Chapter 6
From Moody's First Cases to the Modern Science of Dying
Condensed Edition
In 1975, a young doctor from Georgia published a slim paperback that changed how we talk about death. His name was Raymond Moody. The book was called Life After Life. It sold more than thirteen million copies.1
Moody had not set out to write a bestseller. He had simply noticed a pattern. As a medical student and then a young doctor, he kept hearing the same kind of story from patients who had been brought back after their hearts stopped. They described leaving their bodies, moving through a dark tunnel, meeting a bright being of light, and then being told they had to go back. The details varied. The pattern did not.
He gathered about 150 such cases and gave the pattern a name: the near-death experience, or NDE. Moody coined the term. Before him, people who had these events mostly kept quiet. They feared they would be called crazy. Life After Life gave them leave to speak. And once they started speaking, others started listening.
Note: Raymond Moody did not invent the near-death experience. People have reported such events for centuries, and scattered case reports appear in old medical writings. What Moody did was name it, lay out its common features, and show the medical world that it was a real, repeated pattern. Before Life After Life, the events had no shared language. After it, they had a field.2
I want to be honest about something. When I first came across Moody's work as a seminary student, I was doubtful. The cases felt too neat, the stories too soothing. It was easy to write them off as wish thinking dressed up in medical clothes. But the more I read, and the more I followed the research that came after Moody, the harder that view became to hold. The field grew up. The methods tightened. And the data kept pointing the same way.
What follows is a short history of that growing up.
Two people answered Moody almost right away, and both brought something Moody lacked: careful method.
Kenneth Ring taught at the University of Connecticut. In 1980 he put out Life at Death, the first study to use set interviews and hard numbers on NDE cases.3 Ring backed up Moody's core pattern. He also went further. He built a scoring system to measure how deep an NDE was and tracked how many people reported each feature. His later books told a deeper story. Heading Toward Omega (1984) and Lessons from the Light (1998, with Evelyn Elsaesser Valarino) tracked what happened to people after their NDEs. The changes were striking: less fear of death, more care for others, a shifted sense of what matters.4 Ring also wrote Mindsight (1999, with Sharon Cooper), which gathered NDEs from people born blind. Several of these blind people described true visual details during their out-of-body events. They had never seen a thing before in their lives.5
Michael Sabom was a heart doctor at Emory. He came to the subject as a doubter. A friend told him about Moody's work, and Sabom thought it was nonsense. Then he chose to test it. He talked with cardiac-arrest survivors in his own hospital and checked their stories against the real medical records.6
The results stopped him cold. Patient after patient gave details about their own rescue that they had no normal way of knowing. The details matched the records. Sabom put out Recollections of Death in 1982. He followed it in 1998 with Light and Death, which told the now-famous case of Pam Reynolds.7
Reynolds is one of the best-studied cases in all of NDE research. In 1991 she had brain surgery for a dangerous bulge in a blood vessel. Her body was cooled to sixty degrees. Her heart was stopped. Her blood was drained from her head. Her eyes were taped shut and her ears plugged with speakers sending clicks at a set rate. By every measure, she was deeply under. Yet she later described the bone saw used to open her skull. She described the shape of the blade holder. She reported a specific talk among the surgeons about her arteries, and a song that played in the room. Her details were right.8 Cases like hers are called veridical NDEs. That means the person reports facts they had no normal way of knowing, and the facts check out. We will look at these cases more closely in Chapter 8.
Moody, Ring, and Sabom all worked backward. They found patients who had already been brought back and then asked what had happened. This has a clear weakness: memory can shift over time. By the late 1990s, the field needed a new design. It needed studies that signed up patients before their hearts stopped and talked to them as soon as they woke up.
The breakthrough came from the Netherlands.
Pim van Lommel was a heart doctor in the Netherlands who had been quietly gathering cases for years. In 2001 he and his team published a study of 344 cardiac-arrest survivors across ten Dutch hospitals. The results appeared in The Lancet, one of the most trusted medical journals in the world.9
Key Finding: Van Lommel's Lancet study (2001) was the first forward-looking, multi-hospital study of NDEs. Of 344 cardiac-arrest survivors, 62 (18%) reported an NDE. The study found no medical reason why some patients had the event and others did not. How long the arrest lasted, which drugs were given, whether the patient had heard of NDEs before: none of it made a difference. Van Lommel concluded that a purely bodily account could not explain what his patients had gone through.10
The Lancet paper was a turning point. It moved NDE research from the edges of medicine into real peer-reviewed science. Van Lommel later laid out his full case in Consciousness Beyond Life (2010). He argued that the brain does not produce awareness; it receives and channels it. The data, he said, pointed toward a kind of mind that is not bound to the body.11 I am careful about that claim. Van Lommel's data is strong. His next step goes beyond what the data alone can show. But the data itself demands an answer, and the purely physical answers have not yet been up to the task.
