Appendix I
How the Soul's Time Differs from the Clock's
Condensed Edition
You already know that time does strange things. A dental appointment crawls. A vacation vanishes. The seconds before a car accident stretch into what feels like minutes, every detail sharp and slow. These aren't illusions. They're clues. They tell us something deep about the relationship between the time a clock measures and the time a soul lives through.
This appendix traces that clue from its earliest form in Augustine all the way to modern brain science. The path runs through Bergson, James, Husserl, and a growing body of research on how we sense time. What comes out is a single steady finding: the time of the mind and the time of the clock are not the same thing. They move together most of the time, the way two horses pull the same cart. But under the right conditions, they come apart. Under extreme conditions, they come far apart. And the moment of dying is the most extreme condition of all.
The moment-of-death encounter this book puts forward does not need a strange new theory of the mind. It needs what nearly every major thinker from Augustine forward has already said: the soul has its own time. The clock at the bedside measures something real. But it does not measure what the dying soul is living through.
The best starting point is the oldest. In Book XI of the Confessions, Augustine asks a question that still haunts us: "What then is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain it, I do not know."1 That honest bafflement opens one of Western thought's most important passages.
Augustine reasons his way to a startling answer. The past no longer exists. The future does not yet exist. And the present, if we try to pin it down, shrinks to an instant with no width at all.2 So where is the time we know? Where does the felt length live that lets us hear a melody rather than a series of loose notes?
His answer: it lives in the soul. Augustine names three things the mind does that together make up our sense of time. Memoria (memory) holds what has passed. Attentio (attention) grasps what is present. Expectatio (expectation) reaches toward what is coming. Time, as we actually live it, is the soul stretching across these three.3 It is not a river flowing past us. It is the soul reaching out.
Primary Source — Augustine on Time as the Soul's Extension
As Garrett DeWeese summarizes: "For Augustine in the Confessions, time is something mental. Temporal intervals exist only in the mind, and can only be measured by mind." The mind performs three functions: expectation, attention, and memory. Time is "an extension of the mind itself."4
Why does this matter for the moment of death? Because the dying soul does not lose memoria, attentio, or expectatio. If the soul survives the body's failure (as this book's substance-dualist framework holds; see Chapter 8 and Chapter 9), then the three activities Augustine names continue. The soul still remembers, still attends, still expects. What it no longer does is read the clock from a living body. Its attentio is no longer tethered to the body's rhythms. And that means its temporal experience can unfold at a rate the body never allowed.
Augustine himself never drew this application. He was thinking about time and eternity, not about dying. But the logic of his position leads there. If time is the soul's extension, then the soul set free from the body's constraints extends at its own pace.5
Fifteen centuries after Augustine, the French philosopher Henri Bergson drew a distinction that sharpened the same insight. In Time and Free Will (1889) and Matter and Memory (1896), Bergson separated two things that ordinary language smashes together.6
The first he called durée, usually translated "duration." Durée is the felt flow of conscious life. It is mixed: each moment bleeds into the next, carrying the past with it. It cannot be sliced into equal units. It is a quality, not a quantity. Think of hearing a piece of music. The current note carries the weight of every note before it. You don't hear a row of single tones. You hear a melody, and the melody is durée.7
The second he called temps: spatialized, quantified clock-time. Temps is what we get when we project durée onto a number line and pretend that moments are homogeneous, interchangeable units. Clocks measure temps. The soul lives in durée. They are not the same dimension.8
Primary Source — Bergson on Durée
For Bergson, the inner flow of consciousness is irreducibly qualitative. Duration cannot be measured by a clock any more than a painting can be weighed on a scale. The clock captures something real, but not the thing the soul is living through. When we confuse the two, we mistake the map for the territory.9
What Bergson gives the moment-of-death thesis is clear language. When NDE survivors report that minutes of cardiac arrest felt like hours of lived time, they are saying exactly what Bergson's framework would predict. The body's temps stopped. The soul's durée did not. The soul, partly freed from the body, felt time in its native mode, loose from the rhythm of the body's clock.
