Chapter 16

Time in NDEs — When Clocks Stop, Eternity Breaks Through, and Everything Changes

Time is strange in near-death experiences. Of all the elements people report, time may be the hardest to put into words and the easiest for skeptics to overlook. It does not photograph well. It cannot be diagrammed on a hospital chart. And yet, when we listen carefully to what near-death experiencers (NDErs) tell us about time, we find something remarkable: across cultures, across centuries, across vastly different religious backgrounds, they describe time in strikingly similar ways. Time stops. Time stretches. Time piles up into a single moment. Time becomes something other than what we know on earth.

This chapter argues that these reports are not random distortions of a dying brain. They are too consistent for that, and too coherent. Instead, they look like glimpses of a real place where time genuinely operates differently — a realm that lines up surprisingly well with what the Bible already teaches about eternity and about the God who lives in it. If that is right, then the strange things NDErs say about clocks stopping and lifetimes flashing in an instant are not problems for Christian theology. They are quiet, unexpected confirmations of it.

What NDErs Actually Say About Time

Let me start with the data, because the data is striking. Jeffrey Long, a radiation oncologist who founded the Near Death Experience Research Foundation (NDERF), has gathered the largest collection of NDE reports in the world — well over 4,000 cases at the time of his major analysis.¹ When NDErs respond to his careful questionnaire, one of the questions asks: "Did you have any sense of altered space or time?" The answer is consistent: 60.5 percent of NDErs say yes.² Another question asks more narrowly whether time seemed to speed up. To that one, 33 percent give a fascinating reply — they do not say time sped up exactly. They say "Everything seemed to be happening all at once."³

That phrase — "everything seemed to be happening all at once" — turns out to be a window into something deeper. As we listen to NDErs describe their experiences, four patterns emerge.

(a) Time Ceases

Many NDErs report that in the realm they entered, there was no sense of time passing at all. Past, present, and future seemed to fold into a single eternal moment. One NDEr put it this way: "Yes, while I was in the light, I had . . . [no] sense of time as I know it here on Earth. In other words, no sense of the serial nature of time . . . past, present, or future. All times (past, present, and future) were experienced at every moment in time while I was in the light."⁴

Another reported, "Both time and space in earth stopped completely. Simultaneously, 'the time and the space' on the other side was completely alive, evident, and real."⁵ A man who had an NDE during anesthesia overdose said simply, "No time, just right now."⁶ The motorcycle accident NDEr quoted by Long described it like this: "Everything is heightened and accelerated into pure light energy, with no sense of space or time. I'm more alive than I've ever felt before."⁷ And another, surfacing from anesthesia, reported: "I felt perfect infinite timelessness — I knew everything that had ever existed in the universe, and everything that ever will exist."⁸

Notice how often NDErs reach for the same vocabulary. "Timelessness." "All at once." "No sense of time." These are not people borrowing language from each other. Long's questionnaires are filled out independently, often by people who have never read an NDE book in their lives.⁹ And yet they keep saying the same thing.

(b) Time Compresses

The second pattern is what we might call temporal compression. Vast amounts of information, memory, or experience are crammed into what feels like an instant. The most famous example is the life review (which we covered in detail in Chapter 15). NDErs describe re-experiencing every moment of their entire lives — every word, every thought, every emotion of the people they hurt or helped — and yet the whole panoramic replay happens in what feels like a single moment.

Cardiologist Pim van Lommel, whose 2001 prospective NDE study in the medical journal The Lancet set the bar for serious NDE research, makes this point especially well. He notes that a cardiac arrest typically lasts only a few minutes — perhaps three or four. And yet his patients, after being resuscitated, can spend days describing what they saw and felt during their life review.¹⁰ A drowning survivor told Long: "I saw every moment of my life like I was watching a movie. I was so young, I didn't have to account for sins or learn lessons, but I saw my whole life in just a few seconds."¹¹

Another patient, who lost massive amounts of blood after delivery, described her review with even more detail: "It showed images of everything that had ever happened in my life — my entire life in pictures. And with each picture, I reexperienced the feelings that I had felt at the time. . . . And this was happening all at the same time! . . . In daily life, you see a picture and then you have a memory. But in this experience, I received complete knowledge of all my life events in vivid picture form and memory at the same moment!"¹²

(c) Time Expands

The third pattern is the opposite of compression: brief earthly moments stretching into what feels like vast amounts of time. NDErs frequently report being on the other side for what felt like hours, days, or even what felt like an eternity — only to wake up and learn they were clinically dead for three or four minutes.

Eben Alexander, a neurosurgeon whose 2008 NDE while in a coma from severe bacterial meningitis became famous, captured this strange feature with a striking phrase. In the realm he visited, he said, "a moment can seem like a lifetime, and one or several lifetimes can seem like a moment."¹³ Both directions can happen. Time can crunch down and stretch out, depending on what is going on.

