Chapter 10
The clock says seconds. The dying say something else.
Condensed Edition
In 1985, Howard Storm was lying on a hospital bed in Paris, dying from a perforated duodenum. His wife sat nearby. The doctors had gone home for the night. What happened next, by the clock, lasted only minutes. But Storm didn't experience minutes.1
He experienced what felt like hours. First came a long, terrifying descent into darkness. Then a desperate cry for help. Then a rescue by beings of light who carried him upward. When Storm finally returned to his body and opened his eyes, the hospital room looked the same. The clock had barely moved.
Yet he insisted, in every interview afterward, that the experience lasted longer than any single day of his life. Not vaguely longer. Specifically, concretely longer. Time itself had stretched open and let him fall through it.2
His report is striking. But it isn't unusual at all. Across decades of research, one of the most consistent findings about near-death experiences is this: dying people report that time works differently. It slows. It stops. It folds in on itself. And sometimes it stretches so far that a few clinical seconds hold what feels like a lifetime.3
Raymond Moody was among the first to notice this pattern when he gathered his early case studies for Life After Life in 1975.4 Kenneth Ring documented it systematically in Life at Death (1980). Pim van Lommel confirmed it in a prospective clinical study. Bruce Greyson tracked it across four decades of research. The finding keeps showing up, study after study, decade after decade. Time at the edge of death is not what the clock says it is.
This chapter examines that finding. But before we look at the clinical evidence, it's worth pausing to notice something we already know from ordinary life. Time bends. A two-hour exam feels like twenty minutes when you're absorbed. A five-second fall from a ladder feels like it takes a full minute. Athletes talk about the game "slowing down." Parents describe the frozen instant when their child runs into the street. We've all experienced the gap between the clock and the feel of things. What NDE research reveals is that at the edge of death, this gap can become enormous.
If it holds up, and I believe it does, it is the empirical anchor for everything this book argues.
When researchers ask people who have had NDEs about time, the answers cluster around a handful of patterns. Greyson, who has studied near-death experiences for more than four decades, notes that altered time perception is among the most common features. In his 2021 book After, he documents case after case in which people describe time as nothing like ordinary waking life.5
Some report time slowing. A cardiac arrest lasting three or four minutes by the monitor felt, from the inside, like an hour or more. Events unfolded in fine detail. Each moment stretched wide enough to notice everything.
Some report time stopping altogether. "There was no time," one person told Greyson. Not "I lost track of time." Not "time seemed slow." Simply: time was absent. The experience had sequence, first this, then that, but no felt duration at all.6
Some report compression. Everything happened at once. Past, present, and future were not lined up in a row but stacked and layered. Van Lommel, the Dutch cardiologist whose study of cardiac arrest patients appeared in The Lancet in 2001, found this report surprisingly common. His subjects struggled to describe it. "Everything was happening at the same time" was a frequent phrase.7
And some report expansion. What felt like hours or days or weeks had passed during a clinical window of mere minutes. Storm's case fits here. So do many others in the database of the Near Death Experience Research Foundation (NDERF), founded by Jeffrey Long, which holds the largest collection of NDE accounts in the world.8
Long's database puts hard numbers on this pattern. In the NDERF survey, 60.5 percent of respondents reported an altered sense of space or time during their NDE. A separate question asked specifically whether time seemed to speed up. Thirty-three percent answered that everything seemed to be happening all at once. One person, whose NDE followed a motorcycle accident, described it this way: no speed, no slow, no time at all—only pure being, heightened and accelerated into light energy. Another, whose NDE came from an overdose of anesthesia, spoke of “perfect infinite timelessness.” These are not vague impressions. They are clear, emphatic statements from people trying to describe an experience that broke through everything they thought they knew about time.
Eben Alexander, the neurosurgeon whose NDE during bacterial meningitis became the subject of Proof of Heaven (2012), reported a similar expansion. His experience felt vastly longer than the seven days of his coma. His account has drawn legitimate criticism, and some of the medical details have been questioned.9 I mention him here not as a cornerstone case but as one more witness to the same pattern. Whatever one makes of his broader claims, the temporal distortion he describes fits the larger picture.
