Getting clear on what we are actually talking about
On the morning of August 6, 1991, a thirty-five-year-old professional songwriter named Pam Reynolds was wheeled into an operating room at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona. Doctors had discovered a giant aneurysm on the basilar artery at the base of her brain — a ballooned, weakened section of blood vessel that would have killed her if it burst. The size and location made it impossible to remove using standard techniques. Her only real option was a daring procedure nicknamed "standstill," pioneered by Dr. Robert Spetzler at Barrow.1
To perform standstill surgery, the team would cool Pam's body temperature all the way down to sixty degrees Fahrenheit, stop her heart with an injection of potassium chloride, flatten her brain waves to complete electrocerebral silence, and drain all the blood from her head. For a window of about an hour, she would be, by every clinical measure we have, dead. Then they would try to bring her back.
That morning, the surgical team went through their routine. Her eyes were lubricated and taped shut. Small molded speakers were placed deep in each ear canal and secured; these speakers would produce loud 100-decibel clicks throughout the operation to monitor her brain stem, and they completely blocked any possibility of ordinary hearing. Twenty doctors, nurses, and technicians scrubbed in. The cooling process began. Soon her heart stopped, her EEG flatlined, and the blood was drained from her head into a reservoir on the bypass machine. Clinically, Pam was not there.
And yet, when she came back, she had a story to tell — a story so detailed that Dr. Michael Sabom, the cardiologist who later interviewed her, had to admit it challenged everything he thought he knew about the line between life and death. Pam described leaving her body through the top of her head. She described floating above the operating table and looking down. She described the bone saw the surgeon had used — a device she should never have seen or heard, since her eyes were taped and her ears were plugged. She said it looked like an electric toothbrush with a groove at the top, and that the interchangeable blades sat in what looked like a socket wrench case. Both descriptions turned out to be accurate. She recalled hearing one of the cardiac surgeons, a woman, remark that Pam's veins and arteries were unusually small — a remark the operative record later confirmed Dr. Murray had actually made.
Pam described more. She described being pulled toward a brilliant light. She described a sense of overwhelming peace. She saw and recognized deceased relatives — her grandmother, an uncle, a great-great-aunt — who seemed to be caring for her. She was aware that she had gone far enough that there was a question about whether she could be returned to her body. And she returned with her story, against every medical expectation, and lived to tell it.
Was Pam dreaming? Was she hallucinating? Was her brain making it all up in some final, desperate flare before shutting down? Or was she actually experiencing something outside her body while her brain was clinically silent? These are the questions that drive near-death experience research, and they are the questions this book is going to help us answer with care and discernment. But before we can evaluate any specific NDE, we need to get clear on what we are even talking about. Words like "near-death experience" get thrown around loosely, and that looseness creates confusion. Some of the accounts that get filed under the "NDE" label are not really NDEs at all. Some are dreams. Some are drug-induced visions. Some are deathbed experiences, which are related but distinct. And some are deliberate spiritual exercises like astral projection that share a few surface features with NDEs but belong to a very different category.
In this chapter I want to walk through the definition, core features, history, and types of near-death experiences. This may feel like technical ground at first, but I promise it matters for what comes next. Every chapter that follows in this book will assume that we know what an NDE actually is and what it is not. That is the groundwork we lay here. I want this book to give Christians tools they can actually use, and tools only work when we know what we are working on. So let us start by building a shared vocabulary, and then let us build our definitions carefully from there.
Before we dive into the definitions themselves, let me say a word about why any of this matters for Christian discernment. Some readers may be tempted to skip ahead. I understand that. Definitions are not exciting. But here is the problem. A huge amount of what has gone wrong in NDE research and in the popular Christian response to NDEs comes from sloppy categories. People confuse experiences, lump them together, and then apply the wrong standards to evaluate them.
Consider a few examples of where this goes wrong. A dying grandmother in hospice sees Jesus in the corner of the room and dies peacefully. A teenager on a hallucinogenic drug trip sees "a being of light" who tells her that God is in all religions. A yoga instructor practices out-of-body meditation for years and eventually has experiences she calls "NDE-like." A man who has been clinically dead for four minutes during cardiac arrest reports traveling through a tunnel and meeting his deceased father. All four of these people might get called "NDErs" in casual conversation. But they are not the same category of experience. The grandmother is having a deathbed experience. The teenager is having a drug-induced vision. The yoga instructor is having an induced out-of-body experience. Only the cardiac arrest patient is having an actual near-death experience in the strict sense.
If we apply the same rules of evaluation to all four, we will make a mess of it. A Christian might accept the grandmother's experience, reject the drug trip, and then get stuck on what to do with the other two. Without clear categories, we cannot think clearly. So let us begin where all careful thinking begins: with definitions.
Careful definitions are the first tool of discernment. Much of the confusion in popular discussions of NDEs comes from lumping together experiences that actually belong in separate categories. This book treats near-death experiences, deathbed experiences, out-of-body experiences, spiritual visions, and hallucinations as related but distinct phenomena. Each must be evaluated with the criteria that fit it.
The term "near-death experience" was coined in 1975 by Dr. Raymond Moody, a philosopher and medical doctor who had been collecting stories of people who had come close to death and returned with remarkable accounts to tell. His bestselling book Life After Life brought the phenomenon into public awareness for the first time and sparked more than fifty years of ongoing scientific research.2 Before Moody, such stories had been told all through human history, but there was no widely agreed-upon name or category for them. Moody's term stuck, and with it came the first serious attempts to say clearly what these experiences are.
In the decades since Moody's book, researchers have refined the definition many times. Let me share a few of the most important definitions and show where they overlap.
Dr. Bruce Greyson, a psychiatrist at the University of Virginia and perhaps the most influential academic NDE researcher alive today, defines a near-death experience as a profound psychological event with transcendental and mystical elements, typically occurring in people who are close to death or in situations of intense physical or emotional danger.3 Greyson's definition is intentionally broad. It includes what some researchers would call spiritual transformative experiences (experiences very similar to NDEs that happen without the person being physically near death). We will return to that distinction shortly.
