literature. Consistent with this hypothesis, Charland-Verville and collaborators [ 16 ] pointed out that some NDE features seemed to be more frequent in retrospective designs. We underline, however, that Greyson [ 35 ] had highlighted, prior to that, the consistency of NDE memories over a period of two decades. Given this potential bias and the ineffability of the experience, it would be interesting to collect NDE accounts and look into the terms used by NDErs when recovering from their coma and depicting the experience for the first time. These observations and potential biases call for further studies to analyze prospective trials using thematic analysis method.

Given the increasing number of NDEs testimonies and the impact that these experiences may have on peoples’ lives [ 5 ], it appears crucial to better describe the phenomenon. In this study, a qualitative thematic analysis was used to detail the rich phenomenology of these experiences. We were able to extract 11 themes. Among those, we notably identified 3 themes that partly overlap with features described in closed NDE questionnaires, but which seem to integrate complementary details. The division of narratives into themes gives a fuller overview about the way different features are combined and sheds a light on how these experiences, usually reported as being ineffable, are described by NDErs. Nevertheless, further work should be done to develop better tools to rigorously collect narratives, such as semi-structured interviews, in order to obtain standardized and detailed narratives.

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank IANDS France (particularly J.-P. Jourdan) and François Lallier for their help in recruiting NDE testimonies.

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September 12, 2011

Peace of Mind: Near-Death Experiences Now Found to Have Scientific Explanations

Seeing your life pass before you and the light at the end of the tunnel, can be explained by new research on abnormal functioning of dopamine and oxygen flow

By Charles Q. Choi

Near-death experiences are often thought of as mystical phenomena, but research is now revealing scientific explanations for virtually all of their common features. The details of what happens in near-death experiences are now known widely—a sense of being dead, a feeling that one's "soul" has left the body, a voyage toward a bright light, and a departure to another reality where love and bliss are all-encompassing.

Approximately 3 percent of the U.S. population says they have had a near-death experience, according to a Gallup poll. Near-death experiences are reported across cultures, with written records of them dating back to ancient Greece. Not all of these experiences actually coincide with brushes with death— one study of 58 patients who recounted near-death experiences found 30 were not actually in danger of dying, although most of them thought they were.

Recently, a host of studies has revealed potential underpinnings for all the elements of such experiences. "Many of the phenomena associated with near-death experiences can be biologically explained," says neuroscientist Dean Mobbs, at the University of Cambridge's Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit. Mobbs and Caroline Watt at the University of Edinburgh detailed this research online August 17 in Trends in Cognitive Sciences .

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For instance, the feeling of being dead is not limited to near-death experiences—patients with Cotard or "walking corpse" syndrome hold the delusional belief that they are deceased. This disorder has occurred following trauma, such as during advanced stages of typhoid and multiple sclerosis, and has been linked with brain regions such as the parietal cortex and the prefrontal cortex—"the parietal cortex is typically involved in attentional processes, and the prefrontal cortex is involved in delusions observed in psychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia," Mobbs explains. Although the mechanism behind the syndrome remains unknown, one possible explanation is that patients are trying to make sense of the strange experiences they are having.

Out-of-body experiences are also now known to be common during interrupted sleep patterns that immediately precede sleeping or waking. For instance, sleep paralysis, or the experience of feeling paralyzed while still aware of the outside world, is reported in up to 40 percent of all people and is linked with vivid dreamlike hallucinations that can result in the sensation of floating above one's body. A 2005 study found that out-of-body experiences can be artificially triggered by stimulating the right temporoparietal junction in the brain, suggesting that confusion regarding sensory information can radically alter how one experiences one's body.

A variety of explanations might also account for reports by those dying of meeting the deceased. Parkinson's disease patients, for example, have reported visions of ghosts , even monsters. The explanation? Parkinson's involves abnormal functioning of dopamine, a neurotransmitter that can evoke hallucinations. And when it comes to the common experience of reliving moments from one's life, one culprit might be the locus coeruleus, a midbrain region that releases noradrenaline, a stress hormone one would expect to be released in high levels during trauma. The locus coeruleus is highly connected with brain regions that mediate emotion and memory, such as the amygdala and hypothalamus.

In addition, research now shows that a number of medicinal and recreational drugs can mirror the euphoria often felt in near-death experiences, such as the anesthetic ketamine, which can also trigger out-of-body experiences and hallucinations. Ketamine affects the brain's opioid system, which can naturally become active even without drugs when animals are under attack, suggesting trauma might set off this aspect of near-death experiences, Mobbs explains.

Finally, one of the most famous aspects of near-death hallucinations is moving through a tunnel toward a bright light. Although the specific causes of this part of near-death experiences remain unclear, tunnel vision can occur when blood and oxygen flow is depleted to the eye, as can happen with the extreme fear and oxygen loss that are both common to dying.

Altogether, scientific evidence suggests that all features of the near-death experience have some basis in normal brain function gone awry. Moreover, the very knowledge of the lore regarding near-death episodes might play a crucial role in experiencing them—a self-fulfilling prophecy. Such findings "provide scientific evidence for something that has always been in the realm of paranormality," Mobbs says. "I personally believe that understanding the process of dying can help us come to terms with this inevitable part of life."

One potential obstacle to further research on near-death experiences will be analyzing them experimentally, says cognitive neuroscientist Olaf Blanke at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne in Switzerland, who has investigated out-of-body experiences . Still, "our work has shown that this can be done for out-of-body experiences, so why not for near-death-experience-associated sensations?"

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How to Write a Profile Essay

Near death experience essay sample, example.

By Johannes Helmold

I was on vacation in Ganapatipule, which is a town on the coast on the west side of India, situated right on the Indian Ocean. I was with my long-time friend, Janu, and his mother, staying in a hotel for a few days. The vacation so far was the embodiment of relaxing: eating fresh mangoes, waking up late, dining out all the time (mostly fish curry), swimming a few times a day in the Indian ocean, and joking around with old pals.

Around three in the afternoon on a cloudless day, the beach on our side was empty of people besides my friend, his mother, and I. It was freeing to be alone on this vast beach, known to be a holy place among Hindus. Ganapatipule is named after the god Ganesh, and there is a famous Ganesh shrine near there where a swayambhu (a sculpture erected from the earth itself in the form of a god) is worshiped. Bathing in the ocean around this area is supposed to cleanse people of their negativity and visiting the shrine also purifies individuals as well.

As I started to swim in the warm ocean, jumping over waves, I left my friends behind. I was wearing a white kurta, or a traditional garb for men in India, which was heavy in the water, but my feet was easily touching the ocean floor at all times. I usually washed my clothes by swimming in the ocean when I was there.

But at one instant, I felt that my feet could not touch the ocean floor anymore and I plunged into the water, weighted down by my clothes. The waves kept coming and now they were menacing, as I was getting sucked into the depths every time they came—even if I rose out of the water and tried to swim back to the part of the ocean where I could get a foothold. I had been sucked into a riptide, in fact, and was stuck in a dipping valley, despite my hard efforts to reach safety and my yelling to my friends in the distance.

After struggling heavily for a few, long minutes to go against the suction of the riptide, and shouting to my friends in the distance near the shore to no avail, I began to relax, accepting my fate. I no longer fought to reach the edge of the ocean valley to get a foothold, and in the process of being pulled into the ocean and coming back up to the surface, I talked to God out loud. I discussed what I had did wrong in my life and what I did right. I concluded in reflection that my life was fulfilling overall, and I felt ready to die, accepting the present circumstance as reality.

Yet as soon I surrendered myself to the situation, a huge wave came and pushed me out of the riptide and the deep valley I was sucked into. On the drift of the wave, I landed near my friends, who seemed astonished at my expression and my words of description. They were unaware that I had been trouble. But it did not matter at the time—I was happy to reach land again and felt my life was renewed.

I later learned the time I swam was inauspicious for swimming at Ganapatipule , as the natives believe the god Ganesh bathes around three in afternoon in the ocean there. It was as if Ganesh forgave me for the intrusion, and released me from the anger of the ocean against divine protocol.

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Writing a Paper on Near-Death Experiences

We're glad to hear that you're interested in writing a paper on near-death experiences.

Our bibliography will give you a start.  In particular, if you have access to the 2000 book, The Varieties of Anomalous Experience , Bruce Greyson's chapter on near-death experiences offers an excellent overview and includes a description of a very interesting NDE that occurred to a woman documented to have an inactive brain for one hour during surgery.

To locate resources in the library or bookstore, begin by checking listings under the author's name, if you know it, or under the topics of Near-Death, Death, and Dying.  You may find books in the sections for Religion, Psychology, or Parapsychology.  You may need to ask the librarian or salesperson; the topic is handled differently from place to place.

For magazine articles, look under the same topics suggested for book titles.  Use the library's search facility if there is one.  Otherwise, check the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature .  For some excellent recent magazine and journal resources:

• The August 2003 issue of Reader's Digest included an article on near-death experiences (pages 122-128).
• The September 2003 issue of Spirituality & Health included an article entitled "Beyond Fear: The New Science of Near-Death Experiences."
• The December 15, 2001, issue of the highly respected international medical journal, The Lancet , included an article by Dr. Pim van Lommel and his colleagues who studied NDEs for 13 years in hospitals in Holland.  We have commentary, including a link to an on-line copy of the article.
• To read research papers on near-death experiences, go to Google Scholar and search for the desired author and "near death experience". For example, search for Greyson "near death experience", or other authors like Ring, Holden, Parnia, etc. Many of these papers are available on-line as PDFs.

For websites where near-death experiencers post their experiences and sometimes discuss them with others, go to:

• near-death.com

If you are interested in actually interviewing people who have had a near-death experience, try these suggestions:

Check to see if there is a local support and interest group near you for near-death experiencers (a Friends of IANDS group: FOI).  Use the contact information to learn when and where the group meets.  At the meeting, identify yourself as someone preparing to write a paper on near-death experiences.

Run a small request in your school or community newspaper, or post a notice on a high-traffic bulletin board (library, supermarket, wherever in your community people are most apt to stop and browse).

Whenever you interview a near-death experiencer, be sure to guarantee confidentiality-and keep this promise without fail!

Term Paper Topics about Near-death Experiences

Basic: the near-death experience (nde) in general.

• What research says about the NDE
• Effects of the NDE on people's lives
• Children's near-death experiences

More advanced

• Were the people who report NDEs really dead?
• A comparison of NDEs and deathbed visions (the reports of people who do actually die); see Raymond Moody's books ; Callanan, M. & Kelley, P. (1992). Final Gifts: Understanding the Special Awareness , Needs, and Communication of the Dying .  New York: Bantam.  Osis and Haraldsson's book At the Hour of Death ; and others)
• What healthcare professionals (or the public, or any other group) think about the near-death experience
• Do near-death experiences prove there is life after death?
• Distressing near-death experiences
• How scientists attempt to explain near-death experiences
• How religious traditions explain near-death experiences

How the tabloid papers report near-death experiences

Near-death experiences in history see Book X of Plato's Republic (also here ); St. Paul's experience on the road to Damascus; William James Varieties of Religious Experience ; and others)

"The Wizard of Oz" as a near-death experience; NDEs in film (see "Resurrection," "Jacob's Ladder," "Ghost," "Flatliners," "All That Jazz," "Heaven Can Wait," "Always," "What Dreams May Come," "Dragonfly," and others)

NDE themes and similarities in Katharine Anne Porter's Pale Horse , Pale Rider ; Dickens' A Christmas Carol ; Black Elk's Black Elk Speaks

Similarities between NDE and limbic lobe disorder; physiological theories that attempt to explain the NDE (see especially the work of Susan Blackmore ); levels of consciousness (altered states of consciousness)

Similarities and differences among NDEs across world culture

• Support for NDErs
• Support for Others
• Media Resources
• Recommended Reading
• NDE Brochures
• Fact Sheets
• Educational Training Videos
• Education News
• Writing a paper on NDEs
• Greyson NDE Scale

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Near-Death Experiences Evidence for Their Reality

Introduction.

