WHAT IS IT LIKE to go beyond death? What happens in the period after we die but before all the cells in our body have become irreversibly damaged and have reached a point where they can no longer support life? If we could go beyond this threshold, what might we tell others about this experience, and what would they think of us? Would they even believe us?
In the opening sequence of Clint Eastwood’s movie Hereafter, a woman dies in dramatic fashion, and we get a visceral sense of what it might be like to die. The sequence opens with cuts between a young girl and a woman strolling casually through a local market in a coastal town in Thailand and the woman’s boyfriend waking up in their beachside hotel room. An eerie feeling is cast over these normal events when the boyfriend gazes out over the water and sees a huge wave forming in the distance. Suddenly, there is a huge roar and a tsunami engulfs the resort. As the torrent of water careens through the streets, destroying everything in its path, the woman and the girl run for cover, but it’s no use. They are both swallowed by the massive wave and carried away with the debris.
As the woman drowns, she fights for her last breath. It’s horrifying to watch—until the point when she actually dies. Visions of people swirling in an arena of comforting light begin to form, and an image of the woman and the girl she was shopping with comes into focus. The woman is clearly undergoing a positive and transformative experience. After the tsunami has subsided, the woman’s limp body is pulled from the water. The paramedics perform CPR on her, but there appears to be no hope to resuscitate, so they move on to the next victim. Seconds later, the woman begins breathing and comes back to life. Though she was clearly dead, she reported seeing images from her life. She has experienced a vision of the experiences that may take place after the process of death has started.
The fact that Clint Eastwood tackles head-on in a major studio movie the question of what happens after we die shows that this experience has become part of mainstream culture and thought. Eastwood provides no exposition on the scene, and none is needed. From the powerful and moving images, the audience can experience what it is like to die by seeing the woman have a reaffirming vision of light before being brought back to life. As the film unfolds, it shows how her life has been positively transformed by the experience.
People have now regularly died, come back to life, and told us what they have experienced in that early period of death. Their experiences have been fairly uniform and share many common factors. Like the scene in Hereafter, people have generally described the experience as being a transformative and positive one. Their lives have been enhanced by the experience, and as a result they describe themselves as being more altruistic and less materialistic, less self-centered and less afraid of death.
It is difficult to trace back exactly when we became aware of these experiences, but most likely it had something to do with the discovery of the new field of resuscitation in 1960 and its increasing acceptance by the medical community in the 1960s and 1970s. Following the rise of resuscitation science, by the mid-1970s, there were clearly more and more people who had been successfully resuscitated from death. The interest of the scientific community and the general population in these experiences was heightened in 1975 when Raymond Moody, a psychiatrist and university lecturer in philosophy, published the bestselling book Life After Life. Moody’s book was the first comprehensive study of the human experience during the dying process. He collected and compared the accounts given by 150 survivors of near-death encounters and termed these experiences “near-death experiences,” or NDEs. He defined an NDE as “a clinical situation that would normally have led to the death of the individual without medical intervention.”
Moody found that though not everyone experienced the same things, there were many recurring features. The most common experiences people described were feelings of peace, happiness, and joy and of being pain-free. Some described having an out-of-body experience, where they felt they had separated from their physical body and they had looked down on themselves from above. Some experienced an instant panoramic review of their lives, in which they experienced all that they had said and done, while others described an encounter with deceased relatives, who seemed to have come to welcome them. Others recalled seeing a bright light and going through a tunnel and in some cases meeting a luminous being who radiated a feeling of absolute love and compassion. They often felt as if they were entering a beautiful domain, though many also talked about a point beyond which they could not cross, or else they couldn’t return back to life. Oftentimes, people said they returned reluctantly to life, because what they experienced was incredibly beautiful. Words could not truly describe the beauty they had witnessed. One particularly noteworthy feature was that many people’s attitudes, beliefs, and values were permanently and dramatically altered. They felt a new sense of purpose and appreciation for life. They also became less afraid of death. Much like Joe Tiralosi, those who had become most positively transformed were those who had encountered a being of light.
Today, NDEs are generally understood to be the often vivid and realistic, and sometimes profoundly life-changing, experiences occurring to people who have been physiologically close to death or have even gone beyond the threshold of death, as in cardiac arrest. At the beginning of his book, Moody gives an example of a complete NDE based upon all the common features. He emphasizes that this was not a particular person’s experience, but rather a model or composite of the features commonly found in NDE accounts:
A man is dying and, as he reaches the point of greatest physical distress, he hears himself pronounced dead by his doctor. He begins to hear an uncomfortable noise, a loud ringing or buzzing, and at the same time feels himself moving very rapidly through a long dark tunnel. After this, he suddenly finds himself outside of his own physical body, but still in the immediate physical environment, and he sees his own body from a distance, as though he is a spectator. He watches the resuscitation attempt from his unusual vantage point and is in a state of emotional upheaval.