Bergson himself speculated that the brain acts as a filter on consciousness. In Matter and Memory, he argued that the brain does not generate experience. Rather, it narrows it, selecting from a wider field of awareness only what serves the body's practical needs.10 If he was right, then the failing brain doesn't end experience. It loosens the filter. The soul's temporal horizon widens. This is a remarkably close fit with the phenomenology NDErs describe.
Working at the same time as Bergson but from a different tradition, the American psychologist and philosopher William James made a complementary observation. In The Principles of Psychology (1890), James argued that the experienced present is not a razor-thin instant. It is a small interval he called "the specious present," a brief duration within which consciousness experiences flow, change, and movement as a unified whole.11
James observed that the width of this specious present varies. It changes with attention, interest, emotional intensity, and physiological state. When you're absorbed in a gripping conversation, the present moment feels wide and full. When you're bored, it feels thin and restless.12 The specious present is not a fixed window. It is elastic.
This elasticity matters. If the experienced present can widen under ordinary conditions, then we already have evidence that consciousness is not locked to a single fixed temporal rate. The NDE reports of massively expanded time become, then, not an oddity to explain away. They are the extreme case of a pattern James had already found in everyday life.13
The German thinker Edmund Husserl pushed deeper into how time feels from the inside in his Lectures on the Consciousness of Internal Time (given 1904–1905, published 1928). Husserl showed how every moment of awareness carries a "retention" of the just-past and a "protention" toward the about-to-come.14 These are not ordinary acts of memory or looking ahead. They are built into the very shape of each lived "now." The present moment is always thick with the past it holds and the future it reaches toward.
Husserl's insight fits with Augustine's memoria and expectatio but adds detail. The shape of lived time is always layered. It is never a bare point. It is always a span. And the width of that span can change. When attention sharpens, the horizons of retention and protention stretch. When the normal limits on awareness shift, the whole feel of the present can change shape.15
William Lane Craig, drawing on Husserl's work, argues that our sense of time passing is not a theory we adopt to explain what our senses tell us. It is something more basic: a "properly basic belief." That term means, in plain words, a belief we hold without needing to prove it first. Think of seeing a tree and just knowing there is a tree. You don't reason through the physics of light. You simply see it.16 Craig puts the point as a formal argument. Our belief in the real difference between past, present, and future is properly basic. That means we are prima facie justified in holding it unless a strong defeater comes along.17
This matters for the NDE data. If the NDEr's experience of extended time is a properly basic datum, then the burden of proof shifts. It falls on the person who wants to dismiss it, not on the person who takes it seriously. The NDEr who reports hours of lived time is making a claim on par with ordinary seeing and hearing. We don't need to prove the experience is real. We need a reason to think it isn't.
The thinking from Augustine through Husserl gives us the ideas. But the case doesn't rest on ideas alone. A growing body of lab research shows that changes in felt time are real, repeatable, and well-documented across a wide range of settings.
Key Argument — The Continuum from Ordinary to Extreme
Time-dilation is not just an NDE oddity. It is a well-known spectrum running from mild daily distortions through moderate lab-tested changes to the radical stretching NDErs report. The dying moment sits at the far end of a range whose milder cases are already proven. If normal awareness can stretch time, dying awareness can stretch it further.
Marc Wittmann's research, gathered in Felt Time (2016), lists the settings in which felt time drifts from clock time. Fear stretches time: people in car crashes always say the event unfolded in slow motion.18 Deep stillness in prayer or sitting changes time: trained meditators report the melting of normal time-borders.19 Flow states shrink time: a player lost in a game looks up to find hours gone in what felt like minutes.20 Drugs can reshape felt time sharply: people under psilocybin or LSD often say that minutes felt like hours or that normal time went away.21 Intense pain stretches time. Intense joy shrinks it. Fever, lost sleep, and great stress all bend the inner clock.
Each of these is documented. Each represents a case in which psychological time and clock time come apart. And each sits at the milder end of the continuum that NDE time-dilation occupies at the extreme.22
David Eagleman's neuroscience research at Baylor College of Medicine has explored the brain mechanisms behind these effects. Eagleman showed that time-dilation during frightening events is partly a memory effect. The brain lays down denser memory traces during high-arousal moments, creating a richer record that feels longer in hindsight.23 He calls this "retrospective reconstruction."