Near-death experiences (NDEs) are reported by about 17% of those who nearly die. 1 NDEs have been reported by children, adults, scientists, physicians, priests, ministers, among the religious and atheists, and from countries throughout the world.

While no two NDEs are the same, there are characteristic features that are commonly observed in NDEs. These characteristics include a perception of seeing and hearing apart from the physical body, passing into or through a tunnel, encountering a mystical light, intense and generally positive emotions, a review of part or all of their prior life experiences, encountering deceased loved ones, and a choice to return to their earthly life. 2

There is no uniformly accepted definition of near-death experience. Definitions of NDE with some variability have been used throughout the 35 plus years that NDE has been the subject of scholarly investigation. For my retrospective investigations, an NDE was required to have both a near-death and experience component.

Individuals were considered to be “near-death” if they were so physically compromised that if their condition did not improve they would be expected to irreversibly die. Near-death experiencers (NDErs) included in my investigations were generally unconscious and may have required cardiopulmonary resuscitation. The “experience” component of an NDE had to occur when they were near death. Also, the experience had to be reasonably lucid, which excluded fragmentary or brief disorganized memories. For an experience to be classified as an NDE, there had to be a score of seven or above on the NDE Scale. 3 The NDE Scale asks 16 questions about the NDE content and is the most validated scale to help distinguish NDEs from other types of experiences.

In 1998, a website called the Near Death Experience Research Foundation (NDERF, nderf.org) was established to conduct NDE research and to be a public service. It is NDERF policy that all NDE accounts shared with NDERF are posted on the website if the NDErs give permission to do so. Nearly all NDErs allow their experiences to be posted on the NDERF website. Portions of the NDERF website, including the NDE questionnaire, have been posted in over 20 different languages. The NDERF website has consistently been at or near the top of websites listed from a Google search for the term “near-death experiences.” This prominence of the NDERF website provided a unique opportunity to conduct a large-scale study of NDEs, including NDEs from around the world. At the current time there are over 3,700 NDEs posted on the NDERF website, which is by far the largest collection of publicly accessible NDE accounts in the world.

The NDERF website has a form allowing near-death experiencers to share a detailed narrative of their experiences, and includes a detailed questionnaire. Extensive prior studies found that an Internet survey has validity that is equivalent to traditional pencil-and-paper survey. 4 All experiences shared with the NDERF website are reviewed. Sequentially shared NDEs from the NDERF website were studied. NDEs included for study were single NDE accounts, shared in English, and were shared by the individual who personally had the NDE. An investigation of the NDEs shared with NDERF led to nine lines of evidence suggesting the reality of NDE.

Results Suggesting the Reality of Near-Death Experiences

Line of evidence #1, lucid, organized experiences while unconscious, comatose, or clinically dead.

Near-death experiences occur at a time when the person is so physically compromised that they are typically unconscious, comatose, or clinically dead. Considering NDEs from both a medical perspective and logically, it should not be possible for unconscious people to often report highly lucid experiences that are clear and logically structured. Most NDErs report supernormal consciousness at the time of their NDEs.

The NDERF survey asked, “How did your highest level of consciousness and alertness during the experience compare to your normal, everyday consciousness and alertness?” Of 1,122 NDErs surveyed, 835 (74.4%) indicated they had “More consciousness and alertness than normal”; 229 (20.4%) experienced “Normal consciousness and alertness”; and only 58 (5.2%) had “Less consciousness and alertness than normal.”

The NDERF survey also asks, “If your highest level of consciousness and alertness during the experience was different from your normal everyday consciousness and alertness, please explain.” In response to this question, NDErs commonly reported that consciousness during their experiences was “clear”, “more aware”, and often associated with heightened awareness.

Near-death experiences often occur in association with cardiac arrest. 5 Prior studies found that 10–20 seconds following cardiac arrest, electroencephalogram measurements generally find no significant measureable brain cortical electrical activity. 6 A prolonged, detailed, lucid experience following cardiac arrest should not be possible, yet this is reported in many NDEs. This is especially notable given the prolonged period of amnesia that typically precedes and follows recovery from cardiac arrest. 7

Line of Evidence #2

Seeing ongoing events from a location apart from the physical body while unconscious (out-of-body experience).

A common characteristic of near-death experiences is an out-of-body experience. An out-of-body experience (OBE) is the apparent separation of consciousness from the body. About 45% of near-death experiencers report OBEs which involves them seeing and often hearing ongoing earthly events from a perspective that is apart, and usually above, their physical bodies. Following cardiac arrest, NDErs may see, and later accurately describe, their own resuscitation.

The first prospective study of the accuracy of out-of-body observations during near-death experiences was by Dr. Michael Sabom. 8 This study investigated a group of patients who had cardiac arrests with NDEs that included OBEs, and compared them with a control group of patients who experienced cardiac crises but did not have NDEs. Both groups of patients were asked to describe their own resuscitation as best they could. Sabom found that the group of NDE patients were much more accurate than the control group in describing their own resuscitations.

“A man should look for what is, and not what he thinks should be.” -Albert Einstein

Another prospective study of out-of-body observations during near-death experiences with similar methodology to Sabom’s study was published by Dr. Penny Sartori. 9 This study also found that near-death experiencers were often remarkably accurate in describing details of their own resuscitations. The control group that did not have NDEs was highly inaccurate and often could only guess at what occurred during their resuscitations.

Two large retrospective studies investigated the accuracy of out-of-body observations during near-death experiences. The first was by Dr. Janice Holden. 10 Dr. Holden reviewed NDEs with OBEs in all previously published scholarly articles and books, and found 89 case reports. Of the case reports reviewed, 92% were considered to be completely accurate with no inaccuracy whatsoever when the OBE observations were later investigated.

Another large retrospective investigation of near-death experiences that included out-of-body observations was recently published. 11 This study was a review of 617 NDEs that were sequentially shared on the NDERF website. Of these NDEs, there were 287 NDEs that had OBEs with sufficient information to allow objective determination of the reality of their descriptions of their observations during the OBEs. Review of the 287 OBEs found that 280 (97.6%) of the OBE descriptions were entirely realistic and lacked any content that seemed unreal. In this group of 287 NDErs with OBEs, there were 65 (23%) who personally investigated the accuracy of their own OBE observations after recovering from their life-threatening event. Based on these later investigations, none of these 65 OBErs found any inaccuracy in their own OBE observations.

The high percentage of accurate out-of-body observations during near-death experiences does not seem explainable by any possible physical brain function as it is currently known. This is corroborated by OBEs during NDEs that describe accurate observations while they were verifiably clinically comatose. 12 Further corroboration comes from the many NDEs that have been reported with accurate OBE observations of events occurring far from their physical body, and beyond any possible physical sensory awareness. 13 Moreover, NDE accounts have been reported with OBEs that accurately observed events that were completely unexpected by the NDErs. 14 This further argues against NDEs as being a result of illusory memories originating from what the NDErs might have expected during a close brush with death.

Line of Evidence #3

Near-death experiences with vision in the blind and supernormal vision.

There have been a few case reports of near-death experiences in the blind. The largest study of this was by Dr. Kenneth Ring. 15 This Investigation included 31 blind or substantially visually impaired individuals who had NDEs or out-of-body experiences. Of the 31 individuals in the study, 10 were not facing life-threatening events at the time of their experiences, and thus their experiences were not NDEs. There were 14 individuals who were blind from birth in this study, and nine of them described vision during their experiences. This investigation presented case reports of those born totally blind that described in NDEs that were highly visual with content consistent with typical NDEs.

The NDERF website has received additional case reports of near-death experiences among those legally blind. For illustration, the following NDE happened to Marta, a five-year-old blind girl who walked into a lake:

“I slowly breathed in the water and became unconscious. A beautiful lady dressed in bright white light pulled me out. The lady looked into my eyes asked me what I wanted. I was unable to think of anything until it occurred to me to travel around the lake. As I did so, I saw detail that I would not have seen in “real” life. I could go anywhere, even to the tops of trees, simply by my intending to go there. I was legally blind. For the first time I was able to see leaves on trees, bird’s feathers, bird’s eyes, details on telephone poles and what was in people’s back yards. I was seeing far better than 20/20 vision. 16

An NDERF survey question asked 1,122 near-death experiencers, “Did your vision differ in any way from your normal, everyday vision (in any aspect, such as clarity, field of vision, colors, brightness, depth perception degree of solidness/transparency of objects, etc.)?” In response, 722 (64.3%) answered “Yes”, 182 (16.2%) said “Uncertain”, and 218 (19.4%) responded “No”. A review of narrative responses to this question revealed that vision during NDEs was often apparently supernormal. Here are some illustrative examples from NDEs:

“Colors were beyond any I had ever seen.” “Everything seemed so much more colorful and brighter than normal.” “My vision was greatly increased. I was able to see things as close or as far as I needed. There was no strain involved it was almost like auto zooming a camera.” “I had 360 degree vision, I could see above, below, on my right, on my left, behind, I could see everywhere at the same time!”

Vision in near-death experiencers that are blind, including totally blind from birth, has been described in many case reports. This, along with the finding that vision in NDEs is usually different from normal everyday vision and often described as supernormal, further suggests that NDEs cannot be explained by our current understanding of brain function. This is also further evidence that NDEs are not a product of what NDErs would have expected to occur during a life-threatening event.

Line of Evidence #4

Near-death experiences that occur while under general anesthesia.

Under adequate general anesthesia it should not be possible to have a lucid organized memory. Prior studies using EEG and functional imaging of the brains of patients under general anesthesia provide substantial evidence that the anesthetized brain should be unable to produce lucid memories. 17 , 18 As previously discussed, following cardiac arrest the EEG becomes flat in 10 to 20 seconds, and there is usually amnesia prior to and following the arrest. The occurrence of a cardiac arrest while under general anesthesia is a combination of circumstances in which no memory from that time should be possible. Here is an illustrative example of an NDE that occurred under general anesthesia during surgery for a heart valve replacement:

“During my surgery I felt myself lift from my body and go above the operating table. The doctor told me later that they had kept my heart open and stopped for a long time, and they had a great amount of difficulty getting my heart started again. That must have been when I left my body because I could see the doctors nervously trying to get my heart going. It was strange to be so detached from my physical body. I was curious about what they were doing but not concerned. Then, as I drifted farther away, I saw my father at the head of the table. He looked up at me, which did give me a surprise because he had been dead now for almost a year.” 19

I reviewed 613 near-death experiences shared with NDERF, and found 23 NDEs that appeared to have occurred while under general anesthesia. Cardiac arrest was the most common life-threatening event that was described in association with the occurrence of these NDEs. I compared the responses of these 23 NDErs to the 590 non-anesthesia NDErs by reviewing how both groups responded to 33 survey questions that asked about the content of the NDEs. Chi-square statistics was used for this comparison. Due to the large number of questions asked, statistical significance was set at p=0.01. The only statistically significant difference between the two groups was that the anesthesia NDEs were more likely to describe tunnels in their experiences.

