Definitions, Core Features, and Types
Imagine a woman lying on an operating table. Her heart has stopped. The monitors are screaming flatline. Surgeons are scrambling to bring her back. And yet, somehow, she is watching the entire scene from above — calm, clear-headed, more vividly aware than she has ever been in her life. She sees the instruments on the tray. She hears the doctor's words. She notices the pattern on a nurse's shoes. Then something else begins. A warmth. A pull. A tunnel of light opening before her. A presence of indescribable love waiting on the other side. Minutes later, the paddles jolt her heart back to life. She opens her eyes on the table — and the world she has returned to feels strangely less real than the one she just left.
What just happened to her? Was it a hallucination? A dying brain misfiring? A dream? Or was it something far more significant — a genuine encounter with the spiritual world that awaits us all beyond death?
This chapter exists to answer a foundational question: what exactly is a near-death experience? Before we can evaluate NDEs, before we can discern which ones are genuine and which contain corrupted elements, before we can apply the biblical tests that will occupy the rest of this book, we need to know precisely what we are talking about. Definitions matter. Distinctions matter. And as we will see, many of the most serious errors in the NDE conversation happen because people confuse an NDE with something else entirely.
The term "near-death experience" was coined in 1975 by Dr. Raymond Moody in his groundbreaking book Life After Life.1 But experiences matching this description have been reported for thousands of years. Moody simply gave the phenomenon a name and brought it to public awareness. Since then, the field has matured into a rigorous area of scientific research, and the definition has been refined considerably.
Dr. Bruce Greyson, widely regarded as the leading academic NDE researcher, provides the standard scholarly definition. He describes near-death experiences as profound psychological events with transcendental and mystical elements, typically occurring to individuals close to death or in situations of intense physical danger.2 Greyson also developed the NDE Scale, a sixteen-question research instrument that remains the most validated tool for distinguishing genuine NDEs from other experiences. The scale assigns a score from 0 to 32, with a minimum score of 7 required to qualify as an NDE.3 This tool has been invaluable for researchers because it provides an objective, measurable way to identify whether someone's experience meets the threshold for a true NDE.
As Dr. Jeffrey Long explains, the term "near-death experience" has two components: being near death and having an experience at that time. In his research, NDEs are considered to have occurred only when individuals were truly physically near death — so physically compromised from accident or illness that they were generally unconscious and may have been clinically dead, with no heartbeat or breathing.4 This is not a minor point. It matters tremendously for discernment, because some people claim to have had "NDEs" when they were never actually near death at all.
A near-death experience (NDE) is a specific category of spiritual experience that occurs during or very near clinical death, involves a characteristic cluster of elements (such as out-of-body perception, encountering light, meeting other beings, and a life review), and is consistently described by experiencers as feeling "more real than real life." It is measured and validated using the Greyson NDE Scale, which requires a minimum score of 7 out of 32.
Although no two near-death experiences are identical, researchers have found remarkable consistency in the elements that appear. Long's research, verified by many other investigators, identifies twelve common elements that typically occur in a consistent order.5 These include: an out-of-body experience (OBE), heightened senses, intense and generally positive emotions, passing through a tunnel, encountering a mystical or brilliant light, meeting deceased relatives or mystical beings, an altered sense of time or space, a life review, encountering otherworldly realms, receiving or learning special knowledge, reaching a boundary or barrier, and a voluntary or involuntary return to the body. Not every NDE includes all twelve elements, but most include several. Each element on its own is a powerful experience — and together they form a pattern that is astonishingly consistent across cultures, religions, ages, and historical periods.
Shaun Tabatt has helpfully condensed these into a nine-point NDE framework that provides a practical structure for evaluating NDE accounts.6 Let me walk through the most significant features briefly.
The separation of consciousness from the physical body is often the first element of an NDE. Long's NDERF survey found that 74.9 percent of NDErs reported separating from their physical body.7 Experiencers commonly describe floating above their body and observing the medical scene below with startling accuracy. These out-of-body observations are among the most evidentially significant aspects of NDEs because they can sometimes be verified — the experiencer accurately reports details they could not have perceived with their physical senses. As Michael Sabom documented in his Atlanta Study, some patients described their own resuscitations with such precision that the accounts could have been used as teaching tools for medical students.8
Rather than fading into the fog of unconsciousness, NDErs consistently report that their senses become more acute during the experience. Colors are more vivid, sounds more rich, understanding more immediate. As Tabatt notes, the typical senses are "cranked up to a superhuman level," and communication becomes instantaneous — a spirit-to-spirit exchange rather than the clumsy medium of spoken language.9 This feature poses a serious challenge to the theory that NDEs are produced by a dying brain, since brain impairment would be expected to reduce cognitive clarity, not enhance it.