Sam Parnia, a doctor at NYU Langone Health who works in critical care, picked up the same approach and stretched it across borders. His AWARE study (AWAreness during REsuscitation) was the largest forward-looking NDE study ever tried. AWARE I, published in the journal Resuscitation in 2014, signed up 2,060 cardiac-arrest patients across fifteen hospitals in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Austria.12 Of the 140 survivors they talked with, 46% reported some form of mental activity during the arrest. Nine percent had events that fit the NDE pattern. One patient gave a checked account of what happened during a three-minute stretch of confirmed cardiac arrest.13
AWARE II (2023) kept the work going. This time, hidden picture targets were placed on high shelves in rooms where people were brought back to life. The targets could only be seen from above, which would test out-of-body claims head on. As it turned out, no patient who survived and reported an NDE was revived in a room with a target. So the picture test remains open. But the study added new data on what Parnia calls "lucid dying," his term for the clear mental events that cardiac-arrest survivors recall.14 Parnia's books tell the same story in different ways. Erasing Death (2013) argued that awareness during cardiac arrest is far more common than doctors had assumed. Lucid Dying (2024) pressed harder: if the brain has shut down and the mind is still working, then our whole picture of how brain and mind relate needs rethinking.15
If any one person deserves to be called the anchor of modern NDE studies, it is Bruce Greyson. A doctor of the mind at the University of Virginia, Greyson has been studying NDEs since the late 1970s. He has published more peer-reviewed papers on the subject than anyone alive.16
In 1983 Greyson created the Greyson NDE Scale, a sixteen-item tool designed to spot and measure NDEs in a steady, repeatable way. The Scale sorted the wide range of reported features into four groups. The first is the mind at work: time feels strange, thought speeds up, a life review unfolds, and sudden knowing comes. (The life review will prove so important to our argument that it gets its own chapter; see Chapter 11.) The second is what the person feels: peace, joy, a sense of oneness, and a meeting with light. The third is what Greyson called the "beyond normal" group: vivid senses, seeming ESP, visions of the future, and leaving the body. The fourth is the realm beyond: meeting a being not of this world, seeing the dead, entering an unknown place, and reaching a border you cannot cross.17 A score of seven or higher counts as an NDE. The Scale has been put into more than twenty languages. It is still the standard tool in the field.
Primary Source:
"The one consistent finding in near-death experience research over the past four decades is that these events transform people's lives. Experiencers come back less afraid of death, more compassionate, more altruistic, with a greatly reduced interest in material wealth and status, and with a deepened sense of meaning and purpose." — Bruce Greyson, After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond (2021)
Greyson spent decades at the Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS) at the University of Virginia. Founded by Ian Stevenson in 1967, DOPS is the world's leading school-based center for the study of the mind at the edge of death.18 Greyson's 2021 book After brought together a whole career's worth of findings in warm, plain prose. It is one of the best one-book guides to the field.
Jeffrey Long, a cancer doctor who works with radiation, took a different path to scale. In 1998 he started the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation (NDERF) and built an online database. Anyone who had lived through an NDE could fill out a set survey and share their story.19 By 2025 the database held over five thousand cases from around the world, making it the largest such collection in the world.
Long studied over 1,300 of these cases in Evidence of the Afterlife (2010, with Paul Perry). He named nine lines of proof, as he called them, that NDEs are real events pointing to a life beyond this one. In God and the Afterlife (2016, also with Perry), Long turned to the heart of the reports: the meetings with a being of vast love, and the deep changes those meetings left behind.20
I think Long pushes the data harder than it can bear in some places. His "nine lines of evidence" each carry different weight, and some are stronger than others. But the sheer size of his database and the steady patterns within it are striking. When five thousand people from dozens of countries describe the same core features, you are not looking at stories anymore. You are looking at a fact.