Dutch cardiologist Pim van Lommel, who conducted the landmark prospective NDE study published in The Lancet in 2001, offers a more detailed definition. He describes an NDE as the recollection of impressions gained during a special state of consciousness, often including features like a tunnel, a light, a panoramic life review, seeing deceased persons, or observing one's own resuscitation. Van Lommel notes that this state can occur during cardiac arrest, during serious illness, or sometimes with no obvious medical cause at all. He also emphasizes that the experience almost always produces deep and lasting changes in a person's attitude toward life.4
Jeffrey Long, an oncologist and founder of the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation (NDERF), keeps things simple. He uses a common-sense approach: near-death experiences happen when someone is literally near death, typically unconscious or clinically dead, and during that time they have an experience. Long emphasizes the physical closeness to death as a critical part of the definition.5
What do all of these definitions have in common? Several key elements. First, there is typically some medical crisis involved — cardiac arrest, severe accident, serious illness, drowning, or the like. Second, the person is often unconscious or clinically dead during the experience, meaning they should not, by ordinary medical understanding, be having any experience at all. Third, what they report is not a vague fog but a vivid, often highly detailed conscious experience. Fourth, certain features recur across thousands of reports: out-of-body sensations, tunnels, lights, encounters with deceased loved ones or religious figures, life reviews, and overwhelming peace. And fifth, the experience typically produces lasting changes in the person's life.
Because not every NDE researcher agrees on every detail, a working definition for our purposes might look like this: a near-death experience is a vivid, conscious experience reported by a person who was clinically close to death or in a life-threatening crisis, involving some combination of out-of-body perception, heightened awareness, encounters with light or spiritual beings, and deep aftereffects that last beyond the event itself.
That is the basic picture. Now let me introduce the tool most researchers use to decide whether a given experience counts as an NDE at all.
In 1983, Bruce Greyson published a research tool called the NDE Scale that has become the gold standard in the field.6 The scale consists of sixteen questions about the content of an experience. Each question measures one feature commonly reported in NDEs. A person scores points based on whether they experienced each feature and how strongly. The total possible score is thirty-two. Greyson set the cutoff at seven: if you score seven or higher, your experience qualifies as an NDE for research purposes. If you score lower, your experience may still be meaningful, but it lacks enough of the core features to be counted as an NDE in the strict sense.
What the Greyson Scale measures can be grouped into four categories: cognitive features (altered time perception, racing thoughts, life review, sudden understanding), affective features (peace, joy, cosmic unity, encountering light), paranormal features (enhanced senses, ESP-like awareness, visions of the future, out-of-body experience), and transcendental features (unearthly realms, mystical beings, deceased spirits, border or point of no return).7 Every question gets scored from zero to two, so the more features a person reports and the more intensely they report them, the higher the score.
Dr. Michael Sabom, a cardiologist and committed Christian whose pioneering Atlanta Study shaped the field in important ways, adopted the Greyson Scale for his own research. Sabom made sure every person he studied had a score of seven or higher, so he knew he was studying genuine NDEs and not just vague pleasant feelings or fleeting impressions during a medical crisis.8 Van Lommel and Jeffrey Long have used the scale as well, ensuring that their large databases of NDEs actually contain NDEs and not some other category of experience.
The Greyson NDE Scale asks sixteen questions about an experience. Each question can score 0, 1, or 2 points, for a maximum total of 32. A score of 7 or higher qualifies the experience as a near-death experience for research purposes. The scale covers cognitive features (like altered time and life review), feelings (like peace and joy), paranormal features (like out-of-body perception), and transcendental features (like encountering a light or a deceased loved one). Think of it as a kind of filter: it lets researchers separate full-blown NDEs from experiences that share only one or two surface features.
Miller cautions that passing the Greyson Scale does not automatically mean an experience is accurate or trustworthy in every detail.9 The scale measures whether enough of the typical features are present. It does not evaluate theological content, truthfulness, or sources. We will deal with that deeper evaluation throughout this book. But the scale is an important starting point. When a popular NDE book turns out to describe an experience that scores only a three or a four on the Greyson Scale, that is a red flag. It might not be a real NDE at all, even if it is being marketed as one.
No two NDEs are identical. One person will emphasize the tunnel; another will never see one. One person will spend most of their experience with deceased relatives; another will focus almost entirely on the light. Researchers have noted this variation for decades. Yet underneath the variation lies a remarkable consistency of core features. Let me walk through each one with concrete examples and note what we can say about its frequency and meaning.
Most NDEs begin with the person feeling themselves separate from their physical body. They typically find themselves floating above the scene, looking down on their own body and the people around it. In Jeffrey Long's study of 1,300 NDEs worldwide, 75.4 percent of experiencers reported this kind of out-of-body perception.10 Survivors of cardiac arrest often describe watching medical teams try to resuscitate them. They report details they could not have seen from the physical viewpoint of a body lying on a table — what was on top of cabinets, which doctor was standing where, what was said in adjacent rooms.
The cases where these details check out are sometimes called "veridical" NDEs, because the experiencer reported verifiable information that they had no ordinary way of knowing. Sabom's original research in the early 1980s documented multiple cases where NDErs accurately described medical equipment and procedures in ways that went far beyond what hospital-savvy patients could be expected to guess.11 These cases are some of the strongest evidence that the NDE is not simply a brain-generated fantasy.
Veridical NDEs matter enormously for my own work as a doctoral researcher, and they matter for this book. Here is why. If an NDEr's mind was really inside their skull the whole time, receiving no signals from the outside world (because their brain was not functioning), then they should not be able to report anything that was happening outside their head. A hallucination cannot see the room from the ceiling. A dream cannot describe an instrument the patient has never encountered. Yet NDErs do report these things, and in a substantial number of cases, the details turn out to be accurate.
Pam Reynolds is one famous case, but she is far from the only one. Consider the case of a woman sometimes called "Maria," who in the 1970s had a cardiac arrest at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. During her NDE, she reported floating out of her body, out of the hospital building, and around the outside of the building. She said she had seen a distinctive tennis shoe on a third-floor ledge on the far side of the building — a place no one could see from inside. A hospital social worker went to check, and on that third-floor ledge she found a tennis shoe, with specific wear patterns and features that matched what Maria had described.11
Or consider Vicki Noratuk, a woman who has been blind from birth. Vicki had two NDEs — one after a childhood appendectomy, and another after a serious car accident. Vicki had never seen anything with her physical eyes. She had no visual memory of any kind. Yet during her NDEs she reported seeing. She saw her own body on the hospital bed. She saw a ring on her finger, a ring she knew by touch but had never seen. She saw trees, birds, and people for the first time in her life. The detail in her descriptions surprised researchers who had never encountered a blind person's NDE before.11
These cases do not prove anything by themselves. Skeptics will always propose alternative explanations — the NDEr guessed, the NDEr had heard a detail subconsciously, the report was exaggerated after the fact. But when we line up dozens or hundreds of such cases, the weight of the evidence shifts. As cardiologist Michael Sabom put it, his own research and that of Kenneth Ring is the only evidence from systematic research suggesting that NDErs can sometimes report visual perceptions that are physically impossible and not otherwise explicable.11 That kind of evidence is not nothing. It fits with substance dualism — the view that the mind is not reducible to brain activity — in a way that physicalist views struggle to match.