An NDERF survey question asked, “How did your highest level of consciousness and alertness during the experience compare to your normal everyday consciousness and alertness?” For the NDEs occurring under general anesthesia, 19 (83%) of the respondents answered, “More consciousness and alertness than normal,” to this question, compared to 437 (74%) for all other NDEs. The responses to this question by the two groups were not statistically significantly different. This suggests, remarkably, that the level of consciousness and alertness in NDEs is not modified by general anesthesia.

Other near-death experience investigators have reported NDEs occurring while under general anesthesia. Dr. Bruce Greyson, a leading NDE researcher at the University of Virginia, states:

“ In our collection of NDEs, 127 out of 578 NDE cases (22%) occurred under general anesthesia, and they included such features as OBEs that involved experiencers’ watching medical personnel working on their bodies, an unusually bright or vivid light, meeting deceased persons, and thoughts, memories, and sensations that were clearer than usual.” 20

NDEs due to cardiac arrest while under general anesthesia occur and are medically inexplicable.

Line of Evidence #5

Near-death experiences and life reviews.

Some near-death experiences include a review of part or all of their prior lives. This NDE element is called a life review. NDErs typically describe their life review from a third-person perspective. The life review may include awareness of what others were feeling and thinking at the time earlier in their life when they interacted with them. This previously unknown awareness of what other people were feeling or thinking when they interacted with them is often surprising and unexpected to the NDErs. Here is an example of a life review: “

I went into a dark place with nothing around me, but I wasn’t scared. It was really peaceful there. I then began to see my whole life unfolding before me like a film projected on a screen, from babyhood to adult life. It was so real! I was looking at myself, but better than a 3-D movie as I was also capable of sensing the feelings of the persons I had interacted with through the years. I could feel the good and bad emotions I made them go through.” 21

In my review of 617 near-death experiences from NDERF, a life review occurred in 88 NDEs (14%). None of the life reviews in these NDEs appeared to have any unrealistic content as determined by my review or based on comments by the NDErs about their own life reviews. Life reviews may include long forgotten details of their earlier life that the NDErs later confirm really happened. If NDEs were unreal experiences, it would be expected that there would be significant error in life reviews and possibly hallucinatory features. The consistent accuracy of life reviews, including the awareness of long-forgotten events and awareness of the thoughts and feelings of others from past interactions, further suggests the reality of NDEs.

Line of Evidence #6

Encountering deceased loved ones in near-death experiences.

Near-death experiences may describe encounters with people that they knew during their earthly life. The following is an example of encountering a deceased loved ones in an NDE. This example is also notable as the NDEr was born totally deaf:

“I approached the boundary. No explanation was necessary for me to understand, at the age of ten, that once I cross[ed] the boundary, I could never come back— period. I was more than thrilled to cross. I intended to cross, but my ancestors over another boundary caught my attention. They were talking in telepathy, which caught my attention. I was born profoundly deaf and had all hearing family members, all of which knew sign language! I could read or communicate with about twenty ancestors of mine and others through telepathic methods. It overwhelmed me. I could not believe how many people I could telepathize with simultaneously. 22

When people known to the near-death experiencers are encountered in NDEs, the great majority are people who are deceased. A study by Dr. Emily Kelly was a comparison of 74 NDEs with descriptions of encountering deceased individuals with 200 NDEs that did not describe encounters with the deceased. 23 This study found that when NDErs encountered beings known to them from their earthly lives in their NDEs, only 4% described meeting beings that were alive at the time of their experiences. I reviewed 84 NDEs from NDERF that described encounters with individual(s) that they knew in their earthly life. 24 There were only three NDEs (4%) where the encountered beings were alive at the time of the NDEs, consistent with the findings of the Kelly study.

In dreams or hallucinations when familiar persons are present they are much more likely to be living and from recent memory. 25 This is in sharp contrast to near-death experiencers where familiar persons encountered are almost always deceased. Cases have been reported by NDErs of seeing a person who they thought was living, but in fact had recently died. 25 , 26 These cases illustrate that NDEs cannot be explained by the experiencer’s expectation of what would happen during a life-threatening event. Further evidence that NDEs are not a result of expectation comes from the aforementioned Kelly study where in one-third of the cases the encountered deceased person had a poor or distant relationship with the NDEr, or was someone that had died before the NDEr was born. 23

Line of Evidence #7

Near-death experiences of young children.

Investigation of near-death experiences in very young children is important because at an early age they are less likely to have established religious beliefs, cultural understandings about death, or even an awareness of what death is. Very young children would be very unlikely to have heard about near-death experiences or understand them. I investigated the NDEs in children age five and younger in the same group of 613 NDErs previously discussed in the section on NDEs while under general anesthesia. Two NDEs were excluded as they did not provide their age in the survey. The study groups included 26 NDErs that were age 5 and younger (average 3.6 years old) and 585 NDErs age 6 and older at the time of their NDEs. The NDERF survey included 33 questions about the content of their NDEs. Chi-square statistics was used to compare the responses to these 33 questions between the two groups. 27 There was no statistically significant difference to the responses between the two groups to any of the 33 questions. The NDERF study found that the content of NDEs in children age five and younger appeared to be the same as the content of NDEs in older children and adults. The finding of the NDERF study are corroborated by the investigation of Dr. Cherie Sutherland who reviewed thirty years of scholarly literature regarding the NDEs of children and concluded:

“It has often been supposed that the NDEs of very young children will have a content limited to their vocabulary. However, it is now clear that the age of children at the time of their NDE does not in any way determine its complexity. Even prelinguistic children have later reported quite complex experiences…. Age does not seem in any way to affect the content of the NDE.” 28

Very young children have near-death experience content that is strikingly similar to older children and adults. This is further evidence that NDEs are occurring independently of preexisting cultural beliefs, religious training, or awareness of the existence of NDE.

Line of Evidence #8

Cross-cultural study of near-death experiences.

Portions of the NDERF website, including the questionnaire, have been translated into 23 different languages. Over 500 near-death experiences in non- English languages have been shared with NDERF over the years. Dozens of volunteers have translated the non- English NDEs into English. Both the non-English and English translated versions of the NDEs are posted on the NDERF website. Over 60,000 people currently visit the NDERF website each month. Many website visitors are bilingual and this help assure that the NDEs are accurately translated.

My investigation of NDEs from around the world that have been translated into English shows that their content is strikingly similar. 29 If near-death experiences were considerably influenced by pre-existing religious and cultural beliefs, it would be expected that there would be significant differences in the content of NDEs from different cultures around the world. However, in my review of over 500 NDEs from dozens of countries around the world I found impressive similarities in the content of these NDEs.

I investigated 19 non-Western NDEs, where a “non- Western country” was defined as areas of the world that are predominantly not of Jewish or Christian heritage. 30 These 19 non-Western NDEs were compared to a group of NDEs shared in English from Western countries that were predominantly English speaking. This investigation concluded:

“All near-death experience elements appearing in Western NDEs are present in non-Western NDEs. There are many non-Western NDEs with narratives that are strikingly similar to the narratives of typical Western NDEs. At a minimum, it may be concluded that non- Western NDEs are much more similar to Western NDEs than dissimilar.” 31

Two recent investigations of Muslim near-death experiences in non-Western countries have been reported. An investigation of 19 Iranian Muslim NDEs concluded:

“Our results suggest that Muslim NDEs may actually be quite common, as they are in the West, and may not be especially different in their key features from Western NDEs and therefore not heavily influenced by cultural variations, including prior religious or spiritual beliefs.” 32

Another study of eight Muslim NDEs found:

“Although the documentation standard of the available cases is generally low, these accounts indicate that structure and contents of NDEs from many non-Western Muslim communities are largely similar to those reported in the Western NDE literature.” 33

The lack of significant differences in the content of near-death experiences around the world, including NDEs from non-Western countries, suggests that NDE content is not substantially modified by preexisting cultural influences. This finding is consistent with the previously discussed finding that children age five and under, who have received far less cultural influence than adults during their brief lives, have NDEs with content that is essentially the same as older children and adults. Other common forms of altered consciousness, such as dreams or hallucinations, are much more likely to be significantly influenced by prior cultural beliefs and life experiences. The lack of significant differences in the content of NDEs around the world is consistent with the concept that NDEs occur independently from physical brain function as currently understood.

Line of Evidence #9

Near-death experience after effects.

Following near-death experiences significant changes in the lives of NDErs are commonly observed. The most recent version of the NDERF survey asked NDErs, “My experience directly resulted in...:”

The responses of 278 NDErs to the question were:

Changes in beliefs and values following near-death experiences are often called aftereffects. Given that a life-threatening event without an NDE might result in life changes, some of the best evidence for NDE-specific aftereffects came from the largest prospective NDE study ever reported. This study, conducted by Pim van Lommel, MD, divided survivors of cardiac arrest into a group that had NDEs, and a group that did not. 12 The aftereffects of both groups were assessed two and eight years after the cardiac arrests. The group of cardiac arrest survivors with NDEs were statistically more likely have a reduced fear of death, increased belief in life after death, interest in the meaning of life, acceptance of others, and were more loving and empathic. It may take years after NDEs for the aftereffects to become fully manifest. The aftereffects may be so substantial that NDErs may seem to be very different people to their loved ones and family. The consistency, intensity, and durability of NDE aftereffects is consistent with the NDErs’ typical personal assessments that their experiences were very meaningful and significant. It is remarkable that NDEs often occur during only minutes of unconsciousness, yet commonly result in substantial and life-long transformations of beliefs and values.

Conclusion of Study

Multiple lines of evidence point to the conclusion that near-death experiences are medically inexplicable and cannot be explained by known physical brain function. Many of the preceding lines of evidence would be remarkable if they were reported by a group of individuals during conscious experiences. However, NDErs are generally unconscious or clinically dead at the time of their experiences and should not have any lucid organized memories from their time of unconsciousness.

It is informative to consider how near-death experiencers themselves view the reality of their experiences. An NDERF survey of 1122 NDErs asked “How do you currently view the reality of your experience?”, and received the following responses:

The great majority of more than 1,000 near-death experiencers believed that their experiences were definitely real. The 1,122 NDErs surveyed included many physicians, scientists, attorneys, and nurses. These findings suggest that, for the majority of us who have not personally experienced an NDE, we should be very cautious about labelling NDEs as “unreal.” Given that such a high percentage of NDErs consider their experiences to be “definitely real,” it would be reasonable to accept their assessment of the reality of their personal experience unless there is good evidence that their experiences were not real.

After over 35 years of scholarly investigation of near-death experience, the totality of what is observed in NDEs has not been adequately explained based on physical brain function. It is beyond the scope of this article to review the many proposed “explanations” of near-death experience. Over the years, there have been over 20 different “explanations” of NDE suggested that cover the gamut of physiological, psychological, and cultural causes. If any one or several of these “explanations” were widely accepted as plausible, then there would be no need for so many different “explanations” of NDE. Among those who believe that physical brain function must explain everything that is experienced in all NDEs, there is no consensus whatsoever about how physical brain function produces NDEs.