J. Steve Miller, an educator and Christian apologist, brought a fresh set of questions to the NDE field. Where most researchers came at the data as doctors or thinkers about the mind, Miller asked what the data meant for the Christian faith. His 2012 book Near-Death Experiences as Evidence for the Existence of God and Heaven looked hard at the strongest cases and argued that they count as real evidence for a world beyond this one.21 Miller then pressed deeper. His doctoral work at Columbia International University (2019) gathered and assessed the scholarly research on deathbed visions, terminal lucidity, and after-death communications. With nearly eight hundred footnotes and over a thousand references, it was the most thorough study of the deathbed-evidence literature to date. That work became the foundation for his 2021 book Deathbed Experiences as Evidence for the Afterlife, which argued that the experiences of the truly dying, not just those who come back, form their own strong line of evidence.22
Miller's 2023 follow-up, Is Christianity Compatible with Deathbed and Near-Death Experiences?, pressed into harder ground. Some NDEs seem to sit poorly with standard Christian teaching. People sometimes report a being of light who makes no doctrinal demands, who simply gives off total, unconditional love. Miller studied the NDERF database and found that far fewer NDEs oppose Christian teaching than the popular critics claim. The data, he argued, can be honestly taken in within a broadly Christian frame.23 That is the same belief that drives this book, and we will come back to it again and again in the chapters ahead.
More recently, Shaun Tabatt, a Christian publishing figure and podcast host who has conducted hundreds of NDE interviews, published The NDE Conspiracy (2025). Writing at a popular level, Tabatt argued that the real conspiracy is not that NDE accounts are false. It is the effort to keep people from taking them seriously. His work offers a useful framework for telling genuine accounts from those that may involve spiritual deception.24
Looking back over fifty years, I think the field has moved through four clear stages. The first was Moody's: case gathering. A doctor notices a pattern, collects stories, and gives the thing a name. The work is watching, not testing. It opens the door.
The second stage belonged to Ring and Sabom: careful backward-looking studies. The talks with patients were set and scored. The data was counted. The stories were checked against medical records. The pattern held up.
The third stage was the forward-looking turn: van Lommel, Parnia, and their teams. Patients were signed up before cardiac events, not after. Talks happened as soon as the patient could speak. The results went into top medical journals. Peer review took the place of the popular press.
The fourth stage is still in motion. It includes Parnia's ongoing AWARE program and Long's growing database. It also includes fresh talks between doctors, brain scientists, and thinkers about what the mind really is. The question is no longer whether NDEs happen. It is what they mean.25
No honest history of NDE research can skip the critics. From the start, doubters have offered other readings of what NDEs are. The early pushbacks were simple: wish thinking, what people expect to see, fuzzy memory. As the data got better, the proposed answers grew more exact.
The most common medical idea is that a dying brain, starved of oxygen, makes vivid false images. Others point to excess carbon dioxide in the blood, seizure-like firing in the brain's time-processing center, or a flood of DMT, a strong natural brain chemical. Still others suggest REM intrusion, where the brain's dream system kicks in during the dying process.26
Each of these ideas explains some features of some NDEs. None of them explains the full pattern. None of them handles the veridical cases well. Oxygen loss makes confused, broken images, not the vivid, clear events NDErs describe. Seizures of the time-processing center tend to produce fear and dread, not the deep peace and love most people report. The DMT idea lacks direct proof that the brain puts out enough DMT during cardiac arrest. And REM intrusion does not explain how a patient whose brain showed no sign of working could later report true details of the room around her.27
I want to be fair to the doubters. They are asking the right questions, and some of their ideas are worth testing further. But after fifty years, no single brain-based answer has proven equal to the data. The best we can say is that the case for "it's all just the brain" remains unproven. We will look at these claims in detail in Chapter 8.
One of the most striking facts about the NDE record is how alike the core event is around the world. NDEs have been reported in the United States, Europe, India, China, Africa, and among native peoples in the Americas and the Pacific. The surface details shift. An Indian may describe the god Yama. An American may describe Jesus. A non-religious European may describe a being of light with no name. But the core pattern holds: leaving the body, passing through a space between, meeting a being of vast love, living through a review of one's life, hitting a border, and coming back.28
Insight: The fact that the core NDE features show up across cultures is exactly what we would expect if the event were real but filtered through each person's own words and pictures. A true meeting with a being beyond this world would naturally be told in the language each person already has. This is not a weakness in the data. It is a feature of it. And this matters for our story. If the same loving being meets people in every culture, that fits the claim that Christ meets every dying person. The meeting simply gets shaped by the words and pictures each person already carries. We will return to this in Chapter 18.