After a while, he collects himself and becomes more accustomed to his odd condition. He notices that he still has a “body,” but one of a very different nature and with very different powers from the physical body he has left behind. Soon other things begin to happen. Others come to meet and to help him. He glimpses the spirits of relatives and friends who have already died, and a loving warm spirit of a kind he has never encountered before—a being of light—appears before him. This being asks him a question, nonverbally, to make him evaluate his life and helps him by showing him a panoramic, instantaneous playback of the major events of his life. At some point he finds himself approaching some sort of barrier or border, apparently representing the limit between earthly life and the next life. Yet he finds that he must go back to the earth, that the time for his death has not yet come. At this point he resists, for by now he is taken up with his experiences in the afterlife and does not want to return. He is overwhelmed by intense feelings of joy, love, and peace. Despite his attitude, though, he somehow reunites with his physical body and lives.
Later he tries to tell others, but he has trouble doing so. In the first place, he can find no human words adequate to describe these unearthly episodes. He also finds that others scoff, so he stops telling other people. Still, the experience affects his life profoundly, especially his views about death and its relationship to life.
Moody observed that most of the people who had an NDE did not experience all the same features and that the sequences in which the events took place varied. Further, he noted that whereas some people remembered only two or three features of the NDE, others recalled more detailed experiences.
After the publication of Life After Life, NDEs became the subject of great controversy and heated debate. Although many people claimed that these experiences provided a glimpse of the afterlife, others in the scientific community were more cautious, claiming that they were at best hallucinations and at worst fabrications owing to the publicity being generated by the book. But when researchers began to study these accounts in detail, they found very little evidence to support this view, as many of the accounts predated the 1970s and the publication of Moody’s book. In fact, some of the accounts went back decades, and in the vast majority of cases, the people involved had consistently declined any publicity and had only shared their experiences with researchers. Often they had not even mentioned them to their friends and family. Interestingly, then, although records of cognitive experiences from a close brush with death were found that could be traced back millennia, these experiences became much more clearly described and hence more popular in society from the 1970s onward.
When I began my own research into NDEs in 1997, there was a lot of debate that complicated the mystery even further. This was mainly because the descriptions and feelings that people had experienced when examined individually could also occur in people who had not had a close brush with death. For instance, it was not only those who had come close to death, or had even gone beyond it, who would see a bright light, feel peaceful, or have a transformative experience. The other confounding factor was that the term near death was extremely ambiguous and vague; as with anything in science that is poorly defined, it had created a lot of discussion and also disagreement. Nevertheless, the public and scientific interest had led to a comprehensive historical and scientific examination of these experiences and the factors that may cause them, stirring a spirited debate that encompassed science, psychology, religion, and even culture.
After I started my work, I received hundreds of letters from people who claimed to have had an NDE. I began to study the claims of those people who satisfied the criteria laid out by Moody in Life After Life, and then I delved further into their cases. Adults had a wide range of experiences, and reviewing these was critical to finding a scientific process to study and interpret NDEs of patients whose medical history and treatment through the time of death was known. Evaluating and comparing the experiences of the broadest possible cross section of patients would be a step toward learning what happens to people who die or at least have a close brush with death and are then brought back to life.
One of the most consistent features described was a sense of calm and peace that lasted throughout the experience. One woman who suffered a gynecological hemorrhage said that she was surrounded by a strong light and felt happy, peaceful, and not the least bit frightened. She recalled that she was “high on the ceiling of the ward looking down upon the bed (which seemed to be a long way down) and saw the doctors and nurses around the bed working on the person lying there.” In a layperson’s terms, she had an out-of-body experience.
This feeling of having an out-of-body experience was prevalent in people who had NDEs. A majority of the people described the sensation of separating from their bodies and being able to see events happening below while floating in an out-of-body state. They likened this to removing a heavy garment of clothing or shedding a skin and moving away freely, leaving the old skin behind. Interestingly, people consistently described their “self” as the part that was above, rather than the body that was lying below (suggesting they associated the self with the entity that they felt had separated). In other words, an individual would say, “I was at the corner of the ceiling, looking down at my body.” Almost uniformly people described feeling very peaceful and not at all concerned that they were watching themselves die.
In the most complex cases of out-of-body experiences, people were able to recall the details of what was happening to their bodies during the experience, largely because most claimed to have seen it from above. One woman recounted floating above the bed watching the doctors work on her and also listening to their conversations. After she survived the operation, the surgeon visited her and told her about the resuscitation procedure. The woman said that she already knew the details because she had heard him talking about them during the operation. The doctor dismissed her recollection, saying that she must have heard a nurse discussing it after she had regained consciousness.
