The inner life
Life Review
Direct answer
Life Review: A life review is the experience, reported by some people who have come close to death, of seeing scenes from their whole life again in a short span of time.
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At a glance
- Also called
- life flashing before your eyes
- Found in
- Consciousness & Spiritual Psychology
- Related
- Near-Death Experience, Terminal Lucidity, Out-of-Body Experience, Weighing of the Heart
A life review is the experience, reported by some people who have come close to death, of seeing scenes from their whole life again in a short span of time.
A plain educational schematic; it does not diagnose a condition or replace professional care.
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What is a life review?
The life review is one of the features people describe after a near-death experience, though only a minority report it. Accounts vary. Some speak of a rapid series of pictures, some of every moment present at once, and some of reliving events from the position of the people they affected and feeling what those people felt. It is usually described as vivid and as free of condemnation, though people often say they judged themselves.
Those who report it frequently say it changed what they value, with more weight on how they treat others. What produces it is not known. Proposals include the activity of memory regions in a brain under extreme stress, but no explanation has been confirmed, and the reports cannot show what happens after death.
On the tree of the hidden arts: Death and what follows.
What sets Life Review apart
The life review is the reflective element of the near-death report. The tunnel, the light and the sense of leaving the body are about where the person seems to be; this one is about who they have been. Its most striking variant is the change of viewpoint, in which events are felt from the side of the other people involved. Researchers count it separately on their scales, and it turns up less often than peace or light.
- Early collection: Albert Heim, accounts of Alpine falls, 1892
- Named as a feature: in Life After Life by Raymond Moody, published in 1975
- On the Greyson scale: one of sixteen questions, 1983
- Frequency: 13 per cent of near-death reports in van Lommel's 2001 study
- Typical tone: vivid and without outside condemnation
Often mistaken for something else: In care of the old, life review is a guided looking back proposed by Robert Butler in 1963; the near-death kind is sudden and unbidden.
The story behind Life Review
The saying that a drowning person sees their life pass is old. The Swiss geologist Albert Heim published accounts from climbers who survived falls in 1892, many of whom described it. Raymond Moody listed the review among the common elements of near-death experience in Life After Life (1975), and Bruce Greyson's scale of 1983 includes a question on it. In the Dutch study led by Pim van Lommel in 2001, 13 per cent of those reporting a near-death experience described one.
Why Life Review matters
Life Review is the element of near-death reports that people most often connect with a change in how they live afterwards.
How to read Life Review
Some readers borrow it as a reflective exercise, looking back over a year or a life and asking how each scene felt to the others in it.
Life Review in practice: an example
A man revived after a cardiac arrest might say he saw a quarrel with his brother from his brother's side, and telephone him the week he leaves hospital.
Where readings of Life Review go wrong
Anyone unsettled by such an experience, their own or another's, may be helped by speaking with a doctor or counsellor.
Sources and editorial method
This entry summarizes the tradition in the Almanac's own words; where no source is listed, it is an editorial summary rather than a primary text, and symbolic readings are named as the tradition's, not as fact.
- Source
- The Great Almanac Dictionary
- Category
- Consciousness & Spiritual Psychology
- Aliases
- life review near death experience, life flashing before your eyes, nde life review, panoramic life review
- Last updated
- 2026-09-26
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Common questions
What is a life review?
It is a vivid replaying of scenes from a person's life, reported by some people after a close brush with death. It is one of the recognised features of near-death experiences.
How common is the life review?
It is reported in a minority of near-death experiences. In a Dutch study of cardiac arrest survivors published in The Lancet in 2001, about 13 per cent of those who had such an experience described a life review.
Does life really flash before the eyes at death?
Some survivors of close calls say so, and the reports are sincere and long attested. What happens in the brain at such moments is not established, and nothing is known of those who do not return.