(d) Time Becomes Irrelevant

Finally, many NDErs report that time simply does not apply in the realm they entered. Not that it slows or speeds — but that it is not the kind of thing one would even reach for to describe the place. One NDEr told John Burke, "Everything happened at once — yet with no sense of rush or urgency. In heaven, there are no minutes or hours or days . . . no such thing as 'time.'"¹⁴

The Theological Stakes

So what should we make of this? If NDEs are nothing but oxygen-deprived brains generating random firework displays, why does the temporal element show up so consistently — and why does it line up so well with what the Bible already teaches about eternity and about God? I want to walk through four pieces of theological reflection here.

(a) God and Time: Dynamic Temporality with Transcendent Access

The first question is the big one: what is God's own relationship to time? Christians have argued about this for centuries. The classical "Boethian" view, going back to the sixth-century philosopher Boethius, holds that God lives in a single, timeless "eternal now" — He sees all of history at once and does not experience anything as "before" or "after." More recent thinkers, including Reformed philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff, have argued that God is better described as everlasting than as strictly timeless — He has no beginning and no end, but He does experience something like succession, since the Bible portrays Him as genuinely interacting with His creatures over time.¹⁵

I have argued in a companion volume, The God Beyond the Clock, for what I call dynamic divine temporality with transcendent access. The position is roughly this: God genuinely experiences temporal succession (He really does interact with us in real time, hear our prayers as we pray them, and respond), but He is also not limited by time the way creatures are. He can transcend our timeline, see any point in our history at will, and operate from a perspective that is not bound by linear sequence. He is sovereign over time without being absent from it.

I think NDE reports of altered time fit this picture surprisingly well. The realm NDErs enter is not nothing but the eternal moment of a strictly timeless God — they still have experiences, hear voices, follow conversations, watch movements unfold. But neither is it the relentlessly forward-marching time of earth. It seems to be something in between — a richer, more flexible mode of temporal experience, where "before" and "after" still mean something but no longer dominate. That is a remarkable description for thousands of ordinary people, most with no theological training, to converge upon.

(b) Eternity in the Bible

The Bible itself, when we read it carefully, does not describe eternity as merely "time going on forever." It points us toward something different in kind. Two passages are especially important.

The first is Psalm 90:4: "For a thousand years in your sight are but as yesterday when it is past, or as a watch in the night." Moses, who is traditionally identified as the author of this psalm, is contrasting our human experience of time with God's. From God's vantage point, a thousand of our years compress into an evening that has already gone by, or into a few hours of night watch. The psalm is not saying God experiences nothing — He still "sees" — but His relationship to duration is qualitatively different from ours.

The second is 2 Peter 3:8: "But do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day." Notice that the comparison runs both directions. With God, a single day can be as full as a thousand of our years, and a thousand of our years can be as compressed as a single day. This is exactly the doubled pattern NDErs describe: time can stretch and time can compress. Burke makes this connection explicitly: "Scripture tells us that God's time is exactly what Eben Alexander claimed to experience."¹⁶

Neither of these passages is decisive about every philosophical question concerning God and time. But both clearly teach that the way God relates to time is not the way we relate to time. And NDErs, when they cross that threshold, seem to bump up against precisely that difference.

(c) The Life Review and Time Compression

The third theological piece concerns the life review specifically. As I argued in Chapter 15, the life review is one of the most morally and spiritually transformative elements of the NDE — and it almost always happens in this strange compressed mode of time. An entire lifetime, every word and thought and action, every emotional impact on every person ever encountered — all of it replays in what feels like an instant. How is that even possible?

If physicalism were true — that is, if our consciousness were nothing more than the firing of neurons in our brain — then this kind of compression would be a serious problem. Brains process information at a finite speed. The neural circuits responsible for memory retrieval take measurable time to fire. There is, in fact, a hard limit on how much "experience" a brain can run through in three or four minutes of cardiac arrest. And yet NDErs report content far exceeding that limit.

Substance dualism — the view I defend throughout this book and in detail in Chapter 5 — explains this gracefully. If the soul is a real, immaterial substance distinct from the brain, then when consciousness operates outside the brain (as it does in an NDE), it is no longer bottlenecked by neural processing speed. The soul does not need synapses to fire one after another. It can perceive directly, vastly, holistically. A whole lifetime can be present "all at once" because the limits that compress earthly thinking into linear sequences are simply not there. As Cooper observes — drawing on his analogy of the brain as more like a radio antenna than the source of the signal itself — when the brain is bypassed, perception is not diminished but freed.¹⁷

The compressed life review, in other words, is exactly what we would predict if substance dualism were true and physicalism were false. We have here a quiet but powerful piece of evidence in favor of the soul.

