Tom Sawyer's NDE life review

Bruce Greyson reports that Tom described, at some point during the NDE that followed, reliving painful incidents from earlier in his life: “I experienced a total life review. The best way to describe it is to give you an example. When I was around eight years old, my father told me to mow the lawn and cut the weeds in the yard. Aunt Gay, my mother’s sister, lived in the cottage out back. She was always fun to be with. Certainly all the kids thought she was a cool person to know. She had described to me her plans for some wildflowers that grew on little vines in the backyard. ‘Leave them alone now, Tommy,’ she said. 

“However, my father told me to mow the lawn and cut the weeds. Now, I could have explained to my father that Aunt Gay wanted the weeds left to grow in this particular area. Or I could have explained to Aunt Gay that Father had just told me to mow the lawn and said to cut that patch of weeds. Or, I could methodically and deliberately go ahead and mow the yard and cut the weeds. I did that. I deliberately decided to be bad, to be malicious. 

My Aunt Gay never said a word to me; nothing was ever mentioned. I thought, ‘Wow, I got away with it.’ End of story. “Guess what? I not only relived it in my life review, but I relived every exact thought and attitude; even the air temperature and things that I couldn’t have possibly measured when I was eight years old. For example, at the time, I wasn’t aware of how many mosquitoes were in the area. In the life review, I could have counted the mosquitoes. Everything was more accurate than could possibly be perceived in the reality of the original event. I experienced things that cannot be perceived. I watched me mowing the lawn from straight above, anywhere from several hundred to a couple of thousand feet, as though I were a camera. I watched all of that. My life review was absolutely, positively, everything basically from the first breath of life right through the accident. It was that panoramic view. It was everything.”

Bruce Greyson, After (2021), 39-40.