These patterns don't always appear one at a time. Some people report a combination: time slowing at first, then stopping, then folding into what felt like everything-at-once during the life review. The common thread is simple but startling. Whatever they went through, it did not match the clock.
What makes the finding especially strong is its consistency across very different circumstances. The reports come from cardiac arrest patients, drowning survivors, combat veterans, and surgical cases. They come from children and from the elderly. They come from people with no prior knowledge of NDEs and from people who had read about them. Van Lommel's prospective design is important here: his subjects were interviewed shortly after resuscitation, before they had time to absorb other people's accounts.10 The temporal distortion wasn't borrowed. It was experienced.
Van Lommel puts the point plainly. His subjects frequently described "an apparent perception of a dimension where time and distance do not exist."11 This wasn't a philosophical conclusion they reached afterward. It was a quality of the experience itself, as immediate as color or sound.
I want to be clear about what this data does and doesn't show. It doesn't prove that time "really" stopped or stretched. The reports are subjective. But they are consistent, widespread, and stable over time. And they come from people who had no reason to fabricate them and no framework, in most cases, to expect them. That pattern demands explanation. Something is happening to time perception at the edge of death, and it is happening reliably.
Of all the ways time bends in NDEs, the life review is the most dramatic. I'll give the life review its full treatment in Chapter 11. Here I want to focus only on what it tells us about time.
The pattern is well documented and consistent across the literature. In a matter of clinical seconds, the dying person re-experiences large portions of life. Sometimes all of it. Not as a rapid slideshow or a highlight reel. As a full, immersive reliving, complete with the emotions of everyone involved.12
Kenneth Ring, one of the pioneers of NDE research, described this in his early work. One person told him that during the review, she relived every significant moment of her life. She felt the emotions of every person she had ever affected. She came away understanding things she had never grasped before. The whole experience took, by the clock, perhaps ninety seconds.13
Ninety seconds.
A seven-year-old child whose NDE came from drowning told Long's NDERF foundation something similar: he watched from above and saw his life passing before his eyes—every moment, like watching a movie—though he saw his whole life in just a few seconds. A woman who nearly died from blood loss after delivery described it differently but with the same impossible compression: every event from her entire life appeared in vivid pictures, and with each picture she re-experienced the feelings from the original moment. All of it happened at the same time.14
Primary Source — Tom Sawyer’s Life Review
Tom Sawyer (his real name, not a pseudonym) described one of the most detailed life reviews on record. After a truck crushed his chest in 1978, Sawyer experienced a review of his entire life from birth onward. He felt the ripple effects of his actions on others, sometimes three or four people removed from the original event. Ring, who documented the case in Heading Toward Omega (1984), noted that Sawyer described the review as containing every moment, not selected ones. By the monitor, Sawyer’s heart had stopped for a matter of minutes. From the inside, the review held an entire lifetime at full emotional detail.15
Michael Sabom reports a similar pattern in Light and Death (1998). Pam Reynolds underwent a daring surgical procedure called hypothermic cardiac arrest to remove a giant basilar artery aneurysm. Her body was cooled to 60 degrees Fahrenheit. Her heart was stopped with massive doses of potassium chloride. Her brain waves flattened into complete electrocerebral silence. Clicks delivered through molded ear speakers produced no brain-stem response. The blood was drained from her head. By every clinical test available, her brain was not functioning.16
Yet Reynolds later described a rich and extended experience. She reported veridical perceptions of the surgical instruments—including the unusual shape of the bone saw and a conversation about her femoral arteries being too small—all confirmed by the surgical team. Her experience continued into what felt like a full journey: a tunnel, an overwhelming light, a reunion with deceased relatives who took care of her and would not let her go further, and a return she did not want. On Greyson's NDE Scale, where the average score is about 15, Reynolds scored 27—the deepest NDE in Sabom's entire Atlanta Study. The medical record shows the window in minutes. Her account suggests something far longer.17
Sam Parnia's AWARE studies, the largest prospective investigations of cardiac arrest experiences to date, add further weight. Parnia found that some patients who were resuscitated after documented cardiac arrest reported detailed, structured experiences. Their temporal features did not match the clinical timeline.18
Think about what this means for ordinary assumptions. We tend to imagine that a few seconds can only hold a few seconds' worth of experience. The life review says otherwise. It suggests that consciousness, at the edge of death, can pack an extraordinary density of experience into a very small clinical window. Not by speeding things up (the experience doesn't feel rushed) but by changing the relationship between inner time and outer time altogether.
