Stories of Near-Death Experience: From Plato to the ICU

What counts as a near-death experience?

A near-death experience, or NDE, is a profound personal experience tied to death or the threat of it, which researchers describe as having recognizable shared features. Most happen during what doctors call reversible clinical death: a cardiac arrest, a drowning, a severe injury from which the person is brought back.

The word “near” causes most of the trouble. Over the decades, researchers stretched the label to cover experiences during general anesthesia and a range of other medical and non-medical conditions. A set of research guidelines published in 2022 pushed back. It proposed a stricter term, recalled experience of death (RED), for experiences that happen during a loss of consciousness linked to a genuinely life-threatening event, show no signs of ordinary dreaming or delirium, and follow a recognizable arc: a relationship with death, a sense of going beyond the physical world, difficulty putting it into words, and lasting changes in meaning and purpose.

That distinction matters when weighing any single story. A peaceful vision under anesthesia and a lucid account from someone whose heart had stopped may sound alike in a retelling, but researchers increasingly treat them as different things. For a deeper look at the formal features and theories, see our companion piece on the NDE’s features, studies and theories.

The oldest stories of near death experience

Accounts of people returning from the edge of death are far older than the modern term. By 2005, around 95 percent of world cultures were known to have made some mention of experiences like these.

The soldier before the pyre

At the close of Plato’s Republic, written in ancient Greece, comes the story of a soldier from Pamphylia who was killed in battle and then rose from death before his funeral pyre. At least one modern researcher has pointed to it as an early example of the near-death pattern, though the text is a philosophical work rather than a medical record.

A French military doctor’s case

The oldest known medical description belongs to Pierre-Jean du Monchaux, an 18th-century French army physician, who recorded a case in his book Anecdotes de Médecine. Notably, he offered a physical explanation from the start: he suggested that a rush of blood to the brain produced the strong sensations his patient described. The tension between bodily and spiritual explanations is as old as the medical record itself.

Falling climbers and the life review

In 1892, Albert Heim reported a series of first-person observations from people who had nearly died: workers who fell from scaffolds, wounded soldiers, climbers who dropped from heights, and survivors of near drownings and accidents. It was the first time the phenomenon was described as a clinical syndrome. Climbers’ accounts of a panoramic replay of their lives during a fall became a fixture of later discussion.

Those climbers’ stories also gave the experience its first name. In discussions among French philosophers and psychologists during the 1890s, Victor Egger proposed the phrase expérience de mort imminente, the “experience of imminent death.” Elsewhere in the 19th century, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints gathered a private collection of such cases, an early attempt to look past single stories toward a pattern.

How modern NDE accounts were collected

The 20th century turned scattered anecdotes into a field of study. A few milestones shaped the stories of near death experience that circulate today:

• 1968: Celia Green analyzed 400 first-hand accounts of out-of-body experiences (the sense of perceiving the world from a point outside one’s own body), the first attempt to sort such reports into types.
• 1969: Swiss-American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, a pioneer in near-death studies, published her well-known book On Death and Dying.
• 1972: John C. Lilly used the phrase “near-death experience.”
• 1975: Psychiatrist Raymond Moody popularized the term in his study of roughly 150 people who said they had had such an experience, examining about 50 in depth.
• 1980: Kenneth Ring simplified Moody’s model into five stages.
• 1983: Bruce Greyson replaced his earlier questionnaire with a standardized scale for researchers to score whether an experience qualifies.

Moody’s book is the reason most people picture tunnels and lights. He identified fifteen elements, eleven describing the experience itself and four describing its aftermath, while stressing that no single account contained them all. Ring’s stages, in order, were peace, separation from the body, entering darkness, seeing the light, and entering another realm through that light, followed by resuscitation.

Greyson’s scale became the standard tool, but critics later argued that some of its wording, terms like “unearthly place” or “mystical feelings,” is loose enough that a vivid memory of a peaceful holiday could score as an NDE. Because the scale does not require a real brush with death, using it outside its intended context can produce false positives. That criticism helped drive the push for the stricter 2022 definition. Our article on what people report in near-death accounts looks more closely at how these reports are gathered.

What stories of near death experience have in common

Read enough stories of near death experience and a shape emerges. Moody’s original list included the difficulty of describing the experience, learning one is dead from doctors or bystanders, pain giving way to peace, a strange noise or unearthly music, a dark tunnel, being outside the body, meeting other people, a being of light, a panoramic life review, a border or point of no return, and coming back.