The combination of the preceding nine lines of evidence converges on the conclusion that near-death experiences are medically inexplicable. Any one or several of the nine lines of evidence would likely be reasonably convincing to many, but the combination of all of the presented nine lines of evidence provides powerful evidence that NDEs are, in a word, real.

Jeffrey Long, MD, is a radiation oncologist in Houma, Louisiana and a recognized world expert on near-death experiences. Dr. Long established the nonprofit Near Death Experience Research Foundation and a website forum ( www.nderf.org ) for people to share their NDEs.

None reported.

SYSTEMATIC REVIEW article

Explanation of near-death experiences: a systematic analysis of case reports and qualitative research.

• 1 Student Research Committee, Nursing and Midwifery School, Ahvaz Jundishapur University of Medical Sciences, Ahvaz, Iran
• 2 Department of Physiology, School of Medicine, Dezful University of Medical Sciences, Dezful, Iran
• 3 Cancer Research Center, Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran
• 4 School of Nursing, Student Research Committee, Dezful University of Medical Sciences, Dezful, Iran

Background and objective: Some individuals report a near-death experience (NDE) after a life-threatening crisis, which refers to a range of subjective experiences related to impending death. This experience is a phenomenon with transcendental elements, which leads to deep permanent changes in both the individual and the social lives of the NDEr's. Therefore, this study aims to review the near-death experiences of individuals with different religious and cultural views.

Methodology: This is a systematic analysis study. All the case report, case series and qualitative research studies which presented patients' NDE experiences were included in the study, without language restrictions, and in the period of 1980–2022. The stages of screening, selection, data extraction, and quality assessment have been gone through by two of the researchers. Data analysis and synthesis has been done qualitatively. JBI Critical Appraisal Checklist tool was used to evaluate the quality of the included studies.

Findings: After the initial search, 2,407 studies were included, 54 of which underwent final examination. The total number of the NDEr's in the studies was 465 men, women, and children. Among these studies, 27 were case reports, 20 were case series, and 7 were qualitative studies. Near-death experiences have been categorized into 4 main categories and 19 subcategories. The main categories include emotional experiences (2 subcategories), cognitive experiences (4 subcategories), spiritual and religious experiences (4 subcategories), and supernatural experiences [9 subcategories in two categories (out of body experiences, and supernatural and metaphysical perceptions)].

Conclusion: The most frequent near-death experiences were supernatural experiences, especially the experience of leaving the body. The basis and the content of the patterns mentioned by the NDEr's are similar, and the differences are in the explanation and the interpretation of the experience. There is a common core among them such as out-of-body experiences, passing through a tunnel, heightened senses, etc. Therefore, correct knowledge of near-death experiences leads to providing helpful answers to patients.

Introduction

Near-death experiences (NDEs) are deep psychic, conscious, semi-conscious, or recollected experiences of someone who is approaching or has temporarily begun the process of dying which usually occur in life-threatening conditions ( Greyson, 2007 ). In these experiences, the individual seems to be awake, and observes his/her body and the world from a point outside the physical body ( Blanke et al., 2009 ). There are common features such as a feeling of inner peace, out of body experiences, traveling in a dark environment or “void” (usually associated with passing through a tunnel), reviewing one's life from childhood onwards, seeing a bright light, entering an extraterrestrial “other realm,” and communicating with “sentient beings” ( Ring, 1980 ; Greyson, 1983 ; Moody, 2001 ; Martial et al., 2017 ). In a general classification, two factors have been introduced as the origin of these experiences. Van Lommel et al. (2001) and Hess (2019) differentiate between theories that link NDE to physiological changes in the brain and theories which see NDEs as a psychological reaction to approaching death ( Van Lommel et al., 2001 ; Hess, 2019 ). The previous studies have highlighted the uniqueness of NDE memories in the autobiographical memory ( Williams et al., 2008 ), stating that NDE memories contain more sensory, emotional, and self-referential details in comparison with the memories of other real and imaginary events, or the memories of a coma or impaired consciousness following an acquired brain dysfunction without NDE ( Thonnard et al., 2013 ). Near-death experiences occur in various situations, including cardiac arrest in MI(myocardial infarction) (clinical death), the shocks caused by the blood loss after delivery or in postoperative complications, septic or anaphylactic shocks, electrocution, the coma caused by traumatic brain injury, intracerebral hemorrhage or cerebral infarction, suicide attempts, near drowning or suffocation experiences, apnea, and other cases where death is unavoidable ( Van Lommel et al., 2001 , 2017 ). The occurrence of near-death experiences is increasing thanks to improved survival rates through modern medical techniques. The results of a study show that sharing and investigating this phenomenon may happen 5–10 years after the occurrence of the experience, which often prevents the accurate evaluation of physiological and pharmacological factors ( Van Lommel et al., 2001 ). In addition, the results of studies show that the prevalence of this phenomenon in the patients who have gone into cardiac arrest varies between 3.6 and 23% ( Parnia et al., 2001 ; Schwaninger et al., 2002 ; Klemenc-Ketis et al., 2010 ). Other retrospective studies have estimated that between 43 and 48% of adults, and 85% of children who have been affected by life-threatening illnesses may have experienced the NDE phenomenon ( Ring, 1980 ; Sabom, 1982 ; Morse, 2013 ).

The occurrence of these experiences leads to positive consequences in some NDEr such as a more altruistic life, higher spiritual growth, having interest in the meaning of life, fewer materialistic values, or a reduction in the fear of death ( Noyes, 1980 ; Groth-Marnat and Summers, 1998 ; Knoblauch et al., 2001 ; Parnia et al., 2001 ; Moody, 2005 ; Khanna and Greyson, 2014a ). Their subjective nature and the lack of a clear framework for these experiences make the description and the interpretation of these experiences dependent on individual, cultural, or religious factors ( Van Lommel et al., 2017 ). Near-death experiences vary depending on the survivors' own cultural and religious background ( Parnia, 2017 ), and are almost always described based on the individual's religious beliefs. Most of the early studies on NDEs only depict positive emotions ( Ring, 1980 , 1984 ).

Some studies have also mentioned negative experiences in NDEs, including “hellish” ones, although it seems that some NDEr's may still be reluctant to share their experiences ( Charland-Verville et al., 2014 ; Cassol et al., 2019 ). Numerous quantitative and qualitative studies have been published on patients' experiences of this phenomenon. In the oldest study in this field, Raymond A. Moody compared the continental differences of experiencers ( Moody, 2001 , 2005 ; Schlieter and Schlieter, 2018 ). Combining research results allows qualitative studies to be conducted to reveal new insights or to identify whether subject saturation has occurred ( Campbell et al., 2012 ). In addition to qualitative evidence, the majority of studies have collected quantitative data on patients' experiences through structured questionnaires or interviews. The results of the researches that have been carried out since 1981 in the field of NDE indicate that the treatment staff, especially nurses and doctors, have little knowledge of these experiences, while this knowledge is necessary to identify the NDEr's and help them cope with their experiences ( Foster et al., 2009 ). As it was mentioned, these experiences cause deep and lasting changes in patients' personalities, which highlights the necessity of helping these patients to properly understand and perceive the NDE phenomenon and integrate its consequences ( Foster et al., 2009 ; Van Lommel, 2010 ).

As far as the knowledge of the researchers allows, no systematic analysis has been designed in this field so far. Due to the fact that different studies have reached different results and the results of these studies have not been certain, so it is necessary to search for a definite result for a correct understanding of this phenomenon. In the present study, prior registration (Priori), data combination, more inclusive search based on the use of thesaurus systems MeSH and Emtree, investigation in large databases such as SCOPUS, WOS, MEDLINE/PubMed, Embase, Google scholar and ProQuest, use From Gray Literature, including: Thesis and conference papers and Proceedings, as well as the use of experts' opinions and the review of key journals, this systematic review can have a more comprehensive review of the relevant subject. Examining these experiences may pose challenges to the researchers of sciences such as psychology, parapsychology, psychiatry, medicine, philosophy of religion, and psychology of religion, each of which requires competent and well-reasoned answers. This systematic review reports a combination of the evidence related to patients' experiences- case reports, case series, and qualitative research- in order to achieve a comprehensive perception of patients' experiences. Considering the potential causes and the unpredictable aspect of this phenomenon, an overview of patients' experiences seems necessary.

Research questions

This study focused on two specific review questions: (1) “What common experiences regarding the NDEr's accounts of NDE phenomena can be drawn from the results of the existing studies?”, and (2) “What broad knowledge can be gained from the NDEr's accounts of these common experiences?”

Materials and methods

This systematic review has been prepared based on the Joanna Briggs Institute Reviewers' Manual ( Mcarthur et al., 2015 ). Furthermore, the process of selecting the primary studies was done based on the PRISMA-P 2015 checklist ( Institute of Medicine (US) Committee on Standards for Systematic Reviews of Comparative Effectiveness Research, 2011 ), and consensus-based clinical case reporting guideline development guidelines ( Gagnier et al., 2013 ).

Study eligibility criteria

Inclusion and exclusion criteria, types of studies.

In the current research, all case reports, case series, and qualitative research studies mentioning near-death experiences have been selected for entering. Other types of studies including cohort studies, case control, cross sectional, review, and clinical trial were not included in this research.

Types of participants

In this study, the eligible population included the individuals who had experienced unavoidable death and NDE without any age, gender, race, or ethnicity restrictions.

Search strategy components

Without any language restrictions, studies were searched in PubMed/Medline, Scopus, Medline/Ovid, SPORTD (EBSCO), CENTRAL, and EMBASE, Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL), and Google Scholar search engines from Dec 15, 1980 to June 15, 2022. These were searched in ISI, Scopus, and ProQuest database. The details regarding the process of searching in the PubMed database have been provided below.

(“End Of Life”[tiab] OR End-Of-Life OR[tiab] “Determination of Death”[tiab] OR “Near-Death Experience”[tiab] OR “Out of body Experiences”[tiab] OR “Cardiac Death”[tiab] OR (Death[tiab] AND Cardiac[tiab])) OR “Sudden Cardiac Death”[tiab] OR (“Cardiac Death”[tiab] AND Sudden[tiab]) OR (Death[tiab] AND “Sudden Cardiac”[tiab]) OR “Cardiac Sudden Death”[tiab] OR (Death[tiab] AND “Cardiac Sudden”[tiab]) OR (“Sudden Death”[tiab] AND Cardiac[tiab]) OR “Sudden Cardiac Arrest”[tiab] OR (Arrest[tiab] AND “Sudden Cardiac”[tiab]) OR (“Cardiac Arrests”[tiab] AND Sudden[tiab]) OR (“Cardiac Arrest”[tiab] AND Sudden[tiab]) OR “Brain Death”[tiab] OR (Death[tiab] AND Brain[tiab]) OR “Brain Dead * ”[tiab] OR “Coma Depasse”[tiab] OR “Irreversible Coma”[tiab] OR (Coma[tiab] AND Irreversible[tiab]) OR Coma * [tiab] OR Comatose[tiab] OR Pseudocoma * [tiab]) AND 1980/12/15:2022/12/15[dp].