NDErs frequently report meeting other persons during their experience. These beings may include deceased family members and friends, angelic figures, and — remarkably often — Jesus Christ himself (a finding we will explore in depth in Chapter 13). Long's research found that encounters with deceased relatives, mystical beings, and divine figures are among the most commonly reported NDE elements.10 The theological significance of these encounters will occupy much of this book.
Many NDErs describe a moment during their experience when their entire life passes before them — not as a vague montage, but as a vivid, detailed reliving of key moments. What makes the life review especially striking is that experiencers often report feeling the emotional impact of their actions from the perspective of others. They feel the joy they caused, and they feel the pain. As Tabatt observes, it is not uncommon for people to express feeling overwhelmed by everything God has forgiven them for.11 The life review will receive full treatment in Chapter 16.
Near the end of many NDEs, the experiencer reaches some kind of limit — a fence, a river, a line of light, a point of no return. They are told or they sense that crossing it means they cannot go back. Most are sent back, sometimes reluctantly, because their earthly life is not yet complete. Others are given a choice. This element is remarkably consistent and gives NDEs their distinctive character: the person genuinely approached death but was turned back at the threshold.
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One of the most important things we can do for discernment is to clearly distinguish NDEs from related but different phenomena. Many of the most problematic "NDE" accounts in popular culture are actually something else entirely — and treating them as NDEs creates confusion. Here are the key distinctions.
Dreams are remembered as dreams. They are typically vague, fragmentary, and obviously not real. NDErs universally insist that their experience was the opposite — more vivid, more coherent, and more real than ordinary waking life. When researchers ask NDErs to compare their experience to a dream, the response is almost always immediate and emphatic: "It was nothing like a dream. It was more real than anything I've ever experienced."12 This consistency is one of the strongest markers distinguishing genuine NDEs from other mental events.
Hallucinations produced by drugs, anesthesia, oxygen deprivation, or mental illness tend to be fragmented, incoherent, and highly idiosyncratic — no two are alike. NDEs, by contrast, display remarkable cross-cultural consistency, coherent narrative structure, and lasting positive aftereffects. As J. Steve Miller notes in developing his "Gray Scale" of red flags, signs of hallucination — such as bizarre, fragmented imagery or obvious misapprehensions — are actually evidence against a report being a genuine NDE.13 The distinction matters enormously, because critics of NDE research frequently dismiss the entire phenomenon as "just hallucinations" without reckoning with how different the two phenomena actually are.
Some people experience OBEs — the sensation of leaving their body and observing from outside it — without being anywhere near death. These spontaneous or even deliberately induced OBEs are a distinct category from NDEs. This distinction will become important in Chapters 19 and 30, when we evaluate teachers like Robert Monroe who promoted deliberate OBE induction as a spiritual practice. Whatever one makes of standalone OBEs, they should not be confused with the near-death context that gives NDEs their distinctive weight and evidential force.
A spiritual vision — like those reported by mystics throughout church history or by some charismatic and Pentecostal Christians — may share features with NDEs but occurs while the person is fully alive and not near death. Similarly, some Christians today claim to have been "translated" to heaven during prayer, worship, or sleep. As Randy Kay helpfully distinguishes in his introduction to Tabatt's The NDE Conspiracy, there is an important difference between an afterlife experience that occurs during clinical death, an NDE that occurs during a near-death crisis, and a vision that occurs while the person is cogent and healthy.14 Whatever one makes of prophetic visions, they are not NDEs and should not be evaluated with NDE criteria.
NDEs happen during clinical death or a near-death crisis, and the person returns to tell about it. Deathbed experiences (DBEs) happen during the dying process itself — often in the final hours or days of life — and the person typically does not return. DBEs are the subject of Chapter 3 and deserve their own careful treatment. The two phenomena overlap in some features but differ in context, timing, and theological significance.
Many popular "NDE" accounts in books and online are actually spiritual visions, deliberate OBE practices, or trance experiences — not near-death experiences at all. When someone was never actually near death, their experience may still be spiritually meaningful, but it should not be evaluated as though it occurred at the threshold of death. Mislabeling experiences leads to confusion and poor discernment. Always ask: was the person genuinely near death?