In addition to recalling specific details and describing the self as the part that had detached from the body, this woman’s case also illustrated a common reaction of disbelief from the medical and nursing staff when told by the patient what they were doing during the resuscitation process. The medical staff often rejected the idea that the patient could have seen anything because the person was unconscious. Nevertheless, there were many similar cases in which people who were seemingly medically dead correctly described the events going on around them.
Later I also found many other cases with very similar features to those I had collected in the United Kingdom. For instance, in the United States one woman named Lauralynn, a trainee professional tennis player, reported that she had been scheduled for a routine operation, which her doctors had told her would take twenty minutes. Unfortunately, during the surgery, the doctors punctured her abdominal aorta. She suffered extreme blood loss and had a cardiac arrest and died. At that moment, she found herself near the ceiling, where she could see her body on the table. From there, she watched the surgery team frantically working on her body. She remembers people being very upset, though she wasn’t sure what was wrong. She said that she had no pain or fear; she knew everything was going to be okay.
Lauralynn then described how she found herself in a place of total blackness. She described this state as “comfortable, peaceful, and quiet” and recalled seeing a bright warm light on the horizon that beckoned her. She wanted to go into that light. “It was a place of unconditional love; it was a place that I would never want to leave.”
But Lauralynn also described meeting her brother-in-law, who had died seven months earlier from cancer. He took her on a journey that made her understand her life. After the journey was finished, he told her it was time to go back. Though she didn’t want to return, he insisted. He told her: “You have to go back. You have to live your life’s purpose.” With that, Lauralynn says she was pulled back into her body.
Her life, however, was completely changed. She said that after the experience she felt “like a stranger in a strange land.” She also felt disoriented and couldn’t grasp why everyone was running from place to place and task to task. The biggest change was that she learned that life was about giving yourself to people. On a day-to-day basis, she said she began trying to live each day to the fullest as though there may not be another one.
One of the most consistent features that people had during NDEs was seeing a tunnel, though it was described in different ways. Some described it as a long, dark tunnel; others said that it looked more like a kaleidoscope with colors on the sides. One person described the tunnel as “dark on the top and bottom, but not solid. The sides were like tiles—some were red, yellow and green, and the others were black. All had a shine to them.” After studying many cases of those who recounted seeing a tunnel, it became clear to me that everyone was basically describing the same thing. To underscore this point, often people who recalled the tunnel saw a bright light at the end, which they interpreted as warm and welcoming.
Besides the bright light, people mentioned seeing an actual luminous being, a being of light. The being was described by both religious and nonreligious people as containing love, mercy, and compassion, and in their eyes, this being was absolutely perfect. Some people identified the being of light as God; some thought it to be a religious figure such as Jesus, and others interpreted it as a simple, nondenominational being of light. For some, this was someone who played the role of a loving educator, who exuded compassion and watched over the person and guided the individual through the experience and a review of his or her life. In the review, people found themselves seeing and experiencing everything they had done in life and felt that their actions were completely transparent. The prevailing feature during the whole experience was a deep sense of all-pervading love and benevolence. The love that emanated from the being of light had a far deeper intensity than that which emanated from other people (such as deceased family members) who were encountered during the NDE or anything they had encountered in life up until that point. Some also described feeling the pain and distress that they had caused others whether intentionally or unintentionally during their lifetime. After surviving, many made a promise to themselves that they would try not to harm others with words or actions, and this led them to view life as an opportunity to be a source of goodness to others irrespective of creed or culture.
Some people who saw the tunnel went through it. The description of this sensation ranged from individuals moving forward with their own power through the tunnel to individuals who said they were pulled through it by an unknown force. Several people who went through the tunnel recalled arriving in a beautiful, gardenlike place. In many cases, the sensation of going through the tunnel was associated with other NDE features, such as encountering a being of light or seeing deceased relatives at the end of the tunnel. One person who went into anaphylactic shock and whose response was typical of this group wrote: “I ‘died’ and saw all the old relatives who have passed on. There was a large tunnel and all these people were calling me to join them. I started to go towards them.”
Although some people described hearing a voice or seeing a person telling them not to go any farther or to turn back, others said they themselves chose not to go farther. For the overwhelming majority, the driving force that made them turn back was the need to care for others, particularly their children. One woman, who described hovering over her bed and watching the doctors, wrote: “To the right of the room up high I sensed a tunnel of light, but I didn’t want to go through it, as I had just had my little girl and wanted to go back and look after her, and my husband and parents. I remember drifting back down into my body and back, oh, painfully back.” Others described reaching a similar symbolic point of no return, such as a wooden gate, a stream, or a river that they knew not to go beyond because returning would be impossible.
