NDE researcher Bruce Greyson: life reviews

Among all the participants in my research, a quarter reported a life review. Some experiencers told me that their entire lives flashed before their eyes, from birth to the present or in reverse order. Others said that they were able to view different scenes from their lives at will. The vast majority described this life review as more vivid than ordinary memories. Some experiencers told me that they were shown images from their past, as on a movie screen or on pages in a book. But many, like Tom, reported that they re-experienced these past events as if they were still happening, with all the original sensations and feelings. 

Three-fourths of those who had a life review said that it changed their ideas of what things are important in life. Half of those who had a life review experienced a sense of judgment, most often judging themselves, about the rightness or wrongness of their actions. And more than half experienced these past events not only through their own eyes, but also—like Tom—from the viewpoints of others, feeling those other people’s emotions as well as their own.

Greyson, Bruce. After (pp. 39-42). St. Martin's Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

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.

An extraordinary NDE life review

Barbara Harris Whitfield had an NDE at age thirty-two when she suffered respiratory complications while immobilized after back surgery. She described a life review in which she re-experienced abusive childhood events from the perspective of other people involved: “As I left my body, I again went out into the darkness. Looking down and off to the right, I saw myself in a bubble—in the circle bed—crying. Then I looked up and to the left, and I saw my one-year-old self in another bubble—facedown in my crib—crying just as hard. I decided I didn’t want to be the thirty-two-year-old Barbara anymore; I’d go to the baby. As I moved away from my thirty-two-year-old body in the circle bed, I felt as though I released myself from this lifetime. As I did, I became aware of an Energy that was wrapping itself around me and going through me, permeating me, holding up every molecule of my being. 

“In every scene of my life review I could feel again what I had felt at various times in my life. And I could feel everything everyone else felt as a consequence of my actions. Some of it felt good and some of it felt awful. All of this translated into knowledge, and I learned—oh, how I learned! The information was flowing at an incredible breakneck speed that probably would have burned me up if it weren’t for the extraordinary Energy holding me. The information came in, and then love neutralized my judgments against myself. I received all information about every scene—my perceptions and feelings—and anyone else’s perceptions and feelings who were in the scene. 

"There was no good and no bad. There was only me and my loved ones from this life trying to be, or just trying to survive. “I went to the baby I was seeing to my upper left in the darkness. Picture the baby being in a bubble and that bubble in the center of a cloud of thousands and thousands of bubbles. In each bubble was another scene in my life. As I moved toward the baby, it was as though I was bobbing through the bubbles. At the same time there was a linear sequence in which I relived thirty-two years of my life. I could hear myself saying, ‘No wonder, no wonder.’ 

"I now believe my ‘no wonders’ meant ‘No wonder you are the way you are now. Look what was done to you when you were a little girl.’ “My mother had been dependent on drugs, angry, and abusive. I saw all this childhood trauma again, in my life review, but I didn’t see it in little bits and pieces, the way I had remembered it as an adult. I saw and experienced it just as I had lived it at the time it first happened. Not only was I me, I was also my mother. And my dad. And my brother. We were all one. I now felt my mother’s pain and neglect from her childhood. She wasn’t trying to be mean. She didn’t know how to be loving or kind. She didn’t know how to love. She didn’t understand what life is really all about. And she was still angry from her own childhood, angry because they were poor and because her father had grand mal seizures almost every day until he died when she was eleven. And then she was angry because he left her. 

“Everything came flooding back. I witnessed my brother’s rage at my mother’s abuse, and then his turning around and giving it to me. I saw how we were all connected in this dance that started with my mother. I saw how her physical body expressed her emotional pain. I could hear myself saying, ‘No wonder, no wonder.’ I could now feel that she abused me because she hated herself. “I saw how I had given up myself in order to survive. I forgot that I was a child. I became my mother’s mother. I suddenly knew that my mother had had the same thing happen to her in her childhood. She took care of her father during his seizures, and as a child she gave herself up to take care of him. As children, she and I both became anything and everything others needed. As my life review continued, I also saw my mother’s soul, how painful her life was, how lost she was. In my life review I saw she was a good person caught in helplessness. I saw her beauty, her humanity, and her needs that had gone unattended to in her own childhood. I loved her and understood her. We may have been trapped, but we were still souls connected in our dance of life by an Energy source that had created us. 

“As my life review continued, I got married and had my own children and saw that I was on the edge of repeating the cycle of abuse and trauma that I had experienced as a child. I was becoming like my mother. As my life unfolded before my eyes, I witnessed how severely I had treated myself because that was the behavior shown and taught to me as a child. I realized that the only big mistake I had made in my life of thirty-two years was that I had never learned to love myself.”

Greyson, Bruce. After (pp. 42-44). St. Martin's Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Sir Francis Beaufort NDE life reviews

Greyson writes: "As I looked for research that had already been done on life reviews, I discovered that this was also not a new phenomenon. In 1791, when British rear admiral Sir Francis Beaufort was only a seventeen-year-old midshipman, he fell off a boat into Portsmouth Harbor on the southern coast of England. Unfortunately, he had not yet learned to swim. After exhausting himself struggling to breathe, he lost consciousness and immediately experienced a feeling of calmness and noticed changes in his thinking. He later described it this way: “From the moment that all exertion ceased—which I imagine was the immediate consequence of complete suffocation—a calm feeling of the most perfect tranquility superseded the previous tumultuous sensations—it might be called apathy, certainly not resignation. Though the senses were thus deadened, not so the mind; its activity seemed to be invigorated, in a ratio which defies all description, for thought rose above thought with a rapidity of succession that is not only indescribable, but probably inconceivable by anyone who has not himself been in a similar situation. 