Reports of experiences at the threshold of death are as old as recorded history. Plato's Republic includes the Myth of Er, in which a soldier killed in battle returns to life on his funeral pyre and describes what he witnessed in the afterworld — perhaps the earliest recorded NDE-like narrative in Western literature. The Venerable Bede, writing in eighth-century England, recorded the account of a man named Drythelm who died, visited the afterlife, and returned to tell of heavenly and hellish realms. Scattered reports appear throughout the medieval period, but the phenomenon received no systematic attention.
The modern scientific study of death-related experiences began in 1892, when Swiss geologist Albert Heim published a collection of accounts from mountain climbers who had survived falls — many of whom described a sudden life review and profound peace during their plunge. In the 1960s, Karlis Osis conducted the first large-scale systematic studies of deathbed visions, laying groundwork for later NDE research. But it was Raymond Moody's Life After Life in 1975 that brought the phenomenon to worldwide attention and gave it the name we still use today.15
What happened next was remarkable. Skeptical doctors began investigating — and many became convinced. Dr. Michael Sabom, a cardiologist who initially thought Moody's findings were nonsense, was challenged to simply ask his own patients. When he did, he discovered hundreds of accounts — and his five years of research produced the landmark book Recollections of Death in 1982, followed by his more comprehensive Light and Death in 1998.16 Kenneth Ring, a psychologist at the University of Connecticut, published Life at Death in 1980 and Heading Toward Omega in 1984, providing the first systematic empirical studies of NDE patterns. Bruce Greyson developed his NDE Scale and has published decades of careful research, culminating in his 2021 book After. Pediatrician Melvin Morse documented NDEs in children, whose accounts were particularly compelling because young children lacked the cultural frameworks that skeptics often invoked to explain adult NDEs away.
The most evidentially powerful research came with prospective cardiac arrest studies — studies that identified patients before their NDEs rather than gathering stories after the fact. Pim van Lommel's landmark study, published in The Lancet in 2001, followed 344 cardiac arrest survivors and found that 18 percent reported NDEs.17 Sam Parnia's AWARE studies at major hospitals have continued this prospective approach, attempting to document veridical perception during cardiac arrest with hidden visual targets in operating rooms. Jeffrey Long, a medical oncologist, founded the Near Death Experience Research Foundation (NDERF) and has accumulated thousands of NDE accounts from around the world, producing the largest database of NDEs in existence.18
The point of this brief history is simple: NDE research is not fringe science. It is not wishful thinking. It is a mature, multidisciplinary field with decades of careful empirical study behind it. Christians engaging this field are engaging serious scholarship, not tabloid sensationalism.
Dr. Michael Sabom's Atlanta Study stands out as a model of rigorous NDE research. Sabom personally interviewed 160 patients over two years, using carefully constructed questionnaires and ensuring that each participant had survived a clearly defined near-death crisis. He pursued what he called "virgin cases" — people who had not told their story publicly — to avoid the contamination that comes from repeated retelling. He also divided his Christian participants into conservative and liberal groups and compared them with non-Christian God-believers, producing the most theologically nuanced NDE study of its era.
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One important clarification is necessary. The word "near" in "near-death experience" is somewhat misleading, because many NDErs were not merely near death — they were clinically dead. Their hearts had stopped. Their brain activity had ceased. By every medical measure available, they had crossed the line.
The phenomenon exists on a spectrum. At one end are NDEs that occur during fully documented cardiac arrest with flatline EEG — the most evidentially powerful cases, because there is no brain activity that could theoretically generate the experience. In the middle are experiences during medical crises where death was imminent but not technically documented by monitors. At the other end are experiences during serious accidents or illnesses where death was expected but did not happen. All of these can produce genuine NDEs, and all score similarly on the Greyson Scale.19 But the strongest cases for establishing that NDEs are more than brain-generated phenomena are those involving documented clinical death — where the brain was measurably offline and yet vivid, coherent, verifiable experience was occurring.
Miller's "Gray Scale" of red flags for assessing NDE credibility identifies the first and most fundamental marker: "The person was not close to death." If someone was never truly near death, their experience — whatever it was — is not an NDE by definition.20 This may seem like a technicality, but it matters enormously for discernment. Genuine proximity to death is what gives the NDE its distinctive character and its evidential weight.
Not all NDEs are alike in tone or content. Researchers have identified several major types, each of which will receive fuller treatment in later chapters.
Positive or pleasant NDEs are by far the most common. These involve feelings of overwhelming love and peace, encounters with light and with welcoming beings, beautiful otherworldly landscapes, and a reluctant return to the body. The majority of reported NDEs fall into this category — perhaps 75 to 85 percent, depending on the study.