Memory was a significant part of the experiences. After a significant insult to the brain, such as a head injury or a seizure, or a change in blood oxygen, carbon dioxide, or glucose levels, there is normally a period of memory loss before and after the trauma. This can be as short as a few minutes and as long as days or even weeks, and it is due to an imbalance in the normal biology required for the brain to function. The extent of memory loss depends on the severity of the brain trauma. This may have accounted for why some people had varying recollections of the experience and the events leading up to it.
In one case, a traffic accident victim recalled being pulled into a tunnel and resisting, but he could not remember the accident happening or being treated in the hospital. Despite the memory loss surrounding the event, the man had complete recall of the NDE. Joe Tiralosi, however, did not remember any of the specifics of what happened during the forty-five minutes he was medically dead. He did recall encountering an incredibly warm, loving being who had comforted him and made him unafraid of death. He also didn’t remember going through a tunnel or seeing a heavenly place, though interestingly he was admittedly left with a life-affirming feeling from the experience.
The most complete NDE case of the initial group I studied came from a woman who gave a detailed account of meeting a “perfect being” who guided her through the experience. When I interviewed her, she said that she found it difficult to convey the feelings of deep compassion, love, and kindness that had emanated from the being. The woman, who was suffering from an ectopic pregnancy that caused massive internal bleeding, collapsed after calling a friend for help. She related:
I suddenly found myself standing beside myself looking at a cord which connected me to my body and thinking how thin and wispy it was. Someone was beside me. I was made to feel secure and encouraged to trust my companion, who suggested that the cord was insignificant and that I should not concern myself with its fragility. I was guided towards the light. This was a sort of void, in which I found myself with the ability to fly, or should I say I had no weight—a very strange experience. Throughout the journey I kept looking back to ensure my companion was with me but somehow towards the end of the journey I found myself just content to move on and reach the end.
Reaching the light, I was met by other beings of light and very gently encouraged to move on towards a life review. In this experience my actions were not judged by others, I judged myself. My presence could see into my mind and there was no way I could hide any thoughts. Gently I was encouraged to understand how my mistakes hurt others by experiencing what others had felt as a result of my actions. I was confused, as it all seemed so strange. The word “death” was never mentioned yet somehow I came to understand that I was in that place of spirit where the newly dead move on to.
Many questions sprang to mind like how, why? I had just had abdominal pain, nothing considered life threatening. I was told by those in spirit that I had been pregnant. I had not known that I had been pregnant before this; I had just thought that I had had abdominal pain. I was also told that the spirit of the child had initially consented to be born and then changed its mind … that it had experienced a very traumatic life before and just could not face life again just yet. Perhaps with love and encouragement it would in the future. I asked to see this spirit and explain that with me and my husband it would have known love. We had been hoping for another baby for some time. There was hesitancy and one can only assume the spirit concerned was consulted. After a delay we spoke together. Poor soul, I really sensed the fear. It felt secure with the brothers of light around it, who supported it with love. “One day” was the message from the brothers. “Be patient with him.”
I was moved forward and eventually met the great God in many religions, a beautiful experience and I can only say that I fully understand why St. Paul so wished to be with him, to be in the presence of such unconditional love, humor … understanding … I did not need to speak—thoughts were sufficient. It was as if all were one and shared in his being; his radiance was everywhere. To this day I still look back with elation at this experience.
I became very distressed and became very concerned at leaving a young 18-month-old baby behind. Who would care for her? My husband was away, no family close by. [God’s] compassion was so strong, his love and caring so abundant that by his grace I was allowed to return. I was told that I would have a very special mission to do later in life, when my children grew up. He already knew there would be another.
I cannot remember much about the return. I recall being at the ceiling of the room and watching two nurses either side of me working on drips and drains. There was a jolt and in no time I had drifted into what can only be described as sleep.
I had never read of near death or out of body experiences, terms used today. Two years later my son was born, very sickly, but to this day I have kept my promise given to him in that world of spirit—that I would love him unconditionally as long as he needed me. I created a home of love and as a family we work together to love each other and the world—a small mirror of what I experienced in that land of light. After this experience I have no fear of death and believe with certainty in the afterlife.