The selection of keywords of this systematic review was done through a combination of Mesh Term, Free Text words, and Emtree. In case of coming across the studies in other languages such as Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, etc. while searching, Google translation service was used, and for more certainty in this regard, a translator familiar with that language was asked for help. The aim of this study was to obtain all the articles that have been published in the field in order to minimize the risk of publication and reference bias in this article. Besides, PubMed's “My NCBI” (National Center for Biotechnology Information) email alert service was used to identify newly published studies. Manual search including gray literature, the reference list of the primary included studies, and key journals were searched to find more studies. If the researchers came across a study which matched the objectives of the present study, in case of not having access to the full text of the articles, data's being unpublished, or the existence of wrong and ambiguous data, the responsible author of the article would be emailed, and every 1–10 days, three other emails would be sent. The authors of the article were assured that the article would be reported appropriately. If no message was received from the author of the article after 3 emails, the article would inevitably be excluded. The two authors would try to reach an agreement in case of any disagreement, and in case of not reaching an agreement, the opinion of a third knowledgeable individual would be used as the decision criterion.

Screening and selection

At first, the studies obtained in the search phase were transferred to the End Note software (× 7), and duplicate articles were removed from the software. Then two researchers (H, A and AH, H) separately reviewed all the primary studies based on the titles and the abstracts of the articles, and presented a number of studies which were in line with the search strategy in order to determine eligible studies based on the inclusion criteria. The selected studies were classified into three categories: relevant, irrelevant, and uncertain. The articles which were reported to be irrelevant by both researchers were excluded from the study, then the same two researchers separately evaluated the obtained studies based on the full texts of the articles. Each researcher provided a list of selected articles and the two lists were compared. In case of any disagreement between the researchers, it would be resolved through discussion and exchange of opinions. In case they could not reach a consensus, a third individual would act as an arbitrator. Then the agreement between the two arbitrators would be evaluated and, after a general agreement, the result would be reported as a statistical Kappa coefficient. According to this, in the present study, there was no disagreement between the two researchers in the steps performed. The agreement coefficient is calculated to be 100%.

Study quality and the risk of bias assessment

The assessment of the risk of bias and the quality of study methodology was performed by two researchers (H, A and AH, H), separately, using JBI Critical Appraisal Checklists for Case Series and Case Reports, and JBI Critical Appraisal Checklist for Qualitative Research ( Moola et al., 2020 ). These tools consist of 10 questions, and each question is answered in 4 ways: yes, no, unclear, and not applicable. Then all the studies were placed in three categories: Low Risk, High Risk, and Moderate Risk of Bias. The researchers tried to reach consensus in case of any disagreement.

Case Series and Case Reports checklist questions included 10 questions, respectively (1−Were there clear criteria for inclusion in the case series? 2−Was the condition measured in a standard, reliable way for all participants included in the case series? 3−Were valid methods used for identification of the condition for all participants included in the case series? 4−Did the case series have consecutive inclusion of participants? 5−Did the case series have complete inclusion of participants? 6−Was there clear reporting of the demographics of the participants in the study? 7−Was there clear reporting of clinical information of the participants? 8−Were the outcomes or follow up results of cases clearly reported? 9−Was there clear reporting of the presenting site(s)/clinic(s) demographic information? 10−Was statistical analysis appropriate.), and the questions of the qualitative checklist included 10 questions (1-Is there congruity between the stated philosophical perspective and the research methodology? 2−Is there congruity between the research methodology and the research question or objectives? 3−Is there congruity between the research methodology and the methods used to collect data? 4−Is there congruity between the research methodology and the representation and analysis of data? 5−Is there congruity between the research methodology and the interpretation of results? 6−Is there a statement locating the researcher culturally or theoretically? 7−Is the influence of the researcher on the research, and vice- versa, addressed? 8−Are participants, and their voices, adequately represented? 9−Is the research ethical according to current criteria or, for recent studies, and is there evidence of ethical approval by an appropriate body? 10- Do the conclusions drawn in the research report flow from the analysis, or interpretation, of the data?) ( Moola et al., 2020 ).

Data extraction

Data extraction was carried out by two researchers (H, A and AH, H), separately, using an information extraction form developed by the researcher. At first, an article was evaluated using this form as pilot evaluation, then it was used for evaluating other articles as well. Each researcher submitted the data extraction form of his articles and the two lists were compared. In case of any disagreement between the researchers, it would be resolved through discussion and exchange of opinions. If consensus was not reached, a third individual would act as an arbitrator, then the agreement between the two arbitrators would be evaluated. The following data be extracted from all studies: the first author's name, the article's year of publication, the country where the study had been done, the type of study design, the number of individuals who had experienced unavoidable death, and the characteristics including age (or age groups), gender, the NDEr's (near-death experiencers) underlying factors, and the type of NDE. The NDEr's quotes in the original studies were required for data analysis in order to preserve the meaning of the original text as a unit interpreted by the authors, or as raw data.

In order to analyze qualitative data, Graneheim and Lundman method was used ( Graneheim and Lundman, 2004 ; Hsieh and Shannon, 2005 ). Semantic units were extracted from the participants' statements in the form of primary codes. The codes were also classified based on semantic and conceptual similarity and were as small and compressed as possible. There was a downward trend in data reduction in all analysis units and sub- and main classes. Finally, the data were placed in the main classes that were more general and conceptual, and the themes were abstracted. In addition, an example of data analysis has been shown in Table 1 .

Table 1 . An example of data analysis in the main themes.

Descriptive characteristics of the articles

After searching, 2,407 articles were found. Using Endnote software, the titles and the abstracts of the articles were checked, and 905 duplicate articles were removed. Then the titles and the abstracts of 1,502 articles were examined by the researchers (H, A and AH, H). A total of 1,350 irrelevant articles were excluded based on the study objectives. At this stage, in case of doubting the relevance of an article with the study objectives, the full text of the article was reviewed by the researchers. In the next step, a search was done to access the full texts of the articles and, finally, the full text of 152 articles were reviewed. Considering the inclusion and the exclusion criteria based on the research objectives, some articles were excluded for the reasons given in the Prisma flowchart ( Figure 1 ). To ensure that all the articles had been retrieved, the reference lists of the final articles were also manually searched; no studies were added in this stage. Finally, 54 studies were finalized.

Figure 1 . PRISMA schematic flowchart of enrolment and exclusions.

Tables 2 , 3 summarizes the characteristics of the included studies. In this table, the name of the first author, the title of the article, the year of publication, the NDEr's characteristics, the NDE's underlying factors, and after-death experiences are stated separately for each study. The studies had been published from 1985 to 2021. The 460 NDEr's included men ( n = 126), women ( n = 150), children ( n = 22) and N/C ( n = 162). The studies included 27 case reports, 20 case series, and 7 qualitative studies.

Table 2 . Characteristics of the case report studies and background detail of near-death experiencers ( N = 27).

Table 3 . Characteristics of the case series and qualitative studies and background detail of near-death experiencers ( N = 27).

Near-death experiences have been classified into 4 main categories, and 19 sub-categories. The main categories include emotional experiences (2 subcategories), cognitive experiences (4 subcategories), spiritual and religious experiences (4 subcategories), and supernatural experiences (9 subcategories in two categories (out of body experiences, and supernatural and metaphysical perceptions). The Individuals reported heightened senses, in 39 studies and out-of-body experiences, in 35 studies. In 28 studies, the patients reported positive experiences including love, the feeling of peace, and tranquility, and in 6 studies, they reported negative experiences, mostly torture and hellish experiences. Most of the experiences presented by the NDEr's were supernatural and metaphysical experiences, which are shown in Figure 2 and Table 4 .

Figure 2 . Categorization of individuals who had experienced unavoidable death.

Table 4 . The presence or absence of any category of experience in the included studies.

Methodological quality

Despite all the differences in methodological design and quality, none of the 21 studies received more than 5 negative ratings; therefore, they were all included ( Tables 5 , 6 ). All the studies clearly described their research objectives, used an appropriate research methodology and design, and collected data in a way that answered the research question. In addition, Table 2 examines the quality of studies; 11 studies were of poor quality, 37 of medium quality, and 5 of good quality.

Table 5 . Quality assessment for case study/case series that we include in this article.

Table 6 . Quality assessment for qualitative study that we include in this article.

This systematic revue study was conducted with the aim of explaining Individuals' near-death experiences and identifying common experiences. The results of this study are categorized into 4 main categories including emotional, cognitive, religious, spiritual and supernatural experiences.

Supernatural experiences were the most frequent category of experiences related to NDE, which consist of two subcategories: out of body experiences, and supernatural and metaphysical perceptions. In many studies, supernatural perceptions include passing through a tunnel involuntarily, moving toward the ceiling [out-of-body experience (OBE)], seeing one's own physical body from above whilst outside the body (the phenomenon of self-bilocation), having awareness of the places far from the body, self-permeability (passing through physical objects such as walls), being present in several locations at the same time (self-multilocation) (composed bodies), the feeling of being floating, entering a non-terrestrial location (heaven), and telepathy (non-verbal communication) with others. It can be said that the most important feature of NDEs is an out-of-body experience (OBE), which had been experienced by the majority of the NDErs. OBE is a type of autoscopy (literally, “watching oneself”) in which the soul is separated from the body, but the individual is in a fully conscious state or beyond normal consciousness ( Long and Perry, 2010 ). Soul, in religion and philosophy, the immaterial aspect or essence of a human being that which confers individuality and humanity, often considered to be synonymous with the mind or the self. For most theologies, the Soul is further defined as that part of the individual, which partakes of divinity and transcends the body in different explanations ( Ciocan, 2019 ). The individual seems to be awake, and watches his body and the world from a disembodied place and outside his physical body ( Blanke et al., 2016 ), or perceives verified events that have occurred at a distance outside his/her scope ( Greyson et al., 2009 ). A typical narrative is: “I was lying on the bed. Suddenly, I ascended in a suspended state, watching myself and the events that were taking place from somewhere above the floor, for example, near the ceiling.” ( Green, 1968 ; Van Lommel, 2010 ). After an OBE, some individuals have had numerous supernatural perceptions. In some cases, there is a higher number of perceived experiences and, in others, there are fewer ones. However, there are many commonalities among the mentioned metaphysical experiences. The results of various studies show that after the soul leaves the body, NDErs enter a cylindrical tunnel, at the beginning of which there is absolute darkness and, at the end, a very dazzling light toward which the individual is guided. In most cases, this experience has been a very difficult one to forget. This experience is called a Tunnel Experience (TE) ( Sabom, 1978 ). A tunnel experience may be defined as the perception of a realistic enclosed space which is much longer than its diameter. The peripheral features and the deep perspectives of this phenomenon indicate organizing the space around a central area in the visual field ( Moody, 2001 ). Tunnel experiences have been reported in different forms including cylinder, pipe, tunnel, passage, corridor, spiral, well, funnel, shaft, hole, culvert, cave, long enclosure, sewer, cone, and so on ( Drab, 1981 ). Greyson claims that crossing the tunnel occurs mostly for Indian and Buddhist NDEr's ( Greyson, 2015 ). However, the results of another study conducted on the Muslim population have also confirmed similar experiences (Ghasemiannejad-Jahromi A and R., 2018). In his study, Todd Murphy states that tunnels are not seen or are very rare in Thai NDEs ( Murphy, 2001 ). This systematic review study shows that the supernatural and metaphysical experiences of the participants have similar roots for every race and religion, with differences in the expression of details.