Many NDErs describe traveling through a tunnel, a dark passageway, or some kind of transition space on their way toward a light. This feature is less universal than the out-of-body sensation. Long's study found that 33.8 percent of NDErs reported a tunnel.12 The tunnel imagery shows up more often in Western cultures than in some non-Western ones, which has led some researchers to suggest that the "tunnel" is just how Western minds describe a transition that is not really tunnel-shaped at all. It could be that the transition between realms is experienced in a way that defies description, and different cultures reach for different images to capture it.
The light is one of the most frequently reported features of an NDE, and it is often the most memorable part of the experience. Long found that 64.6 percent of NDErs encountered a brilliant, often loving light.13 The light is typically described as brighter than any earthly light but not painful to look at. Experiencers often say the light loved them, knew them, and communicated with them in ways that were clearer than spoken words. This is the element that has caused the most theological controversy in NDE literature, and we will spend most of Chapter 14 on the question of how to identify whether this light is Jesus or something else. For now, it is enough to note that the light is nearly universal in NDE reports.
The emotional quality of a pleasant NDE is unlike anything the experiencer has known before. Long's study found that 76.2 percent of NDErs described incredible peace, and many spoke of a love so complete that human words fail to describe it.14 This is not giddy happiness. It is a deep, settled, soul-level peace that seems to come from the environment itself, or from the being of light, or from both at once. Many NDErs describe it as the defining feature of the experience — more central than the tunnel or even the light itself. And many struggle for the rest of their lives with a kind of homesickness for that love.
Some NDEs include what is often called a life review. The experiencer sees their life pass before them, sometimes in chronological order, sometimes all at once. In the life review, the experiencer typically does not just watch their actions but feels the effects of those actions on other people. They experience the kindness they gave to a stranger and also the pain they caused someone they loved. Long's study found that 22.2 percent of NDErs reported some form of life review.15 The life review is treated fully in Chapter 16 because of its theological importance. For now, note that it is a real and common feature, though not present in every NDE.
Many NDErs report seeing people they recognize — grandparents, parents, siblings, sometimes spouses — who have already died. Long found that 57.3 percent of his participants encountered other beings, whether mystical figures or deceased relatives.16 These reunions are usually warm and wordless. The deceased relative communicates welcome, love, or in some cases a clear message that it is not yet the experiencer's time and they must return.
Children's NDEs are especially striking on this point. Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, the psychiatrist who pioneered the field of death and dying studies, noted that in all her years of interviewing dying children, every child who mentioned someone waiting for them named a real person who had actually died — sometimes a relative the child could not have known about.17 Seven-year-old Katie, the drowning victim studied by Dr. Melvin Morse, told of meeting Jesus, the heavenly Father, an apparent angel, and two young boys named Mark and Andy. She came out of her coma asking where Mark and Andy were.18
Many NDEs include some point at which the experiencer reaches a border they cannot cross. It might be a river, a fence, a line on the ground, or a doorway. The experiencer senses that crossing this line would mean they cannot return to their body. Long found that 31 percent of NDErs encountered such a boundary.19 The presence of a border suggests that what NDErs visit is not the final state of the afterlife but an intermediate region, a kind of vestibule.
Most NDErs return to their bodies reluctantly. Either they are told by a being of light or a deceased loved one that their time is not yet, or they are given a choice and pick return for the sake of someone they love (often a child or spouse). Long's survey found that 58.5 percent were aware of a decision to return.20 The reluctance is worth noting. NDErs rarely want to come back. The place they are visiting feels, as many of them put it, "more real" than the world they are being sent to.
One of the most striking features of NDEs is the quality of thinking that experiencers describe during the event. They report that their thinking was clearer, quicker, and more complete than normal. Long's survey found that 74.4 percent of NDErs said they were more conscious and alert than normal.21 This is exactly the opposite of what we would expect from a dying or oxygen-deprived brain, which should produce confusion, not heightened clarity. The fact that NDErs describe their cognition as sharper than waking life is one of the strongest arguments against purely physical explanations of the experience.
Sabom interviewed a computer analyst named Greg who was fully alert during his out-of-body experience and noted what he was thinking in real time: trying to figure out how he could be simultaneously above his body and in his body. Greg's cognition was clearly lucid and self-aware during a period when, physiologically, he should have been unconscious.22
NDErs often say that time worked differently during the experience. Some describe everything happening at once. Others say time seemed to stop, or stretch, or lose meaning entirely. Long's study found that 60.5 percent of NDErs reported an altered sense of space or time.23 This feature is hard for the rest of us to picture, but the consistency of the reports across cultures is remarkable.
Perhaps the most striking feature of NDEs is what happens afterward. NDEs typically produce deep, lasting changes in the experiencer's life. They often lose their fear of death. They become more loving and more focused on relationships. They become less materialistic. Many become much more interested in spiritual questions. Many come to faith in God.
Sabom's Atlanta Study compared his NDErs to a control group of cardiac surgery survivors who had come close to death without having an NDE. The NDE group showed significantly greater increases in intrinsic faith, meaning in life, capacity for love, and family involvement than the control group.24 The NDE, in other words, was causing the changes. Simply having a brush with death was not enough. It took the NDE itself to produce the transformation.
These aftereffects are so consistent that researchers consider them a defining part of the phenomenon. A "near-death" event that does not produce lasting change in the person is probably something else — perhaps a dream, a false memory, or a hallucination. Real NDEs leave footprints on the rest of a person's life.
When Jeffrey Long analyzed over 1,300 NDEs from around the world using a careful online survey, the core features appeared over and over in remarkably similar proportions regardless of the experiencer's country, culture, or religious background. About three out of four felt peace. Two out of three encountered a light. More than half met other beings or realms. This global consistency is one of the strongest reasons to take the phenomenon seriously as a real experience rather than a cultural invention or individual hallucination. Hallucinations are idiosyncratic and fragmentary. NDEs are structured and coherent.