The most outstanding feature of this case was the woman’s interaction with the being of light and the transformation it had on her life. Although many years had passed since her experience, it was still fresh in her memory. When I met her, she told me that during the process of judgment she felt uncomfortable and remorseful about the opportunities she had failed to make use of in her life. She described these as situations where she could have had a positive effect on others but did not follow through. She also told me that she now hated to do any harm to others, as she had felt the pain that she had caused others. She now felt that the most important thing in life was to take the opportunities to be of assistance to others, even if these were sometimes the more difficult options. This response also highlights the positive transformation that many people undergo following an NDE, particularly those who have encountered a being of light.
In many ways, this case shared many similarities with the case of an American man named Steve whose complex NDE I came across many years later. The experience recalled by this woman as well as what Steve had experienced provided some real insights regarding what it is like to undergo a life review. Steve had explained that after having an asthma attack that had caused him to die, he experienced something unusual. He explained, “Everything was surrounded by this light blue grey color. I found there was a being beside me. I could feel his presence. It was a comforting presence, a reassuring presence but was also a presence of magnitude and power. I felt things were alright. Then I began a review of my life, of the key moments of my life. But at the same time I was re-experiencing it from the other people’s points of view and that was a stunner because you feel their pain, you feel the sting; you feel the hurt [caused to others by your actions]. It was a horrifying realization that I wasn’t the person I thought I was, and at that point the being then sent me messages to explain ‘it was alright, that was what humans do, humans make mistakes.’” What was most interesting was that for this man, much like the British lady, the life review entailed reexperiencing past events from other people’s perspectives. In essence, Steve had felt and experienced firsthand whatever pain or discomfort he may have caused other people in life, as if someone were doing the exact same thing to him. Thus his own being had become the judge of his own actions and behavior toward other people, without the need for external judgment.
Everything was obvious and clear. With parts of his life laid bare, Steve was shocked at how poorly he had treated people. At times, he had been deceitful, had hurt people, and had outright lied—all of which he had justified to himself at that time, rationalizing that people deserved what they had coming. But during the experience, he felt the other people’s pain caused by his actions. Being forced to relive these events made him question his prior perspective on life and led him to conclude that living a life in that manner had been a failure; he felt that what he had done had been “humiliating and dreadful.”
Steve returned to consciousness in great pain. He was paralyzed from the neck down and was told his condition was not reversible, though thankfully ultimately he recovered and was able to regain full motion. He later described the reason he hadn’t liked what he had seen during his experience, which was due mostly to what he had learned from the astonishing life review he had undergone. He explained, “I re-experienced these events [referring to the actions he had performed in life] from my own point of view. I wasn’t just watching the events; I was actually reliving them again, while at the same time I was also re-experiencing the actions from other people’s points of view. I was them. I was reliving the experience from their point of view and at the same time (and I don’t know how this works) I was also experiencing it from a higher reality; the truth of the matter. So what I saw was my own lies and my own self deception to myself, which I had used to convince me that doing certain things was okay because people had deserved it. Then I was experiencing the emotional impact it had on other people. I felt their pain. I felt the shock on them. But then at the same time I also saw that they have their own lies and self deceptions and so the net result was that I felt like I was a failure as a person and I wasn’t the person I had thought I was. It was humiliating. I felt really dreadful and it was completely humbling.” He emphasized that “the judgment came all from myself [within his own being]. It was not from an outside source, but then this being that was with me was also sending me comforting messages—thank goodness!—and one of them was it was alright as I was only human.” The entire experience, he said, made him feel as though he was being given a second chance to live a more meaningful life. He felt he had a chance now to change things so that “next time I get back to the life review it wouldn’t be the same, or at least they would say, “He tried.’” After his experience, he had become a caring, truthful, and positive person. In short, he wanted to make sure that next time he dies and his life is reviewed that he will, he only half jokingly added, receive a higher grade!
Another experience that I came across later was the impact of a patient’s NDE on his own doctor, the well-known U.S. cardiothoracic surgeon Dr. Mehmet Oz, who practiced surgery at Columbia Medical Center in New York and later set up his own television show. The patient, named George, needed heart surgery, though his surgeon, Dr. Oz, was reluctant because he thought his patient would likely die from the surgery itself. Nevertheless George accepted the risks and convinced him to go ahead with the surgery. During the procedure, complications arose, and George began hemorrhaging heavily to the point that his heart actually stopped and he had a cardiac arrest and died. Dr. Oz and his team worked frenetically to try to save the man and attempted to stop the bleeding and also to restart his heart. With great difficulty they succeeded and George was eventually admitted to the ICU. However, for the next three days, he continued to hemorrhage and he remained perilously close to death.
But eventually the bleeding stopped and he started to recover. One day, Dr. Oz was called to the ICU after George had regained consciousness and his condition was more stable.
