Dr. Bruce Greyson notes time distortion in NDEs

Joe Geraci, a thirty-six-year-old policeman who almost bled to death after surgery, described this sense in his NDE: “I knew what it was like to experience eternity, where there was no time. It’s the hardest thing to try and describe to someone. How do you describe a state of timelessness, where there’s nothing progressing from one point to another, where it’s all there, and you’re totally immersed in it? It didn’t matter to me if it was three minutes or five that I was gone. That question is only relevant to here.” For Joe, time not only slowed down, but seemed to disappear entirely. Many people who have had NDEs describe a sense of timelessness. Some of them say that time still existed, but that the NDE seemed to be outside the flow of time.

Everything in their NDE seemed to be happening at once, or they seemed to move forward and backward in time. Others say that they realized in the NDE that time no longer existed, that the very concept of time became meaningless. Among all the people who shared their near-death experiences with me, three-fourths reported a change in their sense of time, and more than half said that they had a sense of timelessness in their NDEs. 

I noticed that this slowing or stopping of time, along with the speeding up of thought processes, were more common in NDEs that couldn’t have been anticipated, as in sudden car accidents or in heart attacks in apparently healthy people. They were less likely in NDEs that might have been anticipated, as in medical crises in people who knew they had a fatal disease or in people who tried to take their own lives. 

When these changes in thinking and the sense of time do occur, they often appear at the beginning of NDEs, and seem to be brought on by becoming aware of the threat of death. This connection between time slowing down and the suddenness of the close brush with death is something I could have discovered only by analyzing a large sample of NDEs.

Greyson, Bruce. After (p. 30-33). St. Martin's Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.