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This is where careful thinking pays off. A lot of what goes wrong in Christian evaluations of NDEs comes from confusing NDEs with other experiences that only look similar on the surface. Let me walk through each one.
This is the first thing every NDE researcher will tell you, and it is the first thing every NDEr will insist on. Dreams are remembered as dreams. They are fragmentary, strange, symbolic, and obviously not real. You wake up from a dream knowing you were dreaming. NDErs report the opposite. They describe their experience as "more real than real life" — more vivid, more coherent, more present than ordinary waking reality.25
One minister I know was interviewed by J. Steve Miller about his NDE during a serious infection. Miller kept pressing him: how real was it? Finally the minister leaned across the table, locked eyes with Miller, and insisted that it was every bit as real as their current conversation. That kind of conviction is the universal response of NDErs. No one who has had one talks about it like it was a dream. They will tell you it was more real than this conversation we are having right now.26
This matters for discernment. If someone tells you about a "near-death experience" and describes it as dreamlike, fuzzy, or fragmented, that is a red flag. J. Steve Miller lists vague or dreamlike quality as one of his warning signs that an alleged NDE may not be a real NDE.27 Genuine NDEs are impossible to forget. People remember them with total clarity decades later.
Some have argued that NDEs are just hallucinations caused by oxygen deprivation, DMT release in the dying brain, or other chemical processes. A number of researchers have carefully examined this claim, and it does not hold up well under scrutiny.28
Drug-induced hallucinations, including those produced by DMT and ketamine, do share some surface features with NDEs (lights, altered perception), but they differ in important ways. Hallucinations tend to be fragmentary, chaotic, and highly personal. They do not show the same ordered structure that NDEs show. They rarely involve veridical perceptions that can be checked against outside reality. And they do not produce the same lasting, life-changing aftereffects. People who take DMT may have vivid experiences, but they do not typically walk out of the experience fundamentally different people a decade later.
Van Lommel, after examining every major physical explanation proposed for NDEs, concluded that none of them can account for the full phenomenon — especially the enhanced consciousness, the verified perceptions from outside the body, and the consistent structure across cultures.29 This does not prove NDEs are supernatural. It just shows that the brain-based explanations we have are not nearly good enough to close the case.
For our purposes in this book, if someone reports a "near-death experience" that happened while they were on LSD, DMT, mushrooms, or other psychedelics, that is a red flag. Miller correctly lists drug-precipitated experiences as warranting special caution.30 The experience may have spiritual content, but classifying it as a true NDE would be a mistake.
This distinction matters a great deal, and it will return in Chapter 19 and Chapter 30. Some people report out-of-body experiences that are not connected to any near-death event. They may have an OBE during meditation, sleep paralysis, or deliberate astral projection practice. These experiences share some features with NDEs (the sense of leaving the body, perceiving from above) but they are a different category.
Robert Monroe, who founded the Monroe Institute, promoted deliberate OBE induction as a spiritual practice and wrote books about his out-of-body explorations. Some of his followers now claim their induced OBEs are the same as NDEs. They are not. An OBE occurring during deliberate meditation in a healthy body is a fundamentally different event than an NDE during cardiac arrest. One is sought out by the experiencer using techniques designed to produce it. The other happens to the experiencer without any effort on their part while they are clinically dying.
This distinction matters theologically because Scripture warns against trying to contact the spiritual realm through our own technique. Isaiah 8:19–20, Deuteronomy 18:9–14, and Leviticus 19:31 all forbid various forms of deliberate occult practice. Those chapters deal with necromancy and divination specifically (Chapter 26 of this book will treat those passages fully). But the principle applies here too: seeking out-of-body experiences as a spiritual technique is a very different thing than finding yourself out of your body during a medical emergency you did not ask for.
Some Christians, especially in charismatic circles, report being "taken to heaven" while fully alive — during prayer, worship, sleep, or spontaneous mystical experiences. These are sometimes called spiritual visions, translations, or trance experiences. Whatever one thinks of them theologically, they are not NDEs. They do not occur in clinical death or in a life-threatening crisis. They do not meet the basic definitional requirement of being "near-death."
Shaun Tabatt makes this point carefully in The NDE Conspiracy, drawing from his research partner Randy Kay's framework. A vision of heaven in a prayer room is a different event from an NDE in an ICU. Both may have spiritual content. Both may be real or counterfeit. But they need to be evaluated by criteria that fit their category, not by borrowing NDE research to validate vision reports or vice versa.31
Bruce Greyson left some room in his definition for what he calls spiritual transformative experiences, or STEs — experiences that look very much like NDEs but happen in people who were not in physical danger. In Greyson's view, the common factor seems to be intense physical, emotional, or spiritual crisis.32 A person in what Christians might call a "dark night of the soul" can sometimes have an experience that mirrors a classic NDE without being near physical death. This is a real phenomenon, and this book takes it seriously. But for discernment purposes, STEs should be evaluated with slightly different criteria than strict NDEs, because the evidential case is weaker when the brain was not under the kind of physical stress associated with cardiac arrest.
This is the most important distinction in this book, and I am going to treat it in detail in Chapter 3. But I want to introduce it here because readers sometimes confuse the two, and the difference matters for how we evaluate each one.
A deathbed experience (DBE) happens in the dying process itself, usually in the hours, days, or weeks before death. The dying person sees, hears, or otherwise perceives things that others in the room cannot perceive — often deceased loved ones, angels, religious figures, or beautiful environments. The person does not leave the body in the same clinical sense as an NDE. They are typically still alive and communicating with those around them (or at least still physiologically breathing). And they typically do not return to ordinary life afterward. They die, often within a short time after the experience.
DBEs overlap with NDEs in content (Jesus, angels, deceased relatives, light, peace) but they differ in setting, in clinical status, in reliability, and in the kinds of follow-up we can do. DBEs are in some ways cleaner evidence than NDEs. They are witnessed by family and medical staff. The dying person has no interest in constructing a narrative for a future book. The content is usually simple and consistent. For these reasons, the author estimates that roughly ninety-five percent of DBEs are genuine spiritual phenomena, compared to about seventy-five percent of NDEs. Chapter 3 makes the case for this distinction in depth.
When evaluating any alleged NDE, one of the first discernment questions to ask is whether the experience being described is actually a near-death experience at all. If it happened during a meditation session, a drug trip, a prayer vision, a deliberate astral projection, or a deathbed vision, it belongs in a different category. Borrowing the scientific credibility of NDE research to validate an experience that is not actually an NDE is a common mistake in popular spiritual literature. Evaluate each phenomenon on its own terms, not by smuggling in the authority of NDE research that does not apply.