George explained to his surgeon that he felt like he had been in a “deep, dark” space and had looked up to “see this bright light.” He explained, “I began to fall away from it.... I was getting further and further away, and I knew that if I lost sight of the light I would die.”
To save himself, he had gone toward the light. However, he said that he was never scared. He simply made the conscious choice that he was going to reach the light. When he did, he said that he pushed himself up, and woke up. George’s experience after his dramatic surgery had made his surgeon, Dr. Mehmet Oz, question what happens when we die and the existence of a form of life after death. This had also led him to invite people like Lauralynn, Steve, George, and me to his program, and this was how I had come across all these people.
Although there was no way to validate this claim or any of the other claims, the NDEs were very real to those who had experienced them. In addition to retaining a memory of the experience, people consistently described being able to think clearly and lucidly with well-structured thought processes. Essentially, during the NDE, people retained largely the same consciousness and personality. That is, the people who had gone through the experience had retained the same level of knowledge and understanding and essentially the exact same “self” during the experience as they had before it, though the experience did often lead to a positive change afterward.* When I have been in social situations discussing with others what happens when we die, I have sometimes heard people say, “When I die, I will find out.” But these NDEs suggested that after death we don’t suddenly “know everything” or develop a greater cognitive understanding. Our depth of perception remains as it was before dying. That may also account for why the interpretation of the experience depended on people’s prior beliefs and understanding.
In determining the role of preconceived ideas about life, death, and what happens when we die, the most fascinating and potentially conclusive group studied was children who had NDEs. I found two intriguing cases that broke through all boundaries. The first case came to me from the grandmother of a boy named John who had read about the work I was doing and contacted me. When John was not yet three years old, he had suffered a cardiac arrest. His grandmother related that when John’s heart stopped, he turned blue. He looked lifeless. The room erupted in commotion as people began pressing on his chest, frantically trying to restart his heart. Soon, the ambulance arrived and rushed him to the hospital. Along the way, paramedics were thankfully successful at restarting his heart. John’s family moved on with their lives.
Months later, after John was discharged from the hospital and returned to his normal life, he was playing with his grandmother one afternoon. Off the cuff, he said, “Grandma, when I died, I saw a lady.” He had not mentioned this to his parents. But over the course of the next few months, while playing, he continued to talk in profound terms but with a child’s vocabulary about his experience. He said, “When I was in the doctor’s car, the belt came undone and I was looking down from above.” He also said, “When you die, it is not the end … a lady came to take me … there were also many others, who were getting new clothes, but not me, because I wasn’t really dead. I was going to come back.”
John’s parents noticed that he kept drawing the same picture over and over again. As he got older, it became more complex. In the picture, he drew himself floating above his hospital bed and attached to a balloon by a cord. When asked what the balloon was, he said, “When you die you see a bright lamp and … are connected by a cord.” There was no mistaking that he was trying, as best he could, to describe a near-death experience that had also included an out-of-body experience. Interestingly, just like the woman with the ectopic pregnancy, he recalled experiencing a sort of cord that connected him to his body.
A few years later, I was presented with another case that was equally captivating. It involved a three-and-a-half-year-old boy named Andrew. He was admitted to the hospital with a heart problem and had to undergo open-heart surgery. About two weeks after the surgery, Andrew started asking his parents when he could go back to “the sunny place with all the flowers and animals.” His mother told him that they would go to the park when he was feeling better. He said, “No, I don’t mean the park. I mean the sunny place I went to with the lady.” When she asked him what lady, he replied, “The lady that floats.”
His mother told him that she didn’t understand what he meant and apologized that she must have forgotten where this sunny place was. He said: “You didn’t take me there. The lady came and got me. She held my hand and we floated up. You were outside when I was having my heart mended. It was okay, the lady looked after me … the lady loves me … it wasn’t scary. Everything was bright and colorful [but] I wanted to come back to see you.”
She asked him whether he was asleep, awake, or dreaming when he came back. He replied, “I was awake, but I was up on the ceiling and when I looked down I was lying in a bed with my arms by my sides and doctors were doing something to my chest. Everything was really bright and I floated back down.”
About a year after Andrew’s operation, he and his mother were watching a TV program that showed a child having heart surgery. When the bypass machine appeared on the screen, Andrew grew very excited and declared, “I had that machine.” His mother said she didn’t think he was right about that, but Andrew insisted he was. His mother then pointed out that he was asleep during his operation and therefore would not have seen any machines. He said, “I know I was asleep, but I could see it when I was looking down.” She questioned him about this, and he replied, “You know, I told you, when I floated up with the lady.”
Later, in an unrelated situation, Andrew’s mother showed him a photo of her own mother, who had passed away. Andrew said, “That’s her. That’s the lady.” The lady he was referring to was his deceased grandmother.