Distressing or hellish NDEs constitute a significant minority — perhaps 15 to 20 percent of cases. Nancy Evans Bush and Bruce Greyson have documented that in distressing NDEs, the heavenly and redemptive themes of most NDEs are replaced by frightening or hellish experiences.21 Researchers have identified three common responses to distressing NDEs: some experiencers treat it as a wake-up call to change their lives, some try to explain it away, and some struggle for years to understand what happened. These experiences will receive careful treatment in Chapter 21, where we will distinguish between several subtypes including genuine glimpses of Hades, demonic encounters, and experiences rooted in fear or psychological distress.
Mixed NDEs contain elements of both positive and distressing experiences — perhaps beginning in darkness and moving toward light, or encountering both welcoming and threatening beings. These mixed experiences will be especially relevant to our discussion of "hybrid" NDEs in Chapters 17 through 22.
Shared-death experiences are perhaps the most fascinating recent category. In these cases, someone who is not dying — a family member sitting at the bedside, for instance — reports sharing in the dying person's experience. They may see the same light, the same beings, or the same otherworldly environment. Raymond Moody, who first documented this phenomenon, has argued that shared-death experiences may represent the future of NDE research, since they provide a circumstance where elements of the experience can be corroborated by an outside witness.22
Sabom's research also identified four subtypes based on the dominant character of the experience: cognitive NDEs (where mental functions like perception and understanding predominate), affective NDEs (where feelings of joy and harmony are foremost), paranormal NDEs (emphasizing out-of-body and extrasensory components), and transcendental NDEs (where entrance into an unearthly realm is most prominent).23 Interestingly, Sabom found that the types and depths of NDEs were remarkably similar across different religious groups — conservative Christians, liberal Christians, and non-Christian God-believers all reported similar kinds of experiences at similar depths.
If someone in your church or family shares an NDE, the first question to ask yourself — gently and privately — is whether it actually was an NDE. Were they genuinely near death? Does their experience display the characteristic features? Or might they be describing a dream, a vision, a hallucination, or a spiritual impression? This is not about being suspicious. It is about being precise. Knowing what category of experience we are dealing with is the essential first step in loving, careful discernment.
A near-death experience is not a vague, catch-all term for anything strange that happens near death. It is a specific, well-defined, scientifically studied phenomenon with characteristic features, measurable criteria, and over fifty years of rigorous research behind it. It can be distinguished from dreams, hallucinations, standalone OBEs, spiritual visions, and deathbed experiences. It occurs on a spectrum from near-death crisis to documented clinical death. It comes in several varieties — positive, distressing, mixed, and shared. And it has been reported by millions of people across every culture, religion, age group, and historical period.
Why does all this matter for a book on biblical discernment? Because definitions are the first tool of discernment. If we do not know what an NDE is, we cannot evaluate whether a particular one is genuine. If we confuse NDEs with dreams or hallucinations, we will dismiss genuine encounters with God. If we confuse them with spiritual visions or trance experiences, we will apply the wrong criteria and reach the wrong conclusions. And if we fail to distinguish between the experience itself and the interpretation the experiencer places on it — a distinction we will develop fully in Chapter 9 — we will be lost before we even begin.
The good news is that we are not lost. We have clear definitions. We have reliable research tools. We have a rich body of scientific literature to draw on. And most importantly, we have the Scriptures — the unchanging standard against which every spiritual experience must be measured. With our definitions in hand, we are ready to turn in Chapter 3 to the closely related but distinct phenomenon of the deathbed experience.
Burke, John. Imagine Heaven: Near-Death Experiences, God's Promises, and the Exhilarating Future That Awaits You. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2015.
Greyson, Bruce. "The Near-Death Experience Scale: Construction, Reliability, and Validity." Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 171 (1983): 369–375.
Greyson, Bruce. "Near-Death Encounters With and Without Near-Death Experiences: Comparative NDE Scale Profiles." Journal of Near-Death Studies 8, no. 3 (Spring 1990): 151–162.
Long, Jeffrey. God and the Afterlife: The Groundbreaking New Evidence for God and Near-Death Experience. New York: HarperOne, 2016.
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. Life After Life. Atlanta: Mockingbird, 1975.
Sabom, Michael. Light and Death: One Doctor's Fascinating Account of Near-Death Experiences. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1998.
Tabatt, Shaun. The NDE Conspiracy. Shippensburg, PA: Destiny Image, 2025.
Van Lommel, Pim, Ruud van Wees, Godfried Meyers, and Ingrid Elfferich. "Near-Death Experience in Survivors of Cardiac Arrest: A Prospective Study in the Netherlands." The Lancet 358 (2001): 2039–2045.