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Stories of near-death experiences did not begin with Raymond Moody. They have been told, in one form or another, for as long as people have survived brushes with death and shared what happened to them. A brief tour through history will help us see that the phenomenon is real, has been noticed for millennia, and has come into modern scientific study relatively recently.
The earliest detailed NDE-like account in Western literature comes from Plato's Republic, written around 380 BC. Plato tells the story of Er, a Pamphylian soldier who was killed in battle. Er's body was recovered from the battlefield and lay unburied for ten days. When it was finally placed on the funeral pyre, Er revived and began telling what he had seen during his apparent death.33
Er described his soul leaving his body, traveling with many other souls to a mysterious place where judges decided which souls would ascend to heaven and which would descend. He saw souls returning from both directions, some joyful, some worn and weary. He reported being told he must return and carry the message back to the living.
This story is striking. Over two thousand years before Moody coined the term "near-death experience," a Greek philosopher was writing about a man who left his body at the point of apparent death, saw a region where souls were judged, and returned to tell the story. Plato's Myth of Er contains most of the core features of the modern NDE: out-of-body departure, journey to another realm, encounter with judgment, and return with a message.
Raymond Moody has publicly said that his own study of Plato's philosophy during his graduate work in philosophy prepared his mind to recognize NDEs when he started hearing them from contemporary patients.34 Plato did not invent the NDE; he recorded one.
The Bible itself contains several experiences that NDE researchers today would categorize as related phenomena. Stephen, the first Christian martyr, looked intently into heaven just before his execution and saw the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God (Acts 7:55–56). That is a classic deathbed vision.
The Apostle Paul describes an experience of his own in 2 Corinthians 12:1–4 (ESV):
"I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven — whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows. And I know that this man was caught up into paradise — whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows — and he heard things that cannot be told, which man may not utter."
Paul is talking about himself. He does not know whether he left his body or not, but he was caught up into paradise (παράδεισος, transliterated paradeisos, from a Persian word meaning "a garden" or "enclosed park," used in the Greek Old Testament for the garden of Eden and in the New Testament for the blessed state of the righteous dead). He heard things he was not permitted to describe. This is perhaps the closest thing in the New Testament to a personal testimony of what we would today call an NDE or a spiritual transformative experience. Notably, Paul admits uncertainty about the out-of-body question — suggesting it is possible for the soul to leave the body (substance dualism is assumed) but not easy to tell from the inside.
The account of the rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16:19–31 is not strictly an NDE account, but it paints a picture of the intermediate state that matches much of what NDErs describe. Both men are conscious. Both are aware of each other. Both remember their earthly lives. The rich man is in torment; Lazarus is comforted at Abraham's side. This passage is treated fully in Chapter 21 when we sort out the distressing NDEs.
Moving forward to the early medieval period, the Venerable Bede, an English monk writing around the year 730, recorded a remarkable NDE in his Historia Ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum. The experiencer was a man named Drythelm. Drythelm fell gravely ill, died (by all appearances), and lay dead through the night. At dawn he revived and shocked his family by sitting up.
Drythelm described being given a tour of the afterlife by a celestial guide. He saw a place of terrible heat and cold where souls suffered. He saw a place of still greater suffering that he was told was hell. He saw a place of beautiful light that he was told was the outer region of paradise, and beyond it an even greater light that was the direct presence of God. He was denied entry to the full paradise and sent back. Upon his return, Drythelm gave his possessions to his family and the poor and became a monk for the rest of his life.35
Bede's account is not fiction. He recorded it as historical, and his record has been preserved for nearly thirteen centuries. What is striking is how closely Drythelm's experience resembles modern NDEs: the guide, the tour of realms, the border he could not cross, the return, and the dramatic transformation afterward.
Through the rest of church history, NDE-like accounts surface regularly. Saint Perpetua, the early Christian martyr (c. AD 203), recorded visions before her execution. Gregory the Great wrote of such experiences in his Dialogues. Catherine of Siena and many others in the medieval Catholic tradition reported mystical experiences of the afterlife. John Wesley recorded deathbed visions of the people in his ministry. These accounts were never systematically studied. They were simply noted, preserved, and often published for spiritual edification.
The first serious scientific investigation of near-death-like experiences came from Albert Heim, a Swiss geology professor and passionate mountaineer. In 1892, Heim published a study of over thirty mountain climbers who had survived falls that should have killed them. Heim himself had fallen off a cliff in the Alps and had a remarkable experience during the plunge: his life flashed before his eyes, he felt extraordinary peace, and time seemed to stretch so that what was objectively a few seconds felt like minutes.36
Heim collected similar stories from fellow climbers and noticed the same consistent features — peace, life review, altered time, a sense of transcendence. But Heim's work received little attention outside European mountaineering circles at the time. The modern scientific era of NDE research would not begin for another eighty years.
For most of the mid-twentieth century, Western science generally assumed that near-death accounts were just imagination, wish-fulfillment, or the brain's final misfiring. The idea that such reports were worth studying seriously was not taken up by mainstream researchers. That began to change in the 1960s.
Karlis Osis, a parapsychologist at the American Society for Psychical Research, began a systematic collection of deathbed visions and near-death accounts in the early 1960s. He sent questionnaires to thousands of doctors and nurses asking them what they had observed at the bedsides of dying patients. The responses surprised him. Far too many reports came back describing the same pattern — dying people seeing deceased relatives, bright lights, or religious figures — for Osis to dismiss the phenomenon as mere anecdote. He teamed up with Icelandic psychologist Erlendur Haraldsson in the 1970s to run a larger, cross-cultural study comparing deathbed experiences in the United States and India. Their findings, published in 1977 as At the Hour of Death, showed remarkable consistency in the core features across radically different religious cultures.37 The cross-cultural consistency argued strongly against the theory that these experiences were simply cultural expectations dressed up in spiritual language.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, the Swiss-American psychiatrist whose 1969 book On Death and Dying launched the modern hospice movement, noticed the same patterns in her own clinical work. Kübler-Ross spent decades sitting with dying patients, and she came to believe — based on what she saw and heard — that something real was happening at the edge of death. She was especially struck by children. As she noted, every child in her experience who mentioned someone waiting for them on the other side named a real deceased person. Sometimes the child named a relative who had died only hours earlier, whose death the family had not yet told the child about. Kübler-Ross could not explain such patterns with any ordinary theory. She concluded that the afterlife was real, and her work, though often controversial, helped open a door.38
Then came Raymond Moody. Moody was a PhD student in philosophy at the University of Virginia when he heard a lecture by Dr. George Ritchie, a psychiatrist who had himself survived a remarkable NDE during a case of pneumonia in 1943. Moody, already well-read in Plato and interested in questions of immortality, started asking his philosophy students about what they knew of such phenomena. To his amazement, about one in every thirty students came forward with their own story — an aunt who had described a tunnel of light during a heart attack, a friend who had seen Jesus during an accident, a neighbor who had floated above a hospital bed. Moody began collecting these accounts systematically. By 1975 he had gathered more than a hundred cases and published Life After Life.39 The book coined the term "near-death experience," identified nine to fifteen recurring features, and became an international bestseller.