John’s and Andrew’s experiences are remarkable in that the details in their stories correspond to what researchers have found in NDEs described by adults. The content of the children’s NDEs was simpler than those described by adults, and the children were limited in their ability to explain all that they had experienced, but they nevertheless seemed to have had the same core experience as adults have reported. To many scientists and medical researchers, including me, this underscored that there was uniformity to these experiences that could be scientifically studied.
At the time I began studying NDEs, there was a consistency to the transformative and positive undertone of the experiences described by people irrespective of their religious or cultural background—a factor that not only unified the experiences of everyone, but also placed the NDE squarely in the realm of scientific study. The experience seemed to be universal and an indication of what we experience after crossing over the boundary of death, reflecting the cognitive and mental state that humans experience in the early stage of death. The exceptions in my personal experience were the people who had attempted suicide. In those cases, people who survived described some very unpleasant traumatic and painful experiences that did not match those who had died involuntarily or from natural causes.
I HAVE COLLECTED MORE than five hundred cases of people who have experienced a close encounter with death and been brought back to life, including those of children, down to three years old. Through my own personal connection to patients and a study of the voluminous research conducted by others, I have come to conclude that the term near-death experience is scientifically problematic and should be altered when considered in the context of people who have medically crossed over the boundary of death and been brought back to life (i.e., those who have been revived after a cardiac arrest).
The main problem is that the phrase is too vague. A great deal of controversy has come about because the accepted definition of what is considered “near” death is for obvious reasons ambiguous and unclear. What does it mean to say someone is “near” death? Did the person have a heart attack, a stroke, or a severe infection? How about someone who has entered a state of medical shock? The truth is that none of those can really be defined as “near death.” In the same way that a plane rapidly descending to the ground and toward an inevitable crash can be rescued by an experienced pilot, we too can take someone who is rapidly descending toward death and hence near to death and divert him or her away from that inevitability. The question should now be: Did the person die or not?
Although those patients can probably be considered “near death,” the causes that lead to being in a near-death situation are enormous, just like the causes that may lead an aircraft to be in a “near accident” state. More important, within the territory of being “near death” just as in the territory of being in a “near accident,” there is an enormous range of possibilities. By “near accident” we could mean any aircraft that loses control and descends one thousand feet, or we could mean any aircraft that descends to earth but is pulled up seconds before it hits the ground. Clearly, there is an enormous difference between these two situations. The same is also true of the term near death, and it is scientifically too vague and imprecise. We could mean anyone whose death was prevented before he or she had “crashed,” and doctors are quite good at preventing these “crashes” from taking place. This is our day-to-day job in the intensive care unit. There is, in fact, no accurate definition of “near death” in medicine. In science, as soon as something is imprecise and vague it creates an opportunity for disagreement, a wide diversity of opinions and controversy, which makes sense because without adequate precision and a clear definition, people end up discussing things differently. So it makes good sense to disagree!
This is what has partly fueled the discussion and divided opinions, especially by the media, into so-called believers and skeptics. A new and precise term is needed to accurately define the phenomenon at least with respect to those who have actually died and been brought back and thus enable appropriate scientific research and accurate discussion; a precise term would also reduce the amount of emotion people bring to the subject, since death is an enormously emotional subject for everyone. It is hard to think rationally when emotion has taken over a subject and a scientific discussion. The biology of cardiac arrest and actual death, unlike the multitude of events that could be vaguely considered in the near-death situation, is very precisely understood. This is similar to how the consequences of an actual aircraft crashing from the sky, such as the breaking of the aircraft, the formation of debris, and so on, is very well understood, no matter what initiated the crash. Calling the experience by a different, more accurate name would also enable us to look at the evidence again with fresh eyes and more clearly define the experience. Thus, the main reason I now reject the term is more profound.
As a physician, I know that, according to current medical understanding, people who have had a cardiac arrest weren’t near death. They were dead. Physiologically and experientially, by everything we currently understand, the sensation of lying unconscious on a table with no heartbeat and no measurable brain function should be the same for the patient at any point in the death process. As already discussed, the physiology in minute one, when resuscitation is still very much possible, or much later, after death has become permanent and irreversible, is well understood and standardized.
For this reason, when the experience occurs in the circumstances of cardiac arrest and the objective period of death, I think near-death experience would more accurately be termed the actual- death experience, or ADE. Anyone who dies loses consciousness with the immediacy of a hammer blow, and electrical activity in the brain ceases in about ten seconds. Scientifically speaking, people who lose consciousness under these circumstances, by definition, should not be able to report highly lucid, detailed, and chronologically accurate memories and accounts of the experience. And in fact, the vast majority of patients who undergo any brain injury don’t remember anything immediately preceding or following the incident. Yet somehow people who claim these conscious mental processes during the period of clinical death enjoy an inexplicable ability to recall details of which they should be wholly unaware.