Note — Eagleman's "Retrospective Reconstruction"
Eagleman's research says that some kinds of time-stretching are backward-looking: the brain records more during high-stress events, so the event feels longer in memory. But NDE time-dilation does not fit this pattern well. NDErs do not merely remember the event as long. They report living through it as long, with story shape, dialogue, and steady aware experience during the event itself. The backward-looking model covers some daily time-bending but cannot cover the full NDE picture.24
The difference matters. If time-stretching were only backward-looking, it would be a trick of memory, not a real trait of the event. But NDE reports over and over describe long experience during the event, not just the feeling of length after the fact. Howard Storm, for instance, reports detailed talks, teaching, and choices that unfolded in real time, with a story shape that no after-the-fact squeezing could produce.25 The backward-looking model covers part of the data. It does not cover all of it. The full catalog of NDE time-dilation cases is in Appendix J.
Here the philosophical tradition and the brain science meet on a question that bears directly on the moment-of-death thesis.
The answer from brain science, in broad terms, is clear. The basal ganglia, the brain's small inner structures, along with the back-brain and the front cortex are all tied to how we sense time. Damage to these areas changes how long things feel. Drugs that affect dopamine speed up or slow down the inner clock.26 The brain is deeply involved in shaping our feel of time.
For the strict physicalist, this is the whole story. Time-awareness is brain work, and when the brain shuts down, awareness ends. But for the substance dualist (see Chapter 8), brain science tells a different tale. The brain is not the maker of our sense of time but its leash. The soul's own time-mode is held in check by the brain's rhythms during life in the body. The brain keeps the soul's durée in step with the body's temps. When the brain fails, the leash loosens. The soul's felt time, no longer tied to the body's clock, unfolds at its own pace.27
Insight — The Brain-as-Constraint Model
Brain science does not weaken the dualist reading. It supports it. If the brain holds the soul's felt time on a leash, then the dying brain lets go of that leash. NDE time-dilation is what the soul freed from the body's time-grip looks like from the inside. The soul doesn't slow down. It stops being held back.
This reading fits with Bergson's filter theory and with the broader dualist tradition. J. P. Moreland has argued that conscious life cannot be shrunk down to brain states. It is its own kind of thing.28 If that is true, then the soul's time-sense is also its own kind of thing, shaped by the brain but not the same as brain rhythms.
The strict physicalist faces a hard problem here. If awareness simply is brain work, then the dying brain, which is shutting down, should produce fading and garbled experience, not the rich, ordered, time-stretched experience NDErs describe. The more nuanced physicalists (Joel Green, Nancey Murphy) offer a better reply: a partly working brain might still produce altered states, including altered senses of time.29 This is possible. But the patterned, content-rich, story-like nature of NDE time-stretching presses hard against a brain-only account. A brain in the act of failing does not normally produce the equal of hours of orderly dialogue, life review, and steady choice-making (see Chapter 9 for the full case).
Common Objection — "It's All Just Brain Chemistry"
The non-reductive physicalist argues that altered brain chemistry during the dying process could produce vivid, time-distorted experience without a soul. Reply: This accounts for some NDE features, like vivid imagery and emotional intensity. But it struggles with three things. First, the narrative coherence of extended NDE experience. Second, the veridical perceptions reported during flat-line EEG (see Appendix J). Third, the consistent pattern of time-extension rather than time-decay during brain failure. A failing system does not normally produce more ordered output.30
Step back now and see what we have.
Augustine said time is in the soul, made of memory, attention, and expectation. Bergson said the soul lives in felt durée, not in counted temps. James showed that the lived present is elastic, not fixed. Husserl showed that every moment of awareness carries layers of past-holding and future-reaching. Craig argues that our sense of time flowing is properly basic, trustworthy unless shown wrong. Wittmann's tests map the settings in which felt time stretches. Eagleman's brain work shows the neural gears involved, though his model cannot explain the full NDE picture.31
All of them point to the same conclusion. Subjective time is not strictly identical with clock time. Under altered conditions, the gap between them widens. Under the most extreme condition we know of, the moment of dying, the gap can be radical.