Moody's contribution was enormous. He gave the phenomenon a name, put it on the public map, and invited other researchers to take it seriously as a scientific subject. His own later work drifted in directions that many Christians find theologically problematic — especially his promotion of "psychomanteums" (mirror-gazing rooms designed to contact the dead) and his increasing embrace of syncretism. But Life After Life itself remains foundational. It is the book that launched the field.
One more important early figure is worth mentioning. George Gallup Jr., the son of the famous pollster, conducted a nationwide survey in 1980 that was published as Adventures in Immortality. Gallup found that roughly eight million Americans — about five percent of the adult population at that time — reported having had some kind of near-death experience. Even if that number was inflated, the phenomenon was clearly not rare. Gallup's data shocked researchers and the public alike and helped confirm that whatever was happening, it was happening to a lot of people.40
In November 1977, Moody convened a small group of researchers at his home in Charlottesville, Virginia. The group included Bruce Greyson, Kenneth Ring, Michael Sabom, and others. By the end of the weekend, they had formed what became the International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS), the leading academic organization in the field.41
Over the next few decades, serious NDE research exploded. Kenneth Ring published Life at Death in 1979 and Heading Toward Omega in 1984, both influential but increasingly oriented toward a universalist spirituality that Sabom and others would challenge. Michael Sabom, an evangelical Christian and cardiologist, conducted the Atlanta Study and published Recollections of Death (1982) and later Light and Death (1998), which offered both medical and biblical analysis.42 Melvin Morse focused on children's NDEs. Bruce Greyson developed the NDE Scale and continued publishing major peer-reviewed research.
The strongest evidence for NDEs came from a new kind of research in the 2000s. Instead of retrospectively interviewing people who had reported NDEs, researchers began studying cardiac arrest survivors prospectively — that is, setting up the study in advance and interviewing every survivor as they came out of their arrest, whether they reported an NDE or not.
Pim van Lommel, a Dutch cardiologist, led the first major study of this kind, published in The Lancet in 2001. His team interviewed 344 patients resuscitated from cardiac arrest in ten Dutch hospitals. Eighteen percent reported NDEs, and those who did had them during periods when their brains were producing no measurable activity. Van Lommel argued that the standard brain-based explanations could not account for the clear consciousness NDErs described during documented flatline.43
Sam Parnia, a critical care physician now at NYU Langone, launched the AWARE (AWAreness during REsuscitation) studies in 2008. AWARE put targets in resuscitation rooms — images on shelves too high to be seen from the operating table — to test whether NDErs who claimed to see the room from above could describe what was actually there. The results have been mixed in terms of the targets specifically, but AWARE has produced substantial documentation of conscious awareness during cardiac arrest.44
Jeffrey Long founded the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation (NDERF) in 1998 and has built the world's largest database of NDE accounts. His online questionnaire takes about thirty minutes to complete and participants are not paid — meaning people complete it only because they want to share their experience, not for gain. The database now holds thousands of accounts in many languages.
Bruce Greyson, whose NDE Scale remains the field's gold standard, published After in 2021, a comprehensive overview of his decades of research.
This is the research landscape we inherit. NDEs are a well-documented, widely studied, cross-cultural phenomenon. The evidence that they are real experiences — not dreams, not hallucinations, not fabrications in most cases — is substantial. What Christians still need to do is evaluate their spiritual content. That is the task of the rest of this book.
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One question is worth pausing on before we move to types of NDEs: what does "near-death" actually mean? Not every NDE happens during a fully documented clinical death. The phenomenon exists on a spectrum.
At one end of the spectrum are NDEs during cardiac arrest with flatline EEG. These are the most evidentially strong cases. The person was, by every measurable standard, clinically dead. Their brain was not producing measurable activity. Whatever consciousness they had during that time cannot easily be explained by ordinary brain function.
Next come NDEs during severe medical crisis where death was imminent but not technically documented — major blood loss, severe shock, comas from which the person barely survived. These are still strong cases, though the evidential picture is a little less tight.
Further along the spectrum come NDEs during serious accidents, drownings, and life-threatening illnesses where the person came close to death but may not have been unconscious for the entire time. These are still valid NDEs but invite more scrutiny about the exact timing of the experience.
At the far end are experiences that look a lot like NDEs but happened without any actual physical danger — spiritual transformative experiences, as Greyson calls them. These belong in a related category but should be evaluated with somewhat different criteria.45
For our purposes, when this book speaks of NDEs, we are primarily speaking of the first three categories. The strongest evidential cases are the cardiac arrest NDEs, and much of what we will discuss later in the book assumes the person was genuinely in a life-threatening medical situation.
Not every NDE is pleasant. Not every NDE is the same. Researchers have identified several broad types.
This is the majority type — the kind most people think of when they hear the phrase "near-death experience." The experiencer feels peace, sees a light, meets loved ones or beings, and comes back transformed. Most of the accounts in popular Christian NDE literature (Don Piper, Mary Neal, Dean Braxton, Ian McCormack) fall into this category, and most of the NDEs in the major research databases do as well.
A minority of NDEs — somewhere between fifteen and twenty percent by most estimates — are distressing rather than peaceful.46 Nancy Evans Bush, Bruce Greyson, and Barbara Rommer have been the leading researchers in this area. Distressing NDEs vary widely. Some involve darkness, cold, emptiness, or a sense of being mocked by unseen beings. Some involve imagery that Christians would recognize as hellish: fire, torment, demonic beings, and scenes of suffering. Some involve no dramatic content at all but a pervasive sense of meaninglessness or eternal void.