For this reason, I think the experience could point the way to a new scientific theory of the mind. Many scientists hold the belief that electrical and chemical firing at the level of the neuron produces all our cognitive processes. But patients whose brains have flatlined after death claim to recall details of what occurred while they lay unconscious on the table. Even more incredibly, they claim their bodies were beneath them, while their awareness and their “self” hovered at the level of the ceiling.
These surprisingly accurate observations seem to occur when patients correctly describe details they could only have seen while out of their bodies. In one case, reported as part of a large scientific study published in the Lancet, a prestigious medical journal, Dutch cardiologist Pim van Lommel, who has done extensive research into NDEs, described the account of a patient who had awareness and mental and cognitive function during a cardiac arrest in the hospital where he worked. As colleagues began resuscitation efforts, they also set about inserting a breathing tube through the man’s mouth. As the man’s jaws were parted to permit the introduction of a breathing tube, his upper teeth came loose. He had dentures. The nurse removed them quickly and continued her work. After ninety minutes of steady effort, the man’s heartbeat was restored, and he was sufficiently stabilized.
A week later, the man was transferred from intensive care to the cardiac ward, and the nurse who attended him during surgery saw him again for the first time since his recovery. The nurse was entering his room to administer medication and had no intention of revealing that she had been present at his resuscitation. But the patient, incredibly, recognized her. This was surprising enough. He had been unconscious the entire time she was in his room in intensive care—in a coma, in fact, as a result of the lack of blood flow from his stopped heart. But then the patient told the nurse that he had seen her remove his dentures. In all, the patient described the cardiac arrest cart beside his unconscious body, the drawer she had hurriedly tossed his dentures inside, and the small room where he had been resuscitated.
Van Lommel subsequently performed his own investigation, and he was admittedly slack jawed at the patient’s inexplicable recall of these details. The man told van Lommel: “I was floating up near the ceiling, and I was trying to let everyone know I was still alive because I was afraid they were going to stop trying to resuscitate me.” For a long time, van Lommel did not believe in such experiences, but testimonials like this one helped convince him they were real.
Dr. Mario Beauregard, a Canadian neuroscientist, conducted a study with patients who underwent deep hypothermic circulatory arrest (DHCA) at Hôpital Sacré-Coeur, a research hospital affiliated with the Université de Montréal, between 2008 and 2010. These were patients who had been cooled down to an incredible 18˚C (64.5˚F) from 37˚C (98.5˚F), a point at which the brain stops working, and doctors can stop the circulation without causing permanent damage. The body is so cold that the cells have such little metabolic activity that even though they are starved of oxygen and there is no blood flow or circulation, they don’t become damaged. This gives surgeons time to safely operate on patients without any circulation. Biologically this is the same as what happens to someone who has died. This surgical procedure was employed in patients to repair aortic defects where they couldn’t have been placed on a heart-lung bypass machine. The main objective of Beauregard’s study was to estimate the prevalence of conscious mental events during DHCA. Of the thirty-three patients whose cases were examined, three patients reported conscious mental activity and were interviewed for the study, and one reported having an out-of-body experience.
The patient was a woman who had just given birth and required immediate surgery to replace the ascending aorta. According to Beauregard, the woman did not see or talk to the members of the surgical team, and it was not possible for her to see the machines behind the head section of the operating table as she was wheeled into the operating room. She was given general anesthesia, and her eyes were taped shut. Still, she claimed to have had an out-of-body experience (OBE) at one point during the surgery. From a vantage point outside her body, she described seeing a nurse passing surgical instruments to the surgeon. She also perceived anesthesia and echocardiography machines located behind her head. Beauregard was able to verify that the descriptions she provided of the nurse and the machines were accurate. Furthermore, during the experience, the woman reported feelings of peace and joy, and seeing a bright light. Although this is an individual case, it does illustrate the possibility of conscious mental activity during circulatory arrest, which biologically is what happens when we die.
Such stories of people with accurate memories of what occurred during a prolonged period of unconsciousness after the process of death has started comprise a major part of the experiences reported around the world. Indeed, they raise the question: Are these experiences real? To many people, these stories have become fodder for religious and philosophical debate. For some scientists, they may be rejected as unusual hallucinations, but to many scientists who have studied them in detail, they provide a window to awareness and mental activity in the death state, paradoxically binding us all together and freeing us up to make a scientific exploration into the mystery of what happens to human consciousness after we die.