The 2022 guidelines expanded this into dozens of finer elements. Among them: unexpected mental clarity, seeing the scene from above, a sense of seeing in every direction at once, a feeling of being connected by a kind of thread, a pull toward a place, a life review in which every thought and motive matters, seeing events through the eyes of people one affected, a sense of returning “home,” communication by thought alone, a strong desire to stay, and a feeling of being obliged to go back.

How often do these features show up? One researcher who pooled studies across different patient groups reported rough frequencies, though the 2022 guideline authors dispute whether such mixed groups can be compared:

The table makes one point worth remembering: the famous tunnel turns up in fewer than a third of these accounts. The image that defines the phenomenon in popular culture is far from universal.

A near-death experience account, element by element

To show how the pieces fit, here is a composite, not any real person’s testimony, built from the elements researchers most often record. It follows the arc that the classic accounts describe.

1. The event. A person collapses with a cardiac arrest. Medically, consciousness fades and brain function declines sharply.
2. Separation. They report a sudden clarity, a sense of being light, and a view of the room from above, including the people working on their body, with a calm emotional distance.
3. Movement. They feel drawn somewhere, sometimes through darkness or a passage.
4. The light and the presence. They describe a radiant, loving presence that cannot quite be put into words.
5. The review. Their life replays, often with an unsettling twist: they feel the effects of their actions from other people’s points of view.
6. The border. They reach a threshold and sense that crossing it would be final. They want to stay, but feel they must return.
7. The return. They come back to the body, sometimes with vivid sensory impressions.
8. The aftermath. They struggle to describe it, forget parts of it, and later report less fear of death and a changed sense of purpose.

That last stage is often what experiencers themselves stress most. Ring documented a consistent set of value changes among experiencers: more appreciation for life, more compassion, less interest in material wealth, a stronger sense of purpose, and greater spirituality, which is not always the same as becoming more religious. Not every aftereffect is welcome, though. Greyson has described circumstances where these shifts led to psychological, social and spiritual difficulties. More firsthand themes are gathered in our piece on near-death experience testimonies.

How culture colors the telling

The skeleton of the story travels across cultures, but the details change with the teller. Researchers note that in the United States, where a large share of people believe in guardian angels, the light is often identified as angels or deceased relatives, or left unnamed. Hindu experiencers, by contrast, often identify the figures they meet as messengers of the god of death. Cultural beliefs seem to shape some of what is experienced, and they shape the later interpretation even more. That is one reason researchers treat the words of any account as a translation of something the person often insists cannot be fully put into words.

The darker accounts: distressing NDEs

Not all stories of near death experience are serene. After Moody’s book, reports began appearing in research and the media of experiences in which people felt frightened, persecuted or distressed. These came to be called negative, distressing or “hellish” NDEs.

Their status is contested. Some recent researchers argue that most of these accounts do not share the narrative structure, transcendent quality or lasting impact of classic NDEs, and are better explained as ICU delirium and delusions, which are well documented in critically ill patients dealing with toxic metabolic disturbances or withdrawal. They point out that the original “hellish NDE” category lacked specific criteria, and no formal definition or consensus has ever been established. Even so, the idea of frightening death experiences has spread widely, and how to classify these accounts remains an open question.

There is also a sensitive subset: some people who survive suicide attempts describe intense emotional pain that felt like a torment of their own making. These accounts deserve care rather than sensationalism. Anyone struggling after a frightening experience, or with thoughts of self-harm, deserves real support from a professional or a crisis line, not a story.

What explains stories of near death experience?

The strongest ordinary explanation starts in the brain. One neuroscience hypothesis holds that NDEs arise from disturbed multisensory integration: during a life-threatening event, the brain’s normal process of stitching sight, touch, balance and body position into a single sense of “being here” breaks down. That breakdown could plausibly produce the feeling of floating outside the body, of moving through space, or of seeing from an impossible angle. Du Monchaux’s 18th-century guess about blood rushing to the brain belongs to the same family of physical explanations.

The 2022 guidelines also warn against mixing distinct phenomena under one label: drug-induced hallucinations, ordinary dreams, and misattributed memories formed as a person emerges from a coma. Experiences induced by drugs such as ketamine or DMT are sometimes called “NDE-like,” which suggests the brain can generate at least some related imagery under the right conditions.