This isn't just an oddity. It is the single most important piece of evidence for the thesis of this book. The life review can fit an entire lifetime of relived experience into a few clinical seconds. So the question "Is there enough time for a genuine encounter with Christ at the moment of death?" has already been answered. The dying process itself shows us that there is.
The data keeps pointing in the same direction. Clock time and felt time are not the same thing at the edge of death.
These reports invite skepticism, and they should. Extraordinary claims call for serious scrutiny. Two objections deserve attention.
Note — The Skeptical Responses
The brain-compression hypothesis proposes that the dying brain, flooded with chemicals and losing oxygen, rapidly replays stored memories in a final burst of neural activity. The life review, on this view, is a kind of neural dump: fast playback that only feels extended.19
The post-hoc reconstruction hypothesis suggests that the experience is built after the fact. The dying person didn’t actually live through extended time. They filled in the story later, the way we sometimes elaborate a dream upon waking.20
The brain-compression idea has some appeal. It might explain why a life review feels vivid and fast. But it has trouble with three things.
First, it doesn't explain expansion reports. Some cases involve experiences that felt far longer than the clinical interval, not shorter. A compressed neural replay should feel fast, not slow. If the brain is simply dumping data in its final seconds, the result should feel like a film on fast-forward. That's not what people describe. They describe the opposite: a slowing down, a widening out, as if ordinary time had been pulled apart like taffy.
Second, it doesn't explain reports of simultaneity. Everything happening at once, past and present stacked together. That isn't what playback looks like, fast or otherwise. Playback is sequential. These reports describe something categorically different.
Third, and most seriously, it doesn't explain the cases where the brain was demonstrably offline. In van Lommel's prospective study, several patients reported rich experiences during documented flat-line EEGs. In the Reynolds case, Sabom was able to document the absence of brain activity at three levels: silent EEG, absent brain-stem response, and no blood flow to the brain. If the brain showed no measurable activity by any test, what was doing the compressing?21 The evidential case for consciousness during cardiac arrest is developed in Chapter 8, and I won't repeat it here. But the flat-line cases pose a very specific problem for the compression hypothesis. You can't attribute the experience to a last-gasp neural burst if the EEG shows no burst at all.
There's a related point worth adding. Proponents of the brain-compression view sometimes invoke temporal lobe seizures as a possible mechanism. But Sabom found that seizure phenomena are fundamentally different from NDEs. Seizure experiences are fragmented and variable. NDEs are integrated and focused. A massive study of 2,000 epileptic patients found that seizures do not cause spontaneous thought—cognition is an integrative function that seizures disrupt, not produce. Yet in NDEs, thought is often remarkably clear. Greg, a cardiac arrest patient in Sabom's Atlanta Study, described analyzing his own experience from the ceiling of the hospital room with the sharp, cool precision of the computer analyst he was: “I was able to think rationally, coolly, and make decisions while my body was elsewhere and my soul was in the hands of God.” That kind of structured, sequential, self-aware cognition takes time. It is not what a fragmentary neural dump looks like.22
The post-hoc reconstruction objection is harder to dismiss outright. We do fill in memories after the fact. But many people who have had NDEs distinguish carefully between what they experienced during the event and what they thought about later. Ring noted that his subjects were remarkably consistent. Even years afterward, they insisted the time distortion was part of the experience itself. It was not a later interpretation.23 Greyson's long-term follow-up research supports this. He compared NDE accounts given shortly after the event with accounts from the same people up to twenty years later. He found no significant embellishment. NDE reports stay stable in ways that ordinary memories do not.24
Neither objection is conclusive. But neither is strong enough to explain away the data. The temporal anomalies in NDEs remain among the most puzzling and best-attested features of the whole phenomenon.