The deeper grounding comes from the A-theory of time (Appendix H). On the A-theory, tense is real. The present moment is not just a label. It is the cutting edge where real things happen. The soul's stretched time during dying is not a picture of something that doesn't exist. It is the soul living through real moments, one after another, in a time-mode freed from the body's grip. The A-theory says those moments are truly real, not just the soul's inner feeling of them.32
The empirical anchor comes from the NDE data (surveyed in Chapter 10 and cataloged in Appendix J and Appendix K). Pam Reynolds, under hypothermic cardiac arrest with documented flat-line EEG, reported extended subjective experience. Howard Storm reported what felt like hours of conversation and instruction. Dozens of independent cases confirm the pattern: brief clinical dying, long subjective experience.33
The philosophical tradition supplies the framework. The neuroscience supplies the mechanism. The NDE data supply the evidence. Together they support the claim at the heart of this book. The dying moment, brief by the clock, can hold an encounter with Christ. That encounter can be long enough to hold a life review, a pursuit by grace, a conversation, and a free decision.
The thinking and the lab work together show that felt time can stretch far beyond clock time under settings much less extreme than dying. Stillness can stretch a minute into what feels like an hour. Fear can slow ten seconds to what feels like a full minute. Drugs can melt normal time for what feels like hours within a session of known length.34
The dying condition is more extreme than any of these. The brain, which ordinarily constrains the soul's temporal experience, is ceasing to function. The soul is entering a mode of consciousness unmediated by the body's clock. The expected effect is not less time-extension but more. Much more. The NDE data confirm this expectation.35
This means the encounter is credible. Not proven. Not settled beyond dispute. But credible, in the way that matters for a careful proposal. The study of felt time gives the moment-of-death thesis what it needs. It gives us a base in the mainstream of how thinkers have always seen the mind, not a base in fringe ideas. The thesis does not need a novel theory of awareness. It needs what nearly every major thinker from Augustine to the present has already said.
The soul's time is not the clock's time. The dying soul, freed from the body that constrained its temporal experience, has all the subjective time it needs. The working model (Appendix O) brings the pieces together into a stage-by-stage account of what that extended encounter might look like.36
I want to close with something simple.
When the philosophy of mind says that the soul has its own time, it is saying what every parent of a small child already knows. An hour of waiting for test results can feel like a day. A vacation week can vanish in what feels like an afternoon. The ten minutes before your wedding march feel different from the ten minutes before your commute. You don't need Bergson to tell you that. You live it.
The dying soul is not in a strange new metaphysical territory. It is in the same territory we all inhabit, intensified. The gap between clock time and soul time that you feel every day is the same gap that opens wide at the moment of death. Wide enough for an encounter with Christ.37
When the loved one at the bedside slips away in what seems like seconds, those seconds belong to the clock. What unfolds inside those seconds, for the dying soul, belongs to a different order of time. In that order, as Chapter 14 puts it, the soul has all the time it needs. Time to meet the risen Christ. Time to see its life reviewed. Time to be pursued by grace and to say yes or no with full knowledge and full freedom.
Note — The Ordinary Territory We Already Inhabit
The book's claim about time at the moment of death doesn't rest on exotic ideas. It rests on the plain fact that felt time and clock time come apart. The dying moment is the extreme case of something every person already knows from the inside: that some moments hold more than the clock says they should.38
The study of felt time is the base on which the moment-of-death thesis stands. This book's gift is not the gap between felt time and clock time. That gap is nearly as old as thought itself. This book's gift is using that gap to shed light on dying. That use, grounded in the mainstream of careful thinking and backed by the NDE data, gives us good reason to believe something striking. The moment of death can hold far more than any clock could ever measure.
↑ 1. Augustine, Confessions, XI.14.17. DeWeese opens his medieval survey with this passage; see Garrett J. DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), ch. 5. Holland also cites Confessions 11.14.17; see Richard A. Holland Jr., God, Time, and the Incarnation (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2012).