(d) Implications for the Intermediate State

The fourth theological piece may be the most pastorally important. Christians have always wondered: how can the dead "wait" for the resurrection if hundreds or thousands of earthly years separate their deaths from Christ's return? The traditional doctrine of the conscious intermediate state (Chapter 20) teaches that believers who die go immediately to be "with Christ" (Philippians 1:23; 2 Corinthians 5:8) and remain conscious until their bodily resurrection. But that raises a hard question. What about those waiting believers from the early church? Have they been hanging around for two thousand earthly years already?

NDE data suggests that the question itself may be misframed. If time on the other side does not run the way time on earth does — if it can compress, expand, and become "all at once" — then the experience of "waiting" in the intermediate state may not feel anything like our earthly imagination of waiting. A Christian who died in AD 100 and a Christian who dies in AD 2025 may both experience their conscious time with Christ before the resurrection as immediate, full, rich, and complete. They are not bored. They are not pacing. They are not staring at heaven's clock.

John Cooper, whose Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting remains the standard evangelical defense of holistic dualism, addresses this question with characteristic care. He notes that some have tried to dissolve the problem by saying the dead "pass out of time" entirely at death. Cooper rightly rejects this as a non-solution: if we are no longer in time at all, that is not the same as the experience NDErs describe (and frankly raises serious philosophical problems for personal identity).¹⁸ But Cooper also affirms, drawing on Wolterstorff and others, that "even God himself is not wholly timeless, much less those of his human creatures who have departed this earthly vale of tears."¹⁹ The dead are not in some absolute timeless void. They are in a different mode of time — a mode that may include duration, succession, and meaningful experience, but does so without the wearying linear march of earthly clocks.

That picture fits the NDE data exceptionally well. And it should comfort the grieving. When Grandma went to be with Jesus last year, she did not begin a long, lonely watch counting earthly decades until the resurrection. Her experience may already be full, complete, and bathed in eternity, however many earthly years she has been "gone."

What About the Skeptic's Counter?

I want to be fair to the skeptic here. The natural objection runs like this: of course people report distorted time perception during NDEs. Their brains are oxygen-starved. Brain malfunction can produce all kinds of strange experiences, including the warping of subjective time. We should not read deep theology into what is really just a neurological hiccup.

The objection is worth taking seriously, but I do not think it survives close inspection. Here is why. First, ordinary brain malfunction — strokes, seizures, drug intoxication — does sometimes produce time distortion, but the distortions are usually disorganized, incoherent, and frightening in random ways. NDErs, by contrast, report a strikingly orderly kind of altered time, paired with coherent narrative content, vivid moral clarity, and accurate veridical observations of events going on around them (the focus of Chapters 6 and 7). Disordered brains do not produce orderly experiences with verifiable details. Second, the temporal alterations NDErs describe are remarkably consistent across cultures — including across NDErs from Asia, Africa, and Latin America who have no Western expectations about how dying brains should perform.²⁰ Random brain noise should produce random reports. We see something else.

None of this proves the theological reading. But it does mean the brain-malfunction explanation is far less neat than skeptics often suggest. And when we add in the substance-dualist framework — which has independent biblical, philosophical, and Christological support (Chapters 5 and 35) — the NDE temporal data fits naturally rather than awkwardly.

Conclusion: When Eternity Breaks Through

Time in NDEs is one of the quietest pieces of evidence for the Christian view of reality. It does not generate the same headlines as veridical out-of-body observations, and it never will. But there it sits, patiently waiting in thousands of NDE reports, telling us something important: the realm into which dying people slip is not just a louder, brighter version of earth. It runs differently. It does not march. It does not tick. It holds.

And that holding looks an awful lot like the eternity Scripture has been talking about all along — the eternity of a God for whom a thousand years are like a watch in the night, the eternity that breaks into our chronologies whenever heaven brushes against us. NDErs are not inventing this. Their grandmothers' beliefs about eternity, the ancient psalmists' poetry, and Peter's epistle all knew it before them. What NDEs give us is a fresh, contemporary, scientifically documented set of voices saying the same thing in different words: when you cross over, the clocks stop. Or rather — they finally start telling time the way time was meant to be told.

For the Christian who has watched a clock at a hospital bedside, this matters more than it may sound. The minutes that crawled there may already, on the other side, be a single shining instant. The years our loved ones have "been gone" may be no time at all to them. And the long centuries between Christ's first coming and His return may feel, to the saints who already see Him face to face, like a single afternoon. Eternity, it turns out, is not just longer than time. It is something better.