Time alters during a near-death experience

Greyson writes: "In 1892, Swiss geology professor Albert von St. Gallen Heim published the first large collection of near-death experiences in the Yearbook of the Swiss Alpine Club. Heim himself had had a near-death experience two decades earlier, when he was twenty-two and mountain climbing in the Alps. As he fell sixty-six feet down a mountain, his body crashed repeatedly against the rocky cliffs. He wrote that he had watched people fall previously and found watching others fall to be a terrifying experience. But when he himself was falling, it was—to his shock—a beautiful experience. He reported being astounded that he was feeling no pain at all.

“Heim was so affected by his experience that he started talking to other climbers who had survived potentially fatal accidents, and he quickly found thirty others with similar stories. Heim described his thoughts speeding up as he fell: What I felt in five to ten seconds could not be described in ten times that length of time. All my thoughts and ideas were coherent and very clear, and in no way susceptible, as are dreams, to obliteration.

“Many other experiencers,” Greyson says, “reported the same rapid thinking. John Whitacre had a near-death experience at age forty-seven while recovering from surgery for pancreatic and liver cancer. Whitacre discovered: I also had the realization I had a body, which was very much like my physical body I left. I was aware of an enhanced state of consciousness, in which my mind was extremely active and alert to what I was experiencing. I was very observant during this state, and my thoughts seemed to go almost twice the normal speed, although very clear in nature.

In a near-death experience, Greyson reports, events seem to be happening at once, or to move forward and backward in time. Survivors say 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,” Greyson notes, “three-fourths reported a change in their sense of time, and more than half said that they had a sense of timelessness in their near-death experiences.”

Bruce Greyson, After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond, 30-33.