↑ 2. Augustine, Confessions, XI.15. "Of these three divisions of time, then, how can two, the past and the future, be, when the past no longer is and the future is not yet?" The present itself, if divided, yields parts that are past and parts that are future, leaving only a durationless instant.
↑ 3. Augustine, Confessions, XI.28. "The mind, which regulates this process, performs three functions, those of expectation, attention, and memory." Quoted and discussed in DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, ch. 5.
↑ 4. DeWeese, God and the Nature of Time, ch. 5. DeWeese summarizes: "For Augustine in the Confessions, time is something mental. Temporal intervals exist only in the mind." See also Augustine, Confessions, XI.26: "I begin to wonder whether it is an extension of the mind itself."
↑ 5. This application of Augustine's position to the dying soul is the book's own. Augustine's text does not address the moment of death as a temporal event in this way. But the logical extension of his position — that time is constituted by the soul's own activities of memory, attention, and expectation — supports the inference.
↑ 6. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1910; orig. French 1889). See also Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1911; orig. French 1896).
↑ 7. Bergson, Time and Free Will, chs. 1–2. Bergson's key point is that real duration cannot be spatially represented without distortion. The melody analogy is his: the notes interpenetrate in consciousness rather than sitting side by side like beads on a string.
↑ 8. Bergson, Time and Free Will, ch. 2. The distinction between durée and temps is the central argument of the book.
↑ 9. Bergson, Time and Free Will, ch. 2. The map-territory metaphor is not Bergson's own phrase but captures his argument that spatialized time is a representation, not the reality, of the soul's temporal experience.
↑ 10. Bergson, Matter and Memory, chs. 1 and 7. Bergson argues that the brain functions as a kind of valve or filter, narrowing the field of consciousness to what is practically useful for bodily action. Remove the filter, and the field widens.
↑ 11. William James, The Principles of Psychology (New York: Henry Holt, 1890), ch. 15, "The Perception of Time." James borrows the term "specious present" from E. R. Clay.
↑ 12. James, Principles of Psychology, ch. 15. James notes that the apparent duration of the specious present varies with the intensity of attention and the emotional coloring of the experience.
↑ 13. James anticipated the idea that temporal experience could vary radically under altered states, although he did not discuss NDEs specifically. His later work, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), documented altered states of consciousness associated with religious experience, some of which involved temporal distortion.
↑ 14. Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917), trans. John Barnett Brough (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991), Lectures 8–12. The retention-protention structure is the core of Husserl's analysis.
↑ 15. Husserl, Internal Time-Consciousness, Lectures 10–11. The thickness of the present moment's retentional and protentional horizons is not fixed but varies with the mode of consciousness.
↑ 16. William Lane Craig, Time and Eternity: Exploring God's Relationship to Time (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2001), 130–131. Craig cites Husserl's analysis of temporal consciousness as part of the phenomenological evidence for the reality of tense.
↑ 17. Craig, Time and Eternity, 131–133. Craig's argument: "Belief in the objective reality of the distinction between past, present, and future is properly basic. If our belief in the objective reality of the distinction between past, present, and future is properly basic, then we are prima facie justified in holding this belief. Therefore, we are prima facie justified in holding our belief in the objective reality of the distinction between past, present, and future."
↑ 18. Marc Wittmann, Felt Time: The Psychology of How We Perceive Time, trans. Erik Butler (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), chs. 3–4. Wittmann surveys the experimental literature on time distortion under threat.
↑ 19. Wittmann, Felt Time, ch. 8. Experienced meditators report altered temporal experience, including the sense that the boundary between past, present, and future has softened or dissolved.
↑ 20. The flow state, first described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper & Row, 1990), is characterized by temporal compression: hours feel like minutes. This is the inverse of fear-based dilation but demonstrates the same underlying point — subjective time is elastic.
↑ 21. Wittmann, Felt Time, ch. 9. Psychedelic-assisted temporal distortion is among the most dramatic experimentally documented examples of subjective time-variation under controlled conditions.