The second category of NDEs were spiritual and religious experiences, consisting of the 4 subcategories: meeting with the dead and acquaintances, meeting with religious figures, feeling oneness with the universe, and observing punishment and reward for actions. Some NDEr's have reported encounters with their deceased relatives and friends ( Tassell-Matamua, 2013 ; Ghasemiannejad et al., 2014 ). Additionally, some children who have experienced NDEs have reported meeting the individuals whom they did not know at the time of the NDE, but later recognized as their deceased relatives from the family photos they had never seen before ( Morse et al., 1985 ; Lopez et al., 2006 ). Other NDErs report encountering a recently deceased individual, whose death they hadn't been aware of ( Greyson, 2010 ). One of the common aspects of the experiences was meeting with religious figures. The results of a study that compared NDE experiences in different cultures show that in western NDEs, when one is in the tunnel, he/she perceives that a group of deceased relatives and friends have come to welcome him/her, while in Thai NDEs, the experiences usually start with Yamatoots (Yamadutas are the messengers of death according to Hinduism, the agents of Yama, the god of the netherworld) ( Murphy, 2001 ). In Thai NDEs, there is no experience of being light , and the Buddha appears only symbolically. One of the Thai experienced mentioned, “I asked [Yamatoot] to take me to visit the Lord Buddha. I told him I had to see the Buddha. Yamatoot looked up and pointed at the sky, saying, ‘That big star is the Buddha”' ( Moody, 2001 ). In Western NDEs, the majority of the NDErs were Christians, and had seen the figures associated with Jesus Christ and the apostles ( Greyson, 2010 ). In a study whose target population were Twelver Shīʿīsm (also known as Imāmīyyah, is the largest branch of Shīʿa Islam, comprising about 85 percent of all Shīʿa Muslims), the reported religious and spiritual figures were among Shiite imams ( Ghasemiannejad-Jahromi et al., 2018 ). For a better understanding of this category, the individuals' religious and cultural backgrounds should be considered while interpreting the experiences, encounters, and observations. The results of some other studies reveal a feeling of oneness with the universe and the whole cosmos, where the NDErs had stated that they had unified with the whole universe or a part of creation such as plants, with no distance between them ( Long and Perry, 2010 ; Ghasemiannejad et al., 2014 ). The idea that the individual is inextricably connected to the rest of the world, or that everything is part of a whole, can be found in many of the world's religious, spiritual, and philosophical traditions ( Ivanhoe et al., 2018 ). Most of the individuals who have experienced the feeling of oneness say that they will choose this state of mind if they have eternal life. Oneness is perhaps the deepest and the most sublime state that a human being can achieve ( Klussman, 2022 ). The last subcategory of spiritual-religious experiences was observing punishment and reward for actions. Research shows that some NDEr's are able to perceive the external consequences of their actions and deeds in the world, as well as their inner and hidden effects ( Holden et al., 2009 ; Greyson, 2014 ; Khanna and Greyson, 2014b ).

Another category of NDEs were cognitive experiences, which consisted of 4 subcategories, including heightened senses, an altered nature of time, reviewing life events, and the sudden perception of a specific knowledge. In regard with the heightened senses, a review of the reports of the NDEr's shows that their visual descriptions are impressive (efficacious) and clear (obvious), all while these individuals are unconscious and often clinically dead at the time of experiencing and seeing such wonderful sights. In NDEs, all the senses of sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell have been described. The heightened senses and the improved consciousness among these individuals even indicate that these experiences are to be very different from dreams and sleep, and at the moment it is difficult to find a recognized medical explanation for NDEs. This phenomenon is medically inexplicable. There is no other type of altered consciousness experience in which events are that clear, consciousness is that strong, and events follow one another in such a specific order. The research conducted in this field shows a stable pattern of enhanced consciousness and heightened senses, which leads to the clarity of NDEs and proves them ( Bryant and Peck, 2009 ; Khanna and Greyson, 2014b ). Moreover, according to some experienced, in NDEs, time loses its meaning and sense, and they see the events of their life in a fraction of a second ( Holden et al., 2009 ). Reviewing the past events of one's life is another cognitive experience in which NDErs may see a part or all of their life. The individual's encounter with self is one of the most important and common features of these experiences. At this stage, one encounters his/her own words, actions, and thoughts, and sees his/her own life in the form of a book, show, or movie, and judges it. The results of other research show that while reviewing their lives, the individuals review their past actions, words, and thoughts, and realize that each of them has a special energy, which has affected both themselves and others in this world ( Facco and Agrillo, 2012b ; Tassell-Matamua, 2014 ). In addition, the results of various studies, including Long's research, state that the events observed in the NDEr's life reviews are based on reality. These results assume that if NDEs are real, it is expected that the events observed during the life review be confirmed by the individual, and vice versa, if NDEs are not real, significant errors must occur during the life review. However, the latter is not the case, and everything has been confirmed by the individuals ( Bryant and Peck, 2009 ; Khanna and Greyson, 2014b ).

The last category of near-death experiences is emotional experiences, which includes two subcategories: positive experiences and negative experiences. Many NDErs state that they have experienced immense peace, and that it has been their most memorable experience, in such a way that they hesitated whether or not to return to life. In addition, in the cases where an individual had died with severe pain, his/her pain had disappeared with the sudden experience of relaxation ( Klemenc-Ketis et al., 2010 ; Long and Perry, 2010 ). Most of the early studies on NDEs depicted only positive emotions ( Ring, 1980 , 1984 ). However, an interdisciplinary study was published, in which they identified 55 NDErs, eleven of whom reported negative experiences ( Lindley et al., 1981 ). Another study indicated that 1–10% of the samples had not described positive feelings ( Charland-Verville et al., 2014 ), these different proportions can be attributed to very broad definitions of disturbing NDEs, as well as different methods ( Greyson, 2003 ; Charland-Verville et al., 2014 ). Reviewing the conducted studies shows that hellish and purgatory scenes are rarely found in NDEs, but heavenly scenes are seen more often and are very similar to each other. It may be concluded that the disturbing dimensions of the experience, added to its mystical aspect, can prevent the individuals from sharing it ( Cassol et al., 2019 ). Based on the results of a study, frightening NDEs are divided into three groups: 1. The negative events may be viewed as warnings about unwise actions, leading to self-analysis and, ultimately, a “spin” in the NDEr's life, 2. The NDEr may treat the event as if it is not important, and 3. The frightening event may lead to difficulty in integrating the experience, developing a sense of stigma ( Greyson, 2014 ).

Advantages and limitations

The present study has combined data focusing on the principle of comprehensiveness and quality. To perform a comprehensive search, the synonym recognition systems of Thesaurus Mesh and Emtree were used to determine the keywords. Then the search was done in the vastest electronic databases such as PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, and ProQuest with a wide time range, using experts' opinions, without time or place limitations. Considering the variety of the experiences reported by the experienced, the results were reported qualitatively. Some of the studies date back to the years before 1990, some of whose PDFs were incomplete, and the data of a number of their cases had been presented incompletely.

It can be almost concluded that according to the researchers who have presented valuable research in this field, the basis and the content of the patterns mentioned by the NDEr's are similar, and the differences are in the explanation and the interpretation of the experience. There is a common core among them such as out-of-body experiences, passing through a tunnel, heightened senses, etc. This is what all ethnic groups and nations face, without exception and without being influenced by religion, race, culture, and the native customs of their countries. Besides this central core, a series of other events or actions take place, which are more detailed and rooted in the personal archive of the NDEr's, consisting of all kinds of symbols, images, and characters which have been important only to that person. It is clear that aspects of near-death experiences are influenced by culture, while there are also parts that are universal. The most critical versatile features include altered states of consciousness and delusions, which seem to occur in all cultures studied so far. However, the specific characteristics of this experience vary significantly according to cultural context. The first point is that apparently, the content of experiences shows variations. For example, in some cultures, certain religious figures may be seen, and unlike them, others may see their deceased relatives. Second, the pattern of this experience is diverse, so people from certain cultures may have the experience of leaving the body, going to the tunnel, and reviewing life, and unlike them, the experience of others does not include these, and finally, the concept and perception of the near-death experience are different among cultures. In the current study, four main NDE categories were extracted from case reports, case series, and qualitative research studies, in the majority of which the experiences were common. The heightened senses and the improved consciousness among these individuals even indicate that “these experiences are neither dreams, nor sleep, nor the disorders caused”; “This phenomenon is medically inexplicable.” The research conducted in this field show a stable pattern of enhanced consciousness and heightened senses, “which leads to the clarity of NDEs and proves their being real.” The familiarity of the treatment staff, especially nurses and doctors, with NDE components and elements, gaining knowledge in this regard, and an awareness of appropriate and pertinent interventions can lead to proper reactions and feedbacks in response to the NDEr.

Data availability statement

The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/supplementary material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.

Author contributions

HA, AH, AO, and MR designed the study, supervised and directed the study, carried out the implementation, aided in designing the study, and worked on the manuscript. HA and AH processed the experimental data, performed the analysis, and drafted the manuscript. All authors discussed the results, commented on the manuscript, and approved the final manuscript.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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5300 experiences from all over the world in many languages., all are welcome, with your help, nderf has over half a million readers a month to spread the word of love, peace and global unity., nderf nde definition:, "a lucid experience associated with perceived consciousness apart from the body occurring at the time of actual or threatened imminent death.", in search of immortality, 11/26/2021 - the bigelow contest, officially known as the bics contest, is the first contest of its kind to explore if there is evidence for consciousness outside of the body. over 1,000 people from around the world participated in this contest. just over two hundred essays were allowed to proceed to convince the judges that "yes" consciousness can, and does, exist separately from the body - even after death. many questions were explored, such as: what is consciousness; what evidence is convincing how do we know a distinguished panel of judges evaluated the bics essays and constituted one of the most stringent and scholarly peer-reviews conceivable. dr. pim van lommel , one of the leading researchers in the world on consciousness, and dr. jeff long , founder of nderf and media personality, brought home significant prizes. dr. van lommel was awarded the number 2 prize and dr. long was in the runner-up group. (click the links above to read these papers) for the nde community, this is one of the highest public affirmations of the validity of nde, as well as other types of paranormal experiences that are actually "normal." a hearty congratulations for these life-time achievement awards in moving humanity forwards.

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Jody Long, JD

Jeffrey long, md.

PHILOSOPHY/MISSION STATEMENT:

If enough people read about love, peace and hope; maybe they can change to become more loving, compassionate people who truly live their lives without fear.

We can then change the world to become a better place like heaven on earth - as above, so below.

Jody Long is a retired attorney, formerly licensed in Washington, New Mexico, Louisiana, and the Navajo Nation. Critical thinking, intense curiosity, and being a book reader extraordinaire, helps discern truth and allows for crucial commentary on a wide range of subjects from spirituality, history, economics, social organization, and power structures.

