The inner life
Near-Death Experience
Direct answer
Near-Death Experience: A near-death experience is the vivid experience some people report after coming close to death, often with a feeling of peace, a sense of leaving the body and a light.
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At a glance
- Also called
- NDE, near death experience, what is an NDE
- Found in
- Consciousness & Spiritual Psychology
- Related
- Out-of-Body Experience, Terminal Lucidity, Bardo, Psychopomp
A near-death experience is the vivid experience some people report after coming close to death, often with a feeling of peace, a sense of leaving the body and a light.
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What is a near-death experience?
A near-death experience, often shortened to NDE, is what some people describe after a cardiac arrest, a bad accident or another close call. Common features are a feeling of peace, a sense of watching from outside the body, movement through darkness toward a light, meetings with figures, a review of one's life and a border or point of return. No single account has every feature, and some are distressing.
The experiences are reported across cultures, though their details follow what a person already knows: who is met, and what the border looks like, differ from country to country. Many people say the experience left them less afraid of death and more attentive to others.
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What sets Near-Death Experience apart
In the accounts, what marks the near-death experience off from a dream or a hallucination is its order and the weight people give it afterwards: decades later they recall it as more real than ordinary life, and many change how they live. Researchers measure it with Greyson's scale of sixteen questions, on which a score of seven or more counts. The features vary with culture, a minority of accounts are distressing, and studies do not agree on how many.
- Named by: Raymond Moody, Life After Life, 1975
- Common measure: Greyson's NDE Scale, 1983: sixteen questions, a score of 7 or more
- Dutch hospital study: 62 of 344 survivors of cardiac arrest reported one (The Lancet, 2001)
- Earliest collection: Albert Heim's accounts of climbers' falls, 1892
- What it shows: disputed; no study has settled whether mind works apart from the brain
Often mistaken for something else: An out-of-body experience is one feature that may occur in it or by itself, in sleep or illness; a near-death experience is the whole sequence reported after a brush with death.
The story behind Near-Death Experience
Raymond Moody named the experience in Life After Life in 1975, from about 150 accounts. Earlier collections exist: the geologist Albert Heim published climbers' memories of their falls in 1892. Bruce Greyson's scale of 1983 gave researchers a common measure, and hospital studies followed, among them Pim van Lommel's in The Lancet in 2001 and Sam Parnia's AWARE study in 2014.
Why Near-Death Experience matters
Near-Death Experience is the nearest thing to a report from the edge of death that can be collected and compared, which is why believers and sceptics both study it closely.
How to read Near-Death Experience
Researchers record the accounts soon after the event and score them on a common scale, so that one study can be set beside another.
Near-Death Experience in practice: an example
A man revived after a heart attack says he watched the room from near the ceiling and felt calm, and has thought differently about his days since.
Where readings of Near-Death Experience go wrong
An account shows what a person lived through, not what follows death. The house does not use one to say where anyone who has died is now.
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
- NDE, near death experience, near-death experiences, what is an NDE
- Last updated
- 2026-09-26
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Common questions
What is a near-death experience?
It is a vivid experience reported by some people who came close to death, for instance after the heart stopped. Typical features are peace, a sense of leaving the body, a light, and a border that is not crossed.
How common are near-death experiences?
In hospital studies of people revived after cardiac arrest, roughly one in ten to one in five report one. In a Dutch study of 344 survivors published in 2001, 62 did.
Do near-death experiences prove life after death?
No. They are well documented as experiences, and researchers disagree about their cause. Most neuroscientists explain them by what the brain does under extreme stress. Nobody knows what follows death.