The reach across age groups is just as wide. NDEs happen to very young children and to the very old. Melvin Morse studied children's NDEs in Closer to the Light (1990). He found that very young children, some no older than three, told stories with the same core features adults describe. These were children too young to have picked up ideas about death from books or TV.29 NDEs happen to the devout and the non-religious alike. They happen to people who have heard of NDEs and to people who have never run across the idea. The event does not seem to need prior belief.
Not all NDEs are peaceful. A small but striking number are what researchers call "distressing" or "hellish" NDEs, marked by fear, darkness, or a sense of being trapped. These cases matter for this book's argument, and we will look at them closely in Chapter 12.
Best guesses say that roughly 10 to 20 percent of cardiac-arrest survivors report an NDE. Van Lommel's study found 18 percent. Parnia's AWARE I found 9 percent with clear NDE features and 46 percent with some form of mental activity during the arrest. The true number may be higher, since many survivors have no memory of their arrest and others may not want to talk about it.30
The field now has its own home base. The International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS), founded in 1981, holds yearly meetings, funds research grants, and offers support to people who have had NDEs. The Journal of Near-Death Studies, in print since 1982, is the peer-reviewed journal of record.31 The Division of Perceptual Studies at Virginia remains the top school-based center. Parnia's team at NYU Langone has brought the topic into standard critical-care medicine. Long's NDERF hosts the largest open database. And a loose network of researchers across Europe, North America, and Asia keeps working together on new studies.
This is no longer a fringe topic. It is a living research effort. Doctors, brain scientists, and thinkers are publishing in peer-reviewed journals and asking some of the hardest questions medicine can ask: What is the mind? Can it exist apart from the brain? And what happens to us when we die?
After fifty years, the basic fact is settled. NDEs are real events that happen to real people in medically recorded settings. The core features are alike across cultures, ages, and belief systems. The data has held up under closer and closer study. The doubters' other readings, though worth more testing, have not replaced the pattern.
What the data means is another matter. That is where honest people still differ. Some, like van Lommel and Long, say NDEs are glimpses of an actual life after death. Others, like Parnia, are more careful. They say the data challenges the way we think about the mind but does not yet settle whether we survive death. Still others believe a full brain-based answer will come and simply has not been found yet.32
This book enters that talk with a clear claim. I believe the NDE data, taken together with Scripture and the Christian thinking tradition, points toward something specific. It points toward a real, aware meeting between the dying person and the risen Christ at the moment of death. That is not something the NDE research alone can prove. But it is an idea the NDE research makes possible. Without the data we have looked at in this chapter, the charge that "there isn't time for such a meeting" would have no answer. With it, the charge falls apart. A moment of dying can hold far more than the clock suggests.
The field that Raymond Moody started in 1975 has given us something the church should not ignore: proof that the line between life and death is not a wall. It may be a door.
In Chapter 7, we will look closely at what lies on the other side of that door, tracing the common features of the near-death experience in detail. In Chapter 8, we will study the strongest veridical cases and ask what they tell us about the soul. In Chapter 10, we will wrestle with the time puzzles, the strange stretching of minutes into what feels like hours, that make this book's claim possible. For further reference, Appendix A offers a guided reading list of the NDE writings, and Appendix B lays out a timeline of the field's major steps forward.
↑ 1. Raymond A. Moody Jr., Life After Life: The Investigation of a Phenomenon — Survival of Bodily Death (Covington, GA: Mockingbird Books, 1975). The book has been reprinted in many editions and translated into dozens of languages. Moody originally collected approximately 150 cases. He coined the term "near-death experience" in this volume; the abbreviation NDE quickly became standard in the medical literature.
↑ 2. Earlier case reports include Albert Heim's 1892 collection of accounts from mountaineering-fall survivors and scattered references in nineteenth-century medical journals. For a survey of the pre-Moody history, see Greyson, After (New York: St. Martin's, 2021), ch. 1.
↑ 3. Kenneth Ring, Life at Death: A Scientific Investigation of the Near-Death Experience (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1980). Ring's Weighted Core Experience Index (WCEI) was one of the first quantitative measures applied to NDE reports.