The idea that felt time and clock time are not the same thing is hardly new. Philosophers have been saying so for over a century.
William James drew a sharp line in The Principles of Psychology (1890). He coined the phrase specious present to describe the small window of "now" that we actually experience at any given moment. It is not a durationless instant. It is a short, flexible span of felt time. Our sense of how long things last, James argued, is not a passive readout of physical time. It is built by the mind, shaped by attention, emotion, and the state of consciousness.25
Henri Bergson went further. In his work on what he called durée (lived duration), Bergson argued that inner time is a fundamentally different thing from the measurable time of physics. Clock time chops experience into equal units. Lived time flows and stretches and compresses according to the quality of what is being experienced.26 A moment of sudden fear can stretch until it feels like an hour. An hour of boredom can collapse into nothing. We all know this from everyday experience. What the NDE data suggests is that this gap between felt time and clock time can become far wider than ordinary life ever shows us.
NDE researchers rarely cite Bergson by name. But the data they've gathered is what his theory predicts. If felt time has its own structure, there is no reason to insist that a few seconds of clock time can only hold a few seconds of experience. The door Bergson opened in theory, the NDE data has walked through in practice. Felt time and clock time are different things. The dying know this better than anyone.
William Lane Craig, the philosopher and theologian, has argued along related lines. In Time and Eternity, Craig argues that our belief in the reality of tense, the felt difference between past, present, and future, is "properly basic." It is not inferred from other evidence. It is not derived from a clock reading. We form it directly from experience, the way we form the belief that a tree stands outside when we look through the window.27 If Craig is right, then the temporal experience of the dying person is as real as any other. The clock's disagreement doesn't cancel it.
The fuller philosophical case for God's relationship to time is developed in the Part Two appendices, especially Appendix H and Appendix I.
Plain Words
Three terms in this chapter deserve a clear definition.
Time dilation is the stretching of felt time relative to clock time. When someone says a three-minute cardiac arrest "felt like hours," that gap between clock and feeling is time dilation.
Specious present is William James's phrase for the narrow window of "now" that we actually experience. It is not an instant. It is a small, flexible span of felt duration.
Durée (doo-RAY) is Bergson's French term for lived time, the kind of time that speeds up and slows down with the quality of experience. It is the opposite of clock time, which ticks at the same rate no matter what you're feeling.
Insight — Boros Saw It Coming.
The Jesuit theologian Ladislaus Boros anticipated this finding half a century before the NDE data existed. Drawing on Bergson's concept of durée vécue, Boros argued on purely philosophical grounds that at death the mind finally awakens to its full capacity.
It would be possible—and in conformity with the nature of human existence—for man to enter into full possession of his whole life in a single moment, to embrace it all in a durée vécue. — Boros, Mystery of Death, II.3
The universe rises up in its full stature, and man enters into possession of his own undivided life. Out of his essential nature, now posited in its integrality, he can, now and only now, make his integral decision. — Boros, Mystery of Death, II.3
Researchers later documented people reliving entire lifetimes in seconds. They were confirming what Boros had reasoned from philosophy alone. His full hypothesis is the subject of Chapter 16.28
If the data is real, we need some account of how it works. How do dying people experience extended time within brief clinical windows? I want to sketch three options. None of them is the book's official position. I commit to the reality of the time dilation, not to any single explanation of it.
First, the departing soul may experience time differently because it is partly detached from the dying brain. Chapter 8 argued that veridical NDEs give us good reason to think substance dualism is true. If it is, then the soul's own temporal experience may not be locked to the brain's processing speed. As the body shuts down, the soul may begin to experience time closer to its native mode. Think of it this way: the brain may act as a bottleneck during ordinary life, filtering and pacing what the soul can perceive. At death, the bottleneck opens. The soul doesn't perceive less. It perceives more.29
Second, the encounter may take place in God's time. If God experiences real temporal succession but transcends creaturely clock time, then God could draw the dying soul into a wider experience of duration. The soul would still experience genuine sequence (first this, then that), but the pace would be set by divine presence, not by a hospital clock. The encounter would be genuinely temporal, genuinely interactive, but running on a different clock. God would be free to take as long as love requires. This possibility is explored in Chapter 13 and developed further in Chapter 14 and Chapter 15.