She is webmaster for the Near Death Experience Research Foundation (NDERF) for 20+ years and provides support and a forum for NDErs and those who want to know about the afterlife. She has several decades of experience researching paranormal and related phenomena. She is also webmaster for After Death Communication Research Foundation (ADCRF) www.adcrf.org and the other consciousness experience website which is everything that is not an NDE or ADC (OBERF) www.oberf.org

Jody helped with "Evidence of the Afterlife," the New York Times best selling NDE book. She has written "From Soul to Soulmate: Bridges from Near Death Experience Wisdom" and "God’s Fingerprints: Impressions of Near Death Experiences," which was the first book of its genre published in mainland China.

Jeffrey Long is a medical doctor specializing in the practice of radiation oncology, using radiation to treat cancer in London,Kentucky.

As a scientist, Jeff founded NDERF in 1998. He wanted to know if NDEs were real by directly asking the NDErs themselves. The answer is a resounding YES! As a result of his research, he is the author of the New York Times Best Seller, "Evidence of the Afterlife: The Science of Near-Death Experiences." As a leading NDE researcher and a medical doctor, Jeff has appeared on national media including O'Reilly Factor, NBC Today, ABC with Peter Jennings, the Dr. Oz Show, the History Channel, the Learning Channel, and National Geographic. He has also appeared on Fox News Houston and at the New York Academy of Sciences, was an NDE expert in the movie "After Death." Dr. Long, author of "Near-Death Experiences: Evidence for their Reality" published in the medical journal, "Missouri Medicine" and is now listed in the National Library of Medicine. This is a big deal for establishing the credibility of NDE with scientists and the medical community. You can download and read the free article by clicking here .

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God and the Afterlife expands upon Dr. Long’s findings about the afterlife and is the first deep scientific exploration of NDE accounts that encounter God or spiritual beings. He shares accounts from NDErs who meet God. What he discovers is that these testimonials share unique similarities that provide overwhelming evidence that God is real.

Read some of the best NDEs.

This is a feel-good book with some of the most profound NDEs ever submitted to NDERF. This book was written to share NDEs with people who enjoy reading books or who don't have access to a computer.

Love & Relationships

Love is the number one idea described by the NDErs and learning about love through relationships is the number one reason we come to earth. This book puts the two concepts together to help learn to apply them in our own lives.

Takes NDE Research to a whole new level!

“There is currently more scientific evidence to the reality of near death experience (NDE) than there is for how to effectively treat certain forms of cancer,” states radiation oncologist Dr. Jeffrey Long in his groundbreaking book Evidence of the Afterlife.

Touching Comments

We want to thank our readers by sharing some of the most heart-felt comments.

Just a thank you for continuing to post near death surveys on your website. As a spiritual seeker who also is dealing with cancer, these accounts are very comforting. I check for new postings regularly and always enjoy reading all the new postings as soon as they are available on the Website. I found Dr. Long's book to be an excellent source of information that was both analytically presented and inspiring. I've survived cancer a number of times and am prayerfully optimistic this will again be the case at age 64. However, I'm confident that a loving Creator awaits us to experience Atonement in Love once we lay our bodies down. Thanks to many NDE accounts of the marvelous love that awaits us, my fear of dying has diminished.

Thanks Jody. You know, what you and Jeff do with this website is extraordinarily important and useful. I cannot overstate how important NDE stories have been to me since losing my son three years ago. I have read many hundreds of stories on your website, and refer people to it frequently.

Just wanted to write and say how much your website has meant to me. I have been interested in NDEs for a long time. The first one I heard about on a BBC documentary resonated with me so much. I have just read Amy C NDE 4720 and was awash with tears. Happy tears , tears of relief! I have always worried about many of life's big questions and have been trying to grow on a spiritual level. I have been able to do so by reading as many NDEs as I can and learning from these peoples experiences. What you are providing people in your website is a gift. I have read your book "Evidence of the Afterlife" and want to thank you for that too. I now truly believe our time here on earth is given to us as a way for us to grow spiritually. I am a much calmer and happier person because of this knowledge. As a teacher I respect the nature of learning and look forward to a future where I am always learning and growing. Thank you for being a part of that.

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So many of these experiences are clearly from people who are unsure or in some manner insecure about telling their story. I wish these was some way I could reach them just to send a short message of thanks for posting. Not to breach their privacy or make their ego swell. Just to feel I can close the circle, let them know they really help, their experience in print is a powerful message. - R

Thank you for the suggestion and your time. Many blessings to you and thanks again for the work you do - L

Thank you, I really love your sites. Thanks for all of the hard work you do to get this information out there to the world. It's helped me so much!! :) Blessings to you... - R

I love your site. It has been such an inspiration to me over the years. I found John K's STE in the exceptional accounts section so uplifting. Like him, I am a monk in a monastery. I wonder if there's any way you could forward my thanks to him? Really a wonderful account. Thanks for all your work here. Bravo! - A

I just had to express my gratitude for this website I absolutely love it! I look forward to reading all the new stories every week. I too had an out of body experience when I was 7 yrs old so I understand. It also helps clarify things for me now. I just can't thank you enough. – L

Both my wife and I read your book and were very moved. We have gone to your website often over the past few years and have found great comfort in the postings from those who wrote about their NDEs. I just wanted to reach out and encourage your work in this area. You are well appreciated. -S

I wanted to thank you for your wonderful site. I have been following your messages for years. Many are uplifting to me and I am sure others. I can imagine that the people who have spoken of their NDE's are very relieved and happy to find that they have a place to share. – M

Thank you so much for the NDERF website. I found it thankfully due to an article in "Share International" by Patricia Pitchon. I have for quite a long time had an interest in NDE's , the many accounts on your website have given me a much deeper understanding of the nature of the Universe and of our role on the physical plane. It is also profoundly comforting. I have told several people about the website in hope of spreading the knowledge further. Your website has a huge positive effect on my life, I am so grateful, - K

Thank you so much for your site. It has given me a lot of comfort over the past few months. I've read so many stories and find them all fascinating and reassuring. While I haven't had an NDE, so many of the experiences sound familiar to me. It doesn't make sense, but that's the best way to describe the feeling I get when reading the stories. - Z

I am contacting you because you have the most beautiful stories on your site. I cannot wait to read them every Monday morning when I get up because they usually get updated over a weekend. - E

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• Death And Dying

8 Popular Essays About Death, Grief & the Afterlife

Updated 05/4/2022

Published 07/19/2021

Joe Oliveto, BA in English

Contributing writer

Cake values integrity and transparency. We follow a strict editorial process to provide you with the best content possible. We also may earn commission from purchases made through affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. Learn more in our affiliate disclosure .

Death is a strange topic for many reasons, one of which is the simple fact that different people can have vastly different opinions about discussing it.

Jump ahead to these sections: 

Essays or articles about the death of a loved one, essays or articles about dealing with grief, essays or articles about the afterlife or near-death experiences.

Some fear death so greatly they don’t want to talk about it at all. However, because death is a universal human experience, there are also those who believe firmly in addressing it directly. This may be more common now than ever before due to the rise of the death positive movement and mindset.

You might believe there’s something to be gained from talking and learning about death. If so, reading essays about death, grief, and even near-death experiences can potentially help you begin addressing your own death anxiety. This list of essays and articles is a good place to start. The essays here cover losing a loved one, dealing with grief, near-death experiences, and even what someone goes through when they know they’re dying.

Losing a close loved one is never an easy experience. However, these essays on the topic can help someone find some meaning or peace in their grief.

1. ‘I’m Sorry I Didn’t Respond to Your Email, My Husband Coughed to Death Two Years Ago’ by Rachel Ward

Rachel Ward’s essay about coping with the death of her husband isn’t like many essays about death. It’s very informal, packed with sarcastic humor, and uses an FAQ format. However, it earns a spot on this list due to the powerful way it describes the process of slowly finding joy in life again after losing a close loved one.

Ward’s experience is also interesting because in the years after her husband’s death, many new people came into her life unaware that she was a widow. Thus, she often had to tell these new people a story that’s painful but unavoidable. This is a common aspect of losing a loved one that not many discussions address.

2. ‘Everything I know about a good death I learned from my cat’ by Elizabeth Lopatto

Not all great essays about death need to be about human deaths! In this essay, author Elizabeth Lopatto explains how watching her beloved cat slowly die of leukemia and coordinating with her vet throughout the process helped her better understand what a “good death” looks like.

For instance, she explains how her vet provided a degree of treatment but never gave her false hope (for instance, by claiming her cat was going to beat her illness). They also worked together to make sure her cat was as comfortable as possible during the last stages of her life instead of prolonging her suffering with unnecessary treatments.

Lopatto compares this to the experiences of many people near death. Sometimes they struggle with knowing how to accept death because well-meaning doctors have given them the impression that more treatments may prolong or even save their lives, when the likelihood of them being effective is slimmer than patients may realize.

Instead, Lopatto argues that it’s important for loved ones and doctors to have honest and open conversations about death when someone’s passing is likely near. This can make it easier to prioritize their final wishes instead of filling their last days with hospital visits, uncomfortable treatments, and limited opportunities to enjoy themselves.

3. ‘The terrorist inside my husband’s brain’ by Susan Schneider Williams

This article, which Susan Schneider Williams wrote after the death of her husband Robin Willians, covers many of the topics that numerous essays about the death of a loved one cover, such as coping with life when you no longer have support from someone who offered so much of it. 

However, it discusses living with someone coping with a difficult illness that you don’t fully understand, as well. The article also explains that the best way to honor loved ones who pass away after a long struggle is to work towards better understanding the illnesses that affected them. 

4. ‘Before I Go’ by Paul Kalanithi

“Before I Go” is a unique essay in that it’s about the death of a loved one, written by the dying loved one. Its author, Paul Kalanithi, writes about how a terminal cancer diagnosis has changed the meaning of time for him.

Kalanithi describes believing he will die when his daughter is so young that she will likely never have any memories of him. As such, each new day brings mixed feelings. On the one hand, each day gives him a new opportunity to see his daughter grow, which brings him joy. On the other hand, he must struggle with knowing that every new day brings him closer to the day when he’ll have to leave her life.

Coping with grief can be immensely challenging. That said, as the stories in these essays illustrate, it is possible to manage grief in a positive and optimistic way.

5. Untitled by Sheryl Sandberg

This piece by Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s current CEO, isn’t a traditional essay or article. It’s actually a long Facebook post. However, many find it’s one of the best essays about death and grief anyone has published in recent years.

She posted it on the last day of sheloshim for her husband, a period of 30 days involving intense mourning in Judaism. In the post, Sandberg describes in very honest terms how much she learned from those 30 days of mourning, admitting that she sometimes still experiences hopelessness, but has resolved to move forward in life productively and with dignity.

She explains how she wanted her life to be “Option A,” the one she had planned with her husband. However, because that’s no longer an option, she’s decided the best way to honor her husband’s memory is to do her absolute best with “Option B.”

This metaphor actually became the title of her next book. Option B , which Sandberg co-authored with Adam Grant, a psychologist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, is already one of the most beloved books about death , grief, and being resilient in the face of major life changes. It may strongly appeal to anyone who also appreciates essays about death as well.

6. ‘My Own Life’ by Oliver Sacks

Grief doesn’t merely involve grieving those we’ve lost. It can take the form of the grief someone feels when they know they’re going to die.

Renowned physician and author Oliver Sacks learned he had terminal cancer in 2015. In this essay, he openly admits that he fears his death. However, he also describes how knowing he is going to die soon provides a sense of clarity about what matters most. Instead of wallowing in his grief and fear, he writes about planning to make the very most of the limited time he still has.