↑ 22. Wittmann's broader point is that all of these cases are variations on the same phenomenon: the brain's temporal processing is context-sensitive, and subjective time is the product of that processing. The NDE cases represent the furthest end of the continuum.
↑ 23. David M. Eagleman et al., "Does Time Really Slow Down during a Frightening Event?" PLoS ONE 2, no. 12 (2007): e1295. Eagleman's free-fall experiment showed that participants did not gain enhanced temporal resolution during the fall itself, suggesting the slow-motion effect is partly retrospective.
↑ 24. The retrospective-reconstruction model is valuable but limited. NDE reports of real-time narrative experience (dialogue, sustained observation, decision-making) exceed what a purely retrospective account can explain. See the case discussions in Appendix J.
↑ 25. Howard Storm, My Descent into Death: A Second Chance at Life (New York: Doubleday, 2005). Storm's account includes extended dialogue and instruction that he reports experiencing in real time, not merely remembering as long after the fact.
↑ 26. For a review, see Warren H. Meck, "Neuroanatomical Localization of an Internal Clock," Brain Research 226 (1988): 93–108; and Matthew S. Matell and Warren H. Meck, "Cortico-Striatal Circuits and Interval Timing," Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 28, no. 8 (2004): 851–874.
↑ 27. The brain-as-temporal-regulator model is the book's own synthesis, but it draws on Bergson's filter theory (Matter and Memory, ch. 1), the dualist tradition in philosophy of mind (J. P. Moreland, Consciousness and the Existence of God [New York: Routledge, 2008]), and the convergent NDE data.
↑ 28. J. P. Moreland, Consciousness and the Existence of God (New York: Routledge, 2008), chs. 1–3. Moreland argues that the qualitative, subjective, first-person character of consciousness is irreducible to physical description.
↑ 29. Joel B. Green, Body, Soul, and Human Life: The Nature of Humanity in the Bible (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008); Nancey Murphy, Bodies and Souls, or Spirited Bodies? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Both defend non-reductive physicalism while acknowledging the richness of conscious experience.
↑ 30. The argument from system failure is not conclusive, but it is suggestive. Failing systems normally produce degraded output (static on a dying TV, garbled speech from a stroke patient), not the richly organized, temporally extended, narrative experience NDErs report. See the fuller treatment in Chapter 9.
↑ 31. The convergence of these independent lines of inquiry — philosophical (Augustine, Bergson, James, Husserl), epistemological (Craig on properly basic beliefs), experimental (Wittmann, Eagleman), and phenomenological (NDE reports) — is the cumulative case.
↑ 32. See Appendix H for the full treatment of the A-theory. On presentism, the dying soul's experience is the real, present, metaphysically actual living-through of those moments. On the B-theory, the experience is salvageable but loses its character as genuine living through.
↑ 33. See the cases discussed in Appendix J. For comprehensive surveys: Pim van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience (New York: HarperOne, 2010); Bruce Greyson, After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond (New York: St. Martin's Essentials, 2021).
↑ 34. Wittmann, Felt Time, chs. 3–9, surveys the full range. The continuum runs from mild everyday distortions (boredom, absorption) through moderate experimental effects (meditation, fear) to radical restructuring (psychedelics, extreme trauma, NDE).
↑ 35. This is a prediction of the brain-as-temporal-regulator model: if the brain constrains the soul's temporal experience, and dying removes that constraint more completely than any non-fatal condition, then dying should produce the most extreme subjective time-extension. The NDE data confirm this prediction.
↑ 36. Appendix O synthesizes the philosophical, empirical, biblical, and christological work of Appendices F–N into a seven-stage model of the moment-of-death encounter.
↑ 37. The pastoral point is deliberate. The philosophy of psychological time can sound abstract, but the reality it describes is as close as your last experience of time flying or dragging. What the moment-of-death thesis adds is only the claim that this everyday phenomenon extends — radically — at the moment of dying.
↑ 38. This is the convergence point for the whole appendix, and for Chapter 14 in the main body: the dying soul is not in alien metaphysical territory. It is in the territory every human being inhabits, where the soul's time runs at a different pace from the clock's time. Dying intensifies the difference. Grace fills the gap.