Greyson and Bush's 1992 study identified three rough patterns in distressing NDEs. The first pattern has the typical features of a pleasant NDE — separation from the body, tunnel, light — but the entire experience is felt as terrifying rather than peaceful. These researchers called this "loss of ego control," where the features themselves are the same but the person's emotional response is fear rather than surrender. The second pattern is what Greyson and Bush labeled as an experience of eternal nothingness: a sense of being mocked, an experience of emptiness, a feeling that all of life is an illusion. The third and most rare pattern is the classic hellish experience with imagery of torment, fire, cold, sounds of suffering, and sometimes demonic beings.46
Cardiologist Maurice Rawlings estimated that about half of the NDEs he encountered in patients he interviewed immediately after resuscitation were distressing, though many patients later suppressed the memory.47 Rawlings' estimate is higher than most, partly because of how soon after resuscitation he interviewed patients, and partly because people who have had distressing NDEs are extremely reluctant to talk about them. Bush herself refused to share her own distressing NDE for decades. This reluctance almost certainly means that distressing NDEs are underreported in the literature. Imagine for yourself: you have just had the most terrifying experience of your life. You feel like you glimpsed hell. You wonder if you are losing your mind, or if you are being judged, or if you are marked for damnation. Who do you tell? Most people tell no one for years.
The distressing NDE category is important and complex. Not all distressing NDEs mean the same thing theologically. Some may correspond to Hades (the real but temporary place of the unsaved dead). Some appear to be genuinely demonic encounters. Some may be the experiencer's own terror filtering what would otherwise be a neutral experience. And some seem to be disciplinary experiences for believers, or "wake-up calls" that lead to repentance and faith. Chapter 21 of this book develops this fourfold typology in detail. For now, the main point is that distressing NDEs are real, they are not all the same, and they should not be dismissed any more than pleasant NDEs should be dismissed. They are part of the phenomenon. Any honest account of what NDEs are has to include them.
There is also a pastoral dimension here worth naming. Some well-meaning Christian teachers have gone the opposite direction from the secular researchers who ignore distressing NDEs. These teachers collect and publicize hellish NDEs as a kind of evangelistic tool — "See? People really do go to hell. Repent while you can." I understand the impulse. But it is worth being careful. Using fear imagery as an evangelistic hook can produce conversions based on terror rather than genuine repentance. And treating every distressing NDE as a preview of eternal damnation skips over the harder exegetical questions about what exactly these experiences reveal. We will address this balance more carefully when we get to Chapter 21.
Some NDEs contain elements of both the positive and the distressing. An experiencer may begin in darkness, fear, or torment and then be delivered by Jesus or a being of light into peace and beauty. Several famous Christian NDE testimonies follow this pattern — Howard Storm's experience being a prominent example. Mixed NDEs can be some of the most transformative, because they combine the warning value of the distressing side with the comfort and hope of the peaceful side.
A relatively recent discovery in the research literature is the phenomenon of shared-death experiences. In these, someone who is not dying (but who is present with a dying loved one) reports experiencing part of what the dying person is experiencing — seeing the departing soul, feeling the sense of a presence, sometimes seeing a light or hearing music that others in the room may or may not perceive. Peter Fenwick and Sue Brayne's research found that about five percent of end-of-life events involved some shared perception.48 Raymond Moody devoted an entire book (Glimpses of Eternity) to this category.
Shared-death experiences are evidentially interesting because they happen to people whose brains are not dying. A skeptic can argue that NDEs are just the dying brain misfiring, but that argument cannot explain why someone whose brain is healthy and whose body is not in distress would simultaneously see and feel what a dying loved one is experiencing. The phenomenon deserves further study, and we will return to it in Chapter 11.
Children's NDEs are sometimes treated as a separate category because they have some distinctive features. Children tend to report simpler, less theologically loaded experiences than adults. They describe meeting Jesus or angels or deceased grandparents without much commentary about what it all means. Melvin Morse's research on pediatric NDEs in Seattle Children's Hospital found remarkable consistency in the core features, which argues against the theory that adult NDEs are just the product of culturally learned expectations.49 Young children should not have the same pre-formed cultural scripts as adults. Yet their experiences contain the same central features.
Dr. Melvin Morse resuscitated seven-year-old Katie after she nearly drowned in a swimming pool. After three days in a coma, she made a complete recovery and described meeting Jesus, a heavenly Father figure, an angel, and two young boys named Mark and Andy. Most strikingly, Katie described what her family had been doing and wearing at home while she was comatose — details her mother later confirmed were exactly correct. Katie's case is one of many where veridical perception at the edge of death points toward the NDE being a real encounter rather than a brain-generated fantasy. Small children cannot easily be accused of having constructed their experiences from books or films they have read.
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Before closing, let me mention something that runs underneath all of this. For a Christian to take NDEs seriously as real experiences, some kind of view of human nature must be in place in which consciousness can function apart from the brain. This view is called substance dualism — the position that a human being is composed of two distinct substances, a material body and an immaterial soul, and that the soul can exist and function without the body.
John W. Cooper's important book Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting defends what he calls holistic dualism from the biblical text. Cooper shows that the Scriptures consistently assume an immaterial aspect of the person that survives bodily death — in passages about the rich man and Lazarus, Paul's confidence of being "away from the body and at home with the Lord," the souls under the altar in Revelation, and many others.50 Joshua Farris makes a similar argument from a systematic theological angle in An Introduction to Theological Anthropology.51
We will not defend substance dualism in detail in this chapter — that full case is built elsewhere in the book and in the broader evangelical and analytic theological literature. But note this: if physicalism about human nature were true (if we were just brains and bodies with no soul), then NDEs would have to be brain-generated illusions, full stop. A person who is clinically dead and has no brain activity could not possibly have a real experience on that view. The whole phenomenon would have to be explained away.
If substance dualism is true, on the other hand, NDEs are not only possible but more or less what we would expect to see sometimes. When the body temporarily fails, the soul may sometimes continue to function and to perceive. What NDErs describe is consistent with what the Bible describes about the intermediate state: the righteous go to be with Christ, the unsaved go to a place of distress, and both remain conscious while awaiting the final resurrection and judgment.