“The course of those thoughts I can even now in great measure retrace—the event which had just taken place—the awkwardness that had produced it—were the first series of reflections that occurred. They took then a wider range—our last cruise—a former voyage, and shipwreck—my school—the progress I had made there, and the time I had misspent—and even all my boyish pursuits and adventures. Thus traveling backward, every past incident of my life seemed to glance across my recollection in retrograde succession; not, however, in mere outline, as here stated, but the picture filled up with every minute and collateral feature. In short, the whole period of my existence seemed to be placed before me in a kind of panoramic review, and each act of it seemed to be accompanied by a consciousness of right or wrong, or by some reflection on its cause or its consequences; indeed, many trifling events which had been long forgotten then crowded into my imagination, and with the character of recent familiarity.” Beaufort described his thoughts not only speeding up but encompassing every single incident in his life and judging every action as right or wrong. Many of the experiencers who shared their stories with me described this kind of life review."

Greyson, Bruce. After (pp. 37-38). St. Martin's Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Heightened sensations in near-death experiences

In addition to their thoughts being faster and clearer than usual, many experiencers also report that their senses, like vision and hearing, were more vivid than usual. Jayne Smith had an NDE at age twenty-three during a bad reaction to anesthesia during childbirth. She described for me her senses during that experience: “I found myself in a meadow, mind cleared, identity intact, and once more aware of having a body. And this was a beautiful green meadow with beautiful flowers, beautiful colors, lit again with this glorious, radiant light, like no light we’ve ever seen, but there was sky, grass, flowers that had colors that I’d never seen before. And I remember so well looking at them and thinking, ‘I have never seen some of these colors!’ And wonder of wonders, I realized I was seeing the inner light of all the growing things, just utter glory in color. It was not reflected light, but a gentle, inner glow that shone from each and every plant. Overhead, the sky was clear and blue, the light infinitely more beautiful than any light we know.”

Gregg Nome, who drowned when his inner tube capsized going over a waterfall, described for me the remarkable heightening of his senses: “Suddenly, I could hear and see as never before. The sound of the waterfall was just so crisp and clear that it really is indescribable. Two years before this, my right ear had been injured when somebody threw a large, powerful firecracker into a bar where I was listening to a band, and it exploded right next to my head. But now, in my NDE, I could hear perfectly clearly. And my sight was even more beautiful. I felt as if I had been limited by my physical senses for all these years. Sights that were very far away from me were as clear as sights that were very close, and this was at the same time. There was no blurriness in my vision whatsoever.” Gregg found not only his vision more vivid than usual but his damaged hearing restored and all his physical senses heightened. Two-thirds of the experiencers in my research reported extraordinarily vivid sensations in their NDEs.

Greyson, Bruce. After (pp. 34-35). St. Martin's Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

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.

NDE life review of firefighter Bill Hernlund

Dr. Bruce Greyson writes: "The flames were well over two hundred feet high by the time Bill Hernlund, a twenty-three-year-old crash-rescue firefighter in the US Air Force, pulled his truck up to the rear of the burning plane. The first explosion knocked him off-balance. He fell down but was uninjured, so he scrambled back to his feet to continue fighting the fire. But then the fire ignited a second, much more powerful explosion. The burst of flames, metal, and cables launched him backward, slamming him against the side of his truck. With the second explosion, he felt pain in his head and chest, he tasted blood, and he couldn’t breathe. He passed out before he hit the ground. Bill went on to have an elaborate near-death experience. This was in 1970, years before Raymond Moody’s book gave the experience a name, and when Bill had recovered and tried to share his account with his doctor, he was referred for psychiatric help. Bill then kept the NDE to himself until, almost two decades later, he discovered a local support group affiliated with the International Association for Near-Death Studies.

Greyson says this is how Bill described his experience. "I felt a lifting sensation and saw two of my buddies carrying one of the unconscious firefighters away. Somehow, I knew who the helpers were, even though they were wearing aluminized suits with hoods on, but I didn’t know who they were dragging. I yelled out, ‘Hey, Dan, Jim, help me!’ but they couldn’t hear me. Then I realized that because I was the only fireman in that position, and also because my pain, taste, and smell were gone, that must be my body they were dragging away. I could see everything much more clearly and felt warm, safe, and peaceful. “There was a roaring noise like an explosion, but duller and more prolonged. I saw Dan and Jim get knocked down on top of my body. I was in darkness, but fully conscious and vividly aware of my surroundings. I was in some kind of tunnel that looked like what a tornado funnel would be from the inside: there was a light in the distance and I saw the spiraling strings of blue-green light coming and going like the aurora borealis. 

“The light was drawing me to it. I moved exceptionally fast down the tunnel and it took no time at all to reach it. It seemed that time was different or nonexistent there, wherever ‘there’ was. The light was emanating from a being that was giving off a very brilliant light as part of his essence. He was beautiful to look at, and projected the feelings of unconditional love and peace. I also sensed other beings there, but I did not see any because I could not take my attention from the Light Being. He asked me several questions all at the same time, impressions projected at me instead of verbal word-by-word sentences. He asked: ‘How do you feel about your life?’ and ‘How did you treat other people?’ 

As he asked, every single event of my life from earliest childhood to the plane crash projected in front of me. There were details concerning people and things that I had forgotten about long ago. I was not proud of some of my dealings with other people, but the light was quick to forgive all of my errors. He told me to ‘be in peace’ and said that my work in this world was not done yet, and that I had to go back, and I was gone. “I was back in my body again. I do not remember traveling there. The pain was back and I smelled the odor of jet fuel and heard sirens and explosions. The doctors and medics were busy with Dan, Jim, and the B-52 crewmen, but not noticing me. Later, I found out that they looked at me long enough to see that I was dead, and turned their attention to those that they could help."

Bruce Greyson, After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond (St. Martin’s Essentials, 2021), 27-28.