Third, the encounter may operate in a different register of time altogether. Not clock time and not simply divine time, but something closer to what the New Testament calls kairos: a time defined by meaning rather than measurement. Kairos is the "right time," the "ripe moment." It is the word the New Testament uses for the time of God's action, as distinct from chronos, ordinary ticking time. The biblical theology of these terms is explored in Appendix L.30
These three models are not mutually exclusive. The truth may involve pieces of all three. What matters is that none of them is far-fetched. Given what we know about felt time from philosophy, psychology, and NDE research, the claim that the moment of death can hold an extended encounter fits the evidence we have.
Here is the point. Here is why this chapter sits where it does in the book.
The most immediate objection to the thesis of Between Heartbeats is the objection from brevity. "You're saying every dying person meets Christ at the moment of death? That's absurd. There isn't time. People die in seconds. A car crash. A heart attack. You can't have a meaningful encounter, let alone a life review and a free decision, in a few ticks of the clock."
The objection is intuitive. It's also wrong.
Key Argument — The Clock Is Not the Measure
The time-dilation evidence from NDE research dissolves the brevity objection. Felt experience at the moment of death can hold what seems like hours, days, or a full life review. All of it fits within a clinical window of seconds. So the encounter with Christ need not be impossibly brief. From the bedside, the dying person slips away in moments. From the dying person’s perspective, the encounter may unfold as a full conversation, a complete review of life, an extended meeting with the living Christ. Unhurried, thorough, and fully sufficient for a free and informed decision.
The evidence doesn't prove that such an encounter happens. What it shows is that it could happen. The moment of death holds far more room than the clock suggests. The brevity objection assumes that clock time is the only time that counts. NDE research shows that it isn't.31
I don't want to overstate the case. The time-dilation data doesn't prove the book's thesis by itself. It removes an obstacle. It shows that the moment of death is not the pinched, instant event our intuitions imagine. It is, or can be, a wide and deep passage. A threshold with room enough for God to work in.
This is what makes the NDE evidence so important for the argument of this book. Without it, the brevity objection would be devastating. With it, the objection dissolves. We don't have to wonder whether a few seconds can hold a genuine, unhurried encounter. The data says they can.
And that matters not just as a philosophical argument but as a pastoral one. Picture yourself at the bedside of someone you love, watching them slip away in seconds. The thought that stays with you afterward is: Was that enough time? Was there room for anything to happen? Did they just wink out, or was something more going on behind those closed eyes? The NDE evidence says yes. Something more was going on. The passage that looked like seconds from the outside may have been far longer from the inside. Long enough for a meeting. Long enough for grace to do its work.
Moody was among the first to notice the temporal distortion his subjects described.32 In the half-century since, every major researcher has confirmed it. Greyson, Ring, van Lommel, Sabom, Long, Parnia: each has documented the same basic finding. Time at the edge of death is not what the clock says it is. For a detailed catalog of NDE cases showing these temporal anomalies, see Appendix B.
The moment of death holds far more time than the clock can measure. And if God is the one composing the encounter, it holds more than enough.
↑ 1. Howard Storm, My Descent into Death: A Second Chance at Life (New York: Doubleday, 2005), chs. 1–3. Storm’s NDE occurred in June 1985 at a hospital in Paris while awaiting emergency surgery for a perforated duodenum. The clinical emergency lasted hours; the NDE itself occurred during a period of acute crisis when Storm believed he was dying.
↑ 2. Storm, My Descent into Death, ch. 2. Storm consistently reported that the experience felt longer than any ordinary day, a claim he maintained across multiple interviews spanning decades.
↑ 3. For overviews of temporal anomalies in NDEs, see Bruce Greyson, After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond (New York: St. Martin’s, 2021); Pim van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience (New York: HarperOne, 2010), chs. 2–3; and Kenneth Ring, Life at Death: A Scientific Investigation of the Near-Death Experience (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1980).