This is one reason I believe NDE research matters for Christian theology. The empirical data on NDEs strongly suggests that consciousness can function apart from the brain — which is exactly what substance dualism teaches and exactly what physicalism denies. NDEs do not prove substance dualism, but they fit with it remarkably well and sit uneasily with its competitors.52
Most Christians in your congregation will encounter NDEs and DBEs at some point — through a dying parent, a grandparent's last vision, a friend's hospital story, or a book they read. When they come to you with questions, they deserve a thoughtful answer, not a reflex dismissal or an uncritical acceptance. Knowing what an NDE actually is, how it differs from related experiences, and what the research shows is the first step toward being able to offer that thoughtful answer. In this chapter we have simply laid the groundwork. The discernment tools come in the chapters ahead.
A near-death experience is a specific, well-defined phenomenon. It happens during or near clinical death. It includes a characteristic cluster of features — out-of-body perception, tunnels or transitions, encounters with light or with beings, life reviews, heightened consciousness, altered time, reluctant return, and lasting transformation. It has been studied scientifically for over fifty years and reported across many more centuries. It is not a dream. It is not a drug hallucination. It is not the same as a spiritual vision in a prayer room or an induced out-of-body experience. And it is not the same as a deathbed experience, which happens in the dying process itself rather than during a crisis followed by return.
Getting these categories clear is the first step in discernment. When we encounter a claim about a "near-death experience," the first question to ask is whether what is being described actually fits the definition. If it does, we can apply the rest of the framework this book develops. If it does not, we need to categorize it properly and evaluate it with criteria that fit that category.
Here is what I want us to take away from this chapter. NDEs are real. They are well-studied. They exhibit remarkable cross-cultural consistency. They produce measurable and lasting effects in those who have them. Most of them are peaceful. A significant minority are distressing. They are not the same as dreams, drug trips, spiritual visions, OBEs, or deathbed experiences, even though these related phenomena sometimes share surface features. And they fit comfortably within the biblical worldview of a human being as body-plus-soul, where the soul can function apart from the body at the point of death.
Chapter 3 will take up deathbed experiences in the same systematic way. Chapter 4 will introduce the central biblical command that shapes our discernment throughout: "test the spirits." And from there we will build the full framework for evaluating any NDE or DBE we encounter. For now, hold on to the definitions we have developed here. They will do a lot of work in the pages ahead.
Bede, the Venerable. Historia Ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum. Translated by Leo Sherley-Price. London: Penguin Classics, 1990.
Blacher, Richard S. "Death, Resurrection, and Rebirth: Observations in Cardiac Surgery." Psychoanalytic Quarterly 52 (1983): 56–74.
Burke, John. Imagine Heaven: Near-Death Experiences, God's Promises, and the Exhilarating Future That Awaits You. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2015.
Bush, Nancy Evans. Dancing Past the Dark: Distressing Near-Death Experiences. Cleveland, TN: Parson's Porch Books, 2012.
Cooper, John W. Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting: Biblical Anthropology and the Monism-Dualism Debate. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000.
Farris, Joshua R. An Introduction to Theological Anthropology: Humans, Both Creaturely and Divine. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2020.
Fenwick, Peter, and Sue Brayne. "End-of-Life Experiences: Reaching Out for Compassion, Communication, and Connection—Meaning of Deathbed Visions and Coincidences." American Journal of Hospice and Palliative Medicine 28, no. 1 (2011): 7–15.
Gallup, George, Jr., with William Proctor. Adventures in Immortality: A Look Beyond the Threshold of Death. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982.
Greyson, Bruce. After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond. New York: St. Martin's Essentials, 2021.
Greyson, Bruce. "The Near-Death Experience Scale: Construction, Reliability, and Validity." Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 171, no. 6 (1983): 369–375.
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Heim, Albert. "Notizen über den Tod durch Absturz." Jahrbuch des Schweizer Alpenclub 27 (1892): 327–337.
Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth. On Children and Death. New York: Touchstone, 1983.
Long, Jeffrey. God and the Afterlife: The Groundbreaking New Evidence for God and Near-Death Experience. New York: HarperOne, 2016.
Miller, J. Steve. Deathbed Experiences as Evidence for the Afterlife, Volume 1: A Groundbreaking, Scientific Apologetic. Acworth, GA: Wisdom Creek Press, 2021.
Miller, J. Steve. Is Christianity Compatible with Deathbed and Near-Death Experiences? The Surprising Presence of Jesus, Scarcity of Anti-Christian Elements, and Compatibility with Historic Christian Teachings. Acworth, GA: Wisdom Creek Press, 2023.
Moody, Raymond A., Jr. Life After Life. Covington, GA: Mockingbird Books, 1975.
Morse, Melvin L. "Near-Death Experiences and Death-Related Visions in Children: Implications for the Clinician." Current Problems in Pediatrics 24, no. 2 (1994): 55–83.
Morse, Melvin, with Paul Perry. Closer to the Light: Learning from the Near-Death Experiences of Children. New York: Villard Books, 1990.
Osis, Karlis, and Erlendur Haraldsson. At the Hour of Death. 3rd ed. Norwalk, CT: Hastings House, 1997. Originally published 1977.
Parnia, Sam, et al. "AWARE—AWAreness during REsuscitation—A Prospective Study." Resuscitation 85, no. 12 (December 2014): 1799–1805.
Parnia, Sam, et al. "Guidelines and Standards for the Study of Death and Recalled Experiences of Death—A Multidisciplinary Consensus Statement and Proposed Future Directions." Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1511, no. 1 (May 2022): 5–21.
Plato. Republic. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. In The Dialogues of Plato, 4th ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953.
Rawlings, Maurice. Beyond Death's Door. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1978.
Rawlings, Maurice. To Hell and Back. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1993.
Ring, Kenneth, and Sharon Cooper. Mindsight: Near-Death and Out-of-Body Experiences in the Blind. Palo Alto, CA: William James Center for Consciousness Studies, 1999.
Ring, Kenneth, and Madelaine Lawrence. "Further Evidence for Veridical Perception During Near-Death Experiences." Journal of Near-Death Studies 11, no. 4 (Summer 1993): 223–229.
Sabom, Michael B. Light and Death: One Doctor's Fascinating Account of Near-Death Experiences. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1998.
Sabom, Michael B. Recollections of Death: A Medical Investigation. New York: Harper and Row, 1982.
Tabatt, Shaun. The NDE Conspiracy. Shippensburg, PA: Destiny Image, 2025.
van Lommel, Pim. Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience. New York: HarperOne, 2010.
van Lommel, Pim, Ruud van Wees, Vincent Meyers, and Ingrid Elfferich. "Near-Death Experience in Survivors of Cardiac Arrest: A Prospective Study in the Netherlands." The Lancet 358, no. 9298 (2001): 2039–2045.