↑ 4. Kenneth Ring, Heading Toward Omega: In Search of the Meaning of the Near-Death Experience (New York: William Morrow, 1984); Kenneth Ring and Evelyn Elsaesser Valarino, Lessons from the Light: What We Can Learn from the Near-Death Experience (New York: Insight/Plenum, 1998). Ring's aftereffects research showed that NDE survivors consistently reported reduced materialism, increased empathy, and diminished fear of death.
↑ 5. Kenneth Ring and Sharon Cooper, Mindsight: Near-Death and Out-of-Body Experiences in the Blind (Palo Alto: William James Center for Consciousness Studies, 1999). Ring and Cooper documented thirty-one cases of blind persons reporting visual experiences during NDEs or out-of-body episodes; several included veridical details later confirmed by sighted witnesses.
↑ 6. Michael B. Sabom, Recollections of Death: A Medical Investigation (New York: Harper & Row, 1982). Sabom compared the descriptions of cardiac-arrest survivors against their medical records and against a control group of cardiac patients who had not had NDEs. The NDE group's descriptions were significantly more accurate.
↑ 7. Michael B. Sabom, Light and Death: One Doctor's Fascinating Account of Near-Death Experiences (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998).
↑ 8. The Pam Reynolds case (Sabom, Light and Death, chs. 3–5) is discussed and debated extensively in the NDE literature. See also Greyson, After, ch. 5. Skeptics have raised questions about the exact timing of Reynolds's perceptions relative to the onset of deep hypothermia; proponents note that the surgical team confirmed her descriptions of the bone saw and the conversation about her arteries.
↑ 9. Pim van Lommel et al., "Near-Death Experience in Survivors of Cardiac Arrest: A Prospective Study in the Netherlands," The Lancet 358, no. 9298 (December 15, 2001): 2039–2045.
↑ 10. Van Lommel et al., "Near-Death Experience in Survivors of Cardiac Arrest," 2043–2044. Van Lommel found that medical factors (duration of cardiac arrest, medications administered, type of resuscitation) did not correlate with the occurrence of an NDE.
↑ 11. Pim van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience (New York: HarperOne, 2010). Van Lommel proposes a model in which consciousness is "nonlocal," not produced by the brain but received and transmitted by it.
↑ 12. Sam Parnia et al., "AWARE — AWAreness during REsuscitation — A Prospective Study," Resuscitation 85, no. 12 (December 2014): 1799–1805.
↑ 13. Parnia et al., "AWARE," 1802–1803. The case involved a 57-year-old man who described events occurring during a three-minute period of verified cardiac arrest, including the actions of medical staff and the automated external defibrillator sounds. Hospital staff independently confirmed the accuracy of his account.
↑ 14. Sam Parnia et al., "AWAreness during REsuscitation — II: A Multi-Centre Study of Consciousness and Awareness in Cardiac Arrest," Resuscitation 191 (2023). Parnia has increasingly preferred the term "recalled experiences of death" or "lucid dying" to distinguish the medically documented phenomenon from its popular associations.
↑ 15. Sam Parnia, Erasing Death: The Science That Is Rewriting the Boundaries Between Life and Death (New York: HarperOne, 2013); Sam Parnia, Lucid Dying: The New Science of Life, Death, and What Comes After (New York: HarperOne, 2024).
↑ 16. Greyson's publication record on NDEs spans more than four decades and includes over one hundred peer-reviewed articles and chapters. For a complete bibliography, see the Division of Perceptual Studies website at the University of Virginia.
↑ 17. Bruce Greyson, "The Near-Death Experience Scale: Construction, Reliability, and Validity," Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 171, no. 6 (1983): 369–375. The Scale has been validated in multiple languages and remains the standard research instrument for identifying NDEs.
↑ 18. The Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS) was established in 1967 by Ian Stevenson as the Division of Personality Studies. Its research areas include near-death experiences, children who report past-life memories, and after-death communications.
↑ 19. The Near-Death Experience Research Foundation (NDERF) website is at nderf.org. The standardized questionnaire, available in over twenty languages, generates a consistent dataset for cross-cultural comparison.
↑ 20. Jeffrey Long with Paul Perry, Evidence of the Afterlife: The Science of Near-Death Experiences (New York: HarperOne, 2010); Long with Perry, God and the Afterlife: The Groundbreaking New Evidence for God and Near-Death Experience (New York: HarperOne, 2016). Long's nine lines of evidence include: medically inexplicable lucid consciousness during cardiac arrest; out-of-body perceptions with verified details; NDEs in the blind; NDEs in young children; consistent core features across cultures; transformative aftereffects; and more.