↑ 4. Raymond Moody, Life After Life: The Investigation of a Phenomenon—Survival of Bodily Death (Atlanta: Mockingbird Books, 1975). Moody’s pioneering study gave the field its name and first documented many of the features—including altered time perception—that later researchers would confirm under controlled conditions.
↑ 5. Greyson, After. Greyson’s research career spans more than four decades, beginning with his early work at the University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies.
↑ 6. Greyson, After. Reports of “timelessness”—not merely the loss of time-awareness but the experienced absence of time as a category—recur across Greyson’s case studies and in the broader Journal of Near-Death Studies literature.
↑ 7. Pim van Lommel et al., “Near-Death Experience in Survivors of Cardiac Arrest: A Prospective Study in the Netherlands,” The Lancet 358, no. 9298 (2001): 2039–45. Of 344 consecutive cardiac arrest patients, 62 (18%) reported some form of NDE, and altered time perception was among the features reported. See also van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life, chs. 2–4.
↑ 8. Jeffrey Long with Paul Perry, Evidence of the Afterlife: The Science of Near-Death Experiences (New York: HarperOne, 2010). Long founded the NDERF in 1998; by the time of this book’s publication, the database held over 1,600 accounts. See also Long with Perry, God and the Afterlife: The Groundbreaking New Evidence for God and Near-Death Experience (New York: HarperOne, 2016), which draws on over 4,000 NDE accounts and lists “a sense of alteration in time or space” as the seventh of twelve consistent NDE elements. The specific NDERF survey question “Did time seem to speed up?” yielded the 33 percent “everything seemed to be happening all at once” response; a separate question, “Did you have any sense of altered space or time?” produced the 60.5 percent affirmative response. The experiencer accounts quoted are from the NDERF database as published in God and the Afterlife, pp. 18–19.
↑ 9. Eben Alexander, Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012). For the criticisms, see Luke Dittrich, “The Prophet,” Esquire (August 2013), which raised questions about Alexander’s medical records and prior claims. Alexander’s case is instructive for the temporal pattern it exhibits but should be treated with caution given the unresolved questions about his broader account.
↑ 10. Van Lommel et al., “Near-Death Experience in Survivors of Cardiac Arrest,” The Lancet (2001). The prospective design is methodologically significant: patients were interviewed within days of resuscitation, and no selection bias (e.g., seeking out people who had already published or discussed their experience) was introduced.
↑ 11. Van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life. The phrase appears in van Lommel’s summary of the experiential features most frequently reported by his cardiac-arrest subjects.
↑ 12. The life review is treated in its own right in Chapter 11. Here I address only the temporal dimension. For fuller surveys, see Greyson, After; Ring, Life at Death, ch. 3; Ring, Heading Toward Omega: In Search of the Meaning of the Near-Death Experience (New York: William Morrow, 1984); and van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life, ch. 3.
↑ 13. Ring, Life at Death. Ring documented numerous life-review cases in which the experiencer reported reliving significant events in rapid sequence during a very brief clinical interval.
↑ 14. Long, God and the Afterlife, pp. 19–20. Both accounts are from the NDERF database. The drowning child’s NDE occurred at age seven. The blood-loss case followed delivery; the woman’s description of receiving “complete knowledge of all my life events in vivid picture form and memory at the same moment” is among the clearest accounts of temporal simultaneity in Long’s database. Long identifies the life review as the eighth of twelve consistent NDE elements; the NDERF survey question “Did you experience a review of past events in your life?” produced a 21.8 percent affirmative response.
↑ 15. Ring, Heading Toward Omega. Tom Sawyer’s case is frequently cited in the NDE literature because of its detail and the reliability of Sawyer as a reporter. The case occurred in 1978 in Rochester, New York. Sawyer later became an active participant in NDE research.
↑ 16. Michael Sabom, Light and Death: One Doctor’s Fascinating Account of Near-Death Experiences (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998), chs. 3 and 10. The surgical procedure was performed by Dr. Robert Spetzler at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix. The details of the monitoring are documented in Sabom’s reconstruction from the operative reports of the neurosurgeon, neuroanesthesiologist, and cardiac surgeon: EEG was continuously monitored and went silent at cardiac arrest; 100-decibel clicks delivered through molded ear speakers produced no brain-stem response; the cardiopulmonary bypass machine was turned off and blood was drained from the body at 11:25 A.M., with core body temperature at 60°F.