Belief in (or at least hope for) an afterlife has been common throughout humanity for decades. Additionally, some people who have been clinically dead report actually having gone to the afterlife and experiencing it themselves.

Whether you want the comfort that comes from learning that the afterlife may indeed exist, or you simply find the topic of near-death experiences interesting, these are a couple of short articles worth checking out.

7. ‘My Experience in a Coma’ by Eben Alexander

“My Experience in a Coma” is a shortened version of the narrative Dr. Eben Alexander shared in his book, Proof of Heaven . Alexander’s near-death experience is unique, as he’s a medical doctor who believes that his experience is (as the name of his book suggests) proof that an afterlife exists. He explains how at the time he had this experience, he was clinically braindead, and therefore should not have been able to consciously experience anything.

Alexander describes the afterlife in much the same way many others who’ve had near-death experiences describe it. He describes starting out in an “unresponsive realm” before a spinning white light that brought with it a musical melody transported him to a valley of abundant plant life, crystal pools, and angelic choirs. He states he continued to move from one realm to another, each realm higher than the last, before reaching the realm where the infinite love of God (which he says is not the “god” of any particular religion) overwhelmed him.

8. “One Man's Tale of Dying—And Then Waking Up” by Paul Perry

The author of this essay recounts what he considers to be one of the strongest near-death experience stories he’s heard out of the many he’s researched and written about over the years. The story involves Dr. Rajiv Parti, who claims his near-death experience changed his views on life dramatically.

Parti was highly materialistic before his near-death experience. During it, he claims to have been given a new perspective, realizing that life is about more than what his wealth can purchase. He returned from the experience with a permanently changed outlook.

This is common among those who claim to have had near-death experiences. Often, these experiences leave them kinder, more understanding, more spiritual, and less materialistic.

This short article is a basic introduction to Parti’s story. He describes it himself in greater detail in the book Dying to Wake Up , which he co-wrote with Paul Perry, the author of the article.

Essays About Death: Discussing a Difficult Topic

It’s completely natural and understandable to have reservations about discussing death. However, because death is unavoidable, talking about it and reading essays and books about death instead of avoiding the topic altogether is something that benefits many people. Sometimes, the only way to cope with something frightening is to address it.

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5 who survived cardiac arrest describe what they saw and heard before reviving

Every year, more than 350,000 people have a cardiac arrest outside of a hospital . Few survive. While many people who have been resuscitated have no memories of the experience, a recent study suggests others recall something , whether it’s a vague sense that people are around them, or more specific dreamlike awareness. 

Unlike a heart attack where people are awake and the heart is still painfully beating, those in cardiac arrest are always unconscious. They have no heartbeat or pulse and need CPR urgently. In essence, they have “flat-lined” and are so near death there is no activity on electronic monitors.

What a near-death experience is has never really been defined. Researchers have been trying to explore what’s happening when a patient’s heart stops to see if there are themes or patterns of consciousness.

“There is an assumption that because people do not respond to us physically, in other words, when they’re in a coma, that they’re not conscious, and that’s fundamentally flawed," said Dr. Sam Parnia, a pulmonary and critical care specialist at NYU Langone Health, and the lead author of the recent study.

To find out more about the experiences of the few survivors who have a sense of consciousness during heart-related near-death events, NBC News connected with participants in the NYU Langone research and others from the Cardiac Arrest Survivor Alliance online community, a program of the Sudden Cardiac Arrest Foundation, and the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation .

They shared what they saw, heard and felt during resuscitation, how their lives changed afterward and what they believe other people should know about death and dying.

"Calm, quiet, peaceful"

Greg Kowaleski, a father of three who lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, was 47 and playing a pick-up ice hockey game when he collapsed on the rink. Fortunately for Kowaleski, a pediatric cardiologist who is a good friend of his happened to be there, skating for the opposing team.

Dr. Jeff Zampi determined that Kowaleski didn’t have a pulse and immediately began chest compressions. Using an automated external defibrillator, or AED, Zampi was able to shock his friend’s heart back into a normal rhythm. 

Although the cardiac arrest was in 2021, Kowaleski still recalls the “incredibly vivid” memory he had while Zampi was resuscitating him. Kowaleski found himself boarding an airplane that was completely empty, the blue seats stretching out in front of him.

“The sun is really bright outside, like a beautiful day and I sit down next to the window in my seat, looking out on the tarmac,” he said. 

“As I’m sitting there waiting, I hear somebody call my name,” he said. “It’s my friend Jeff.”

In the memory, Zampi told him he was on the wrong flight and needed to get off. “I got up and I followed him out of the plane,” he said. “And then as we’re getting off the plane, boom! I came back. I woke up.”

Since then, Kowaleski said he’s struggled a little bit with what exactly the experience meant.

“The place where I went, wherever it was, I will say it was extremely peaceful,” he said. “I don’t know that I’ve ever experienced anything so calm, quiet, peaceful.”

What he does know is that he doesn’t really fear death anymore.

“It’s not a scary, bad place to go, wherever I was.” 

"There was no gender"

In 2016, Em James Arnold, a parent in New York City, had a cardiac arrest and was revived.

Arnold’s girlfriend started CPR, but the resuscitation lasted 90 minutes and required nine defibrillator shocks. A combined team of FDNY firefighters and FDNY emergency medical services crews responded to the 911 call, which was made by Arnold’s 12-year-old daughter.

During the near-death experience, the cardiac arrest survivor — who was assigned male at birth and now prefers they/them pronouns — had a profound and life-changing memory.

Arnold remembers traveling feet-first over an expanse of water, floating on what seemed to be a stone-like surface. Overhead was an endless sky, and Arnold felt completely safe, free of fear, and neither male nor female.

Arnold, now 53, has had gender dysphoria since about the age of 3 or 4, although they didn’t always know there was a name for the feeling that one’s gender identity doesn’t match the one registered at birth.

“For me, that was like a lifelong puzzle," Arnold said. "And then, when I go into cardiac arrest and I’m in that water, there was no gender, so there was no assignment there. It allowed me to embrace that of myself.” 

After waking from a three-day coma and a long hospitalization, doctors gave Arnold an implantable cardioverter-defibrillator, or ICD, a battery-operated implanted device that can shock the heart if necessary. Two years later they had surgery to repair a damaged heart valve.

After the experience, Arnold began emerging out and presenting as mixgender/transgender and, soon after, married their girlfriend.

“She’s the one who walked me through this, as she constantly says to me, be yourself, be yourself, just be yourself,” Arnold said. “That’s the hardest thing for anybody to do.”

The couple has a new baby, now 8 months. The cardiac arrest “helped me understand that gender is nothing,” Arnold said. 

Like opening your eyes in a cave

Zach Lonergan, a 32-year-old scientist who lives in Pasadena, California, was regularly logging 15- to 18-mile runs with his friends as they prepared for the Los Angeles Marathon.

As part of the training, they all decided to run the Rose Bowl Half Marathon.

“We’re like, oh, 13 miles for a half marathon is no big deal,” Lonergan said.

However, when race day came in January, Lonergan wasn’t feeling well.

“Of course, I ignored my symptoms and decided to run a really fast race,” he said.

Despite feeling tired for the last few miles, he crossed the finish line. When he went to pick up his medal, he collapsed.

Without a pulse or heart beat, emergency workers performed CPR and shocked Lonergan's heart twice. 

Lonergan doesn’t remember the collapse.

He does recall being awake and aware in a dark place that was unfamiliar, describing it like opening your eyes in a cave. 

“It felt strange, but at the same time, it was the most peaceful time of my entire life,” he said. “In this darkness, I felt extremely warm, and extremely peaceful.” 

After he was resuscitated, doctors gave him an ICD implant that would shock the heart, if necessary.

After he recovered, Lonergan did feel some anxiety, especially when it came to running. However, he also recalls it being a time of “prolonged peacefulness.”

Grateful to be alive, he no longer feared death. He took a “reunion tour” to reconnect with friends he hadn’t seen in years. 

“You only get one life and you have to cherish the people you have around you,” he said. “I think that’s been the biggest gift that I’ve gotten.”

"All-surrounding sense of love"

Dr. Melinda Greer, 65, was being evaluated for chest pain at a cardiac intensive care unit when her heart stopped. Greer, a retired pediatrician in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, had asystole, a failure of the heart’s electrical system which causes the heart to stop pumping, or flat-line.

That was 10 years ago. She is finally opening up about what she feels was a positive experience.

As the nurse was performing CPR on her, Greer saw an “incredible white light” and felt “an incredible all-encompassing, all-surrounding sense of love.” 

She felt like she had returned to a “place that felt like home to me, and I was back amongst a group of what I can only call beings, because we weren’t physical, that I considered my group.” 

It was “a wonderful experience," she said. "I really was angry when they brought me back.”

After Greer left the hospital, she decided to retire early, focusing on creative pursuits and new experiences, rather than acquiring things. She encourages people to get more involved in the “positive aspects of living in a beautiful world.”

“Feel the wind, get out in nature, take off your shoes and socks and put your feet firmly on the ground and just listen to that inner voice, that’s what I would recommend," she said. "I wish I’d done it long ago.”

"I knew I could not leave them”

Connie Fuller, 55, lives in Warrior, Alabama, just north of Birmingham. In 2020, Fuller was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. In 2021, she and her husband made the hard decision to sell their swimming pool business to spend more time together. But the day of the sale was particularly stressful, and she started having chest pain.

She was admitted to the hospital for observation, although tests had ruled out a heart attack. It was at this point that she developed bradycardia, an abnormally slow heart rate, and her heart stopped.

Fuller doesn’t remember when the nurse started CPR. She didn’t feel any pain, although she found out later that the nurse broke her sternum and several ribs, a common occurrence during CPR.

“I love her, she saved my life," Fuller said.

What Fuller does remember is hearing her husband’s voice when he came back into the room.

“We started dating when I was 14, he was 16," she said. "He sounded like that little 16-year-old boy. That was the voice that I heard."

She feels that her husband’s voice helped pull her back into her body, as the medical team worked to revive her.

“I do remember thinking, this feels so good and so peaceful and it’s so calm and there’s no worries here,” she said. “But at the same time, I remembered my husband and my daughter and I knew I could not leave them.”

Based on her experience, Fuller advises family members to talk to patients, even when it seems they are dying.

“If it’s safe, and possible — allow the family members to be there to talk to the patient,” she said.

Fuller, who believes in God, wondered why she didn’t have experiences that are more like the traditional concept of heaven.

“Psychologically it’s been a lot to handle,” she said. "I thought, why wasn’t I in heaven? Why didn’t I see my relatives? Why didn’t I see the white light? You know, why didn’t that happen for me?”

Fuller turned out to have takotsubo cardiomyopathy, or broken heart syndrome , which is a weakness of the heart muscle that can be caused by severe stress.

“I thought at that time I had wasted my heartbeats worrying about a swimming pool store," Fuller said. "That’s when I prayed and I begged God, please give me one more chance to not waste any more heartbeats on something that’s not important. I won’t. I will not do that again.”

Theresa Tamkins is a health reporter and editor who has worked for BuzzFeed News, Health.com and Reuters Health. She covers infectious disease, fitness, nutrition and mental health, and has written for CNN, The Lancet, MSNBC, and WebMD, among others.