↑ 21. J. Steve Miller, Near-Death Experiences as Evidence for the Existence of God and Heaven: A Brief Introduction in Plain Language (Acworth, GA: Wisdom Creek Press, 2012). Miller's approach is distinctive for its combination of philosophical argument, attention to the strongest veridical cases, and explicit Christian framing.
↑ 22. J. Steve Miller, "Deathbed Experiences as Evidence for the Afterlife: A Multicultural Examination of the Literature" (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia International University, 2019). The dissertation is the most rigorously sourced treatment of the deathbed-evidence literature available, engaging among others Sir William Barrett's Death-Bed Visions and Osis and Haraldsson's At the Hour of Death. The published version: J. Steve Miller, Deathbed Experiences as Evidence for the Afterlife, Volume 1: A Groundbreaking, Scientific Apologetic, Evaluating Death-Related Visions, Terminal Lucidity and After Death Communications (Acworth, GA: Wisdom Creek Press, 2021). Miller identifies twenty-seven potentially evidential characteristics of phenomena surrounding death and documents eleven of them in detail.
↑ 23. J. Steve Miller, 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), Volume Three of Deathbed Experiences as Evidence for the Afterlife. Miller studied the NDERF database and found that of over five thousand cases, 18 percent reported seeing Jesus, while only three reported seeing Krishna and two reported seeing Buddha. Of eighty self-identified Muslims, none reported seeing Muhammad. Miller argues that the NDE data rarely opposes Christian teaching and that the claim that NDEs promote Eastern religions or universalism does not hold up under close study.
↑ 24. Shaun Tabatt, The NDE Conspiracy: Why You Can Trust the Testimony of Those Who've Crossed Over (Shippensburg, PA: Destiny Image, 2025). Tabatt is a publishing executive, podcast host, and the creator of the "Tabatt Score," a nine-point framework for measuring NDE core features. His work is a popular-level apologetic for the reliability of NDE testimony, drawing on his extensive personal interviews with NDE experiencers.
↑ 25. For a helpful overview of the field's development, see Greyson, After, chs. 1–3, and the historical survey in Long, Evidence of the Afterlife, introduction.
↑ 26. For the hypoxia hypothesis, see Susan Blackmore, Dying to Live: Near-Death Experiences (Buffalo: Prometheus, 1993). For the DMT hypothesis, see Rick Strassman, DMT: The Spirit Molecule (Rochester, VT: Park Street Press, 2001). For REM intrusion, see Kevin Nelson, The Spiritual Doorway in the Brain (New York: Dutton, 2011). Each of these proposals is discussed and critiqued in Greyson, After, chs. 6–8, and in van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life, chs. 6–9.
↑ 27. The inadequacy of purely neurological explanations is discussed at length in van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life, chs. 6–9; Greyson, After, chs. 6–8; and Sabom, Light and Death, ch. 10. See Chapter 8 of this volume for the full treatment.
↑ 28. For cross-cultural NDE research, see Allan Kellehear, "Census of Non-Western Near-Death Experiences to 2005: Observations and Critical Reflections," in Janice Miner Holden, Bruce Greyson, and Debbie James, eds., The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences: Thirty Years of Investigation (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2009), 135–158. See also Long, Evidence of the Afterlife, ch. 8.
↑ 29. Melvin Morse with Paul Perry, Closer to the Light: Learning from the Near-Death Experiences of Children (New York: Villard, 1990). Morse's study of pediatric NDEs found that children as young as three reported core NDE features. See also P. M. H. Atwater, The New Children and Near-Death Experiences (Rochester, VT: Bear & Company, 2003).
↑ 30. Van Lommel et al., "Near-Death Experience in Survivors," 2041 (18%); Parnia et al., "AWARE," 1802 (9% with NDE features, 46% with some recalled experience). Long, Evidence of the Afterlife, introduction, estimates roughly 5% of the general population has had an NDE, based on survey data.
↑ 31. The Journal of Near-Death Studies (originally Anabiosis: The Journal for Near-Death Studies) has been published continuously since 1982. It is the primary peer-reviewed venue for NDE research and is currently published by the International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS).
↑ 32. For a balanced discussion of the interpretive options, see Greyson, After, ch. 12, and the philosophical analysis in Miller, Near-Death Experiences as Evidence, chs. 5–7. For a sustained skeptical alternative, see Blackmore, Dying to Live.