The strongest case for something stranger rests on a paradox the 2022 guideline authors themselves highlight. In a person who is actually dying, mental clarity and consciousness decline, and in extreme cases detectable brain function ceases. Yet the most coherent, structured and lucid accounts, complete with life reviews, are reported from precisely these states. Those same authors argue that drug-induced experiences look noticeably different: distorted body sensations, an inflated or self-centered perspective, and scattered imagery such as geometric shapes, aliens, elves or neon scenes, unlike the calm order of classic accounts. Dreams and seizures, they say, also fail to match.

Some religious and transcendental traditions describe an afterlife in terms close to these accounts, and many experiencers take the experience as evidence of one. Neither side has a decisive answer. Neuroscience can describe mechanisms that produce parts of the experience, but it has not shown how a severely impaired brain produces a vivid, organized narrative that the person remembers clearly long afterward. For related questions about where awareness begins and ends, browse our consciousness, dreams and the mind collection.

How to read near-death stories without getting misled

Collections of stories of near death experience range from careful research to inspirational anthologies. A few habits help separate them:

• Ask how close to death the person really was. A cardiac arrest is not the same as a vivid dream under anesthesia. Many popular collections blend the two.
• Notice when the account was recorded. A description taken soon after the event carries different weight from one that has been retold many times over the years.
• Separate the experience from the interpretation. “I saw a bright light” and “I met an angel” are different claims. Culture often supplies the second.
• Be cautious with checklists. Scoring tools with vague wording can label ordinary peaceful moments as NDEs.
• Do not assume every frightening account is the same phenomenon. Some may be ICU delirium, and the debate is unsettled.
• Respect the person. Moody’s advice to clinicians was to ask, listen, validate, educate and refer. It applies just as well to anyone hearing a friend describe one.

A common mistake runs in both directions: treating a single dramatic story as proof of an afterlife, or dismissing every account as a hallucination without listening to what was actually reported. The more productive question is narrower: what was this person’s medical state, what did they describe, and does the description fit the classic pattern or something else?

Stories of near death experience have outlasted every attempt to settle them, from Plato’s soldier to Heim’s falling climbers to modern cardiac wards. If these questions keep pulling you in, the Troubled Minds Vault holds long-form conversations about the unexplained, and the full journal archive collects more cases at the edges of the mind.

Questions and answers

What happens in a typical near-death experience?

Most accounts describe some of the same elements. These include a sense of leaving the body, deep peace replacing pain, movement through darkness or a tunnel, a bright light or loving presence, meeting deceased relatives, a review of one's life, reaching a border, and returning. Few people report every element. Researchers stress that each experience differs, and that the person's culture and beliefs shape how it is described afterward.

Are near-death experience stories always positive?

No. Most reported experiences are peaceful, but a minority are frightening or distressing, with feelings of persecution or dread. Some recent researchers argue that many of these 'hellish' accounts are better understood as ICU delirium or delusions, which are well documented in critically ill patients, because they lack the narrative structure and lasting impact of classic accounts. No formal definition or consensus exists, so the question remains open.

How common are near-death experiences?

Estimates vary with how 'near death' is defined. One figure from prospective studies puts the rate at around 17 percent of critically ill patients. A 2011 estimate suggested about nine million people in the United States have reported an NDE, mostly after serious injury affecting the body or brain. Broad definitions inflate the numbers, which is why newer research guidelines try to limit the term to people who actually faced death.

What is the oldest recorded near-death experience?

Near the end of Plato's Republic is the story of a soldier from Pamphylia who was killed in battle and then revived before his funeral pyre. Some researchers read it as an early NDE. The oldest known medical report comes from Pierre-Jean du Monchaux, an 18th-century French military doctor, who described a case in his book Anecdotes de Médecine.

Does science explain near-death experiences?

Partly. One neuroscience hypothesis treats NDEs as the product of disturbed multisensory integration in the brain during life-threatening events, and many distressing accounts fit known patterns of ICU delirium. What remains disputed is why some people report clear, coherent, structured experiences during periods when brain function is severely impaired. That puzzle keeps the debate open between neurological and transcendent explanations.

Stay curious. Keep the question open.
Follow the evidence wherever it leads.