↑ 17. Sabom, Light and Death, chs. 3 and 10. Reynolds accurately reported the unusual shape of the Midas Rex bone saw, the conversation about her femoral arteries being too small (verified against the cardiac surgeon’s operative report), and other surgical details—all while her eyes were taped shut, her ears were occluded by molded speakers, and she was under deep anesthesia or in cardiac arrest. Her Greyson NDE Scale score of 27 compared to an average of 15 among NDE reporters and 13.3 in Sabom’s Atlanta Study group. As Sabom notes, her attending surgeon, Dr. Spetzler, told CBS’s 48 Hours that during hypothermic cardiac arrest, “that patient by all definition would be dead.”
↑ 18. Sam Parnia et al., “AWARE—AWAreness during REsuscitation—A Prospective Study,” Resuscitation 85, no. 12 (2014): 1799–1805. The follow-up study, AWARE II, was published as Sam Parnia et al., “AWAreness during REsuscitation—II,” Resuscitation 191 (2023): 109903. See also Sam Parnia, Erasing Death: The Science That Is Rewriting the Boundaries between Life and Death (New York: HarperOne, 2013).
↑ 19. For the brain-compression hypothesis and related reductive accounts, see Susan Blackmore, Dying to Live: Near-Death Experiences (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1993). Blackmore proposes that the life review is a product of random neural firing in a dying brain, with the feeling of extended time being an artifact of the brain’s attempt to organize the chaos.
↑ 20. The post-hoc reconstruction objection is a standard concern in memory research. For its application to NDEs, see Greyson, After, where Greyson addresses the objection directly and distinguishes NDE recall from ordinary confabulation.
↑ 21. Van Lommel et al., “Near-Death Experience in Survivors of Cardiac Arrest,” The Lancet (2001). Van Lommel notes that NDEs were reported by patients whose EEGs showed flat lines within 10–20 seconds of cardiac arrest. For the Reynolds case specifically, Sabom documents the three-level test of brain inactivity: silent EEG, absent brain-stem response to auditory clicks, and no cerebral blood flow (Light and Death, chs. 3 and 10). For the broader case, see Chapter 8.
↑ 22. Sabom, Light and Death, chs. 4 and 10. Michael Persinger’s stimulation experiments found that induced temporal-lobe-seizure phenomena were “fragmented and variable, whereas in NDEs these sensations are integrated and focused within a brief period” (cited in Sabom from Persinger, “Modern Neuroscience and Near-Death Experience,” Journal of Near-Death Studies 7, no. 4 [1989]: 233–39). Denis Williams’s study of 2,000 epileptic patients found that seizures do not produce spontaneous cognition (Denis Williams, “The Structure of Emotions Reflected in Epileptic Experiences,” Brain 79 [1956]: 28–67). Greg’s account is from Sabom’s Atlanta Study, ch. 4; his NDE followed cardiac arrest during a hospital stay.
↑ 23. Ring, Life at Death. Ring stressed that his subjects were not “dream-like” reporters; they spoke with precision and consistency about the temporal qualities of their experience.
↑ 24. Bruce Greyson, “Consistency of Near-Death Experience Accounts over Two Decades: Are Reports Embellished over Time?” Resuscitation 73, no. 3 (2007): 407–11. Greyson compared NDE accounts given shortly after the event with accounts given by the same individuals up to twenty years later and found no significant embellishment.
↑ 25. William James, The Principles of Psychology (New York: Henry Holt, 1890), vol. 1, ch. 15 (“The Perception of Time”). James coined the term specious present (building on E. R. Clay) to describe the subjective “saddle-back” of experienced time, which is always a short span, never a durationless instant.
↑ 26. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1910; orig. French ed. 1889). Bergson’s concept of durée (duration, lived time) runs through his major works; see also Matter and Memory (1896) and Creative Evolution (1907).
↑ 27. William Lane Craig, Time and Eternity: Exploring God’s Relationship to Time (Wheaton: Crossway, 2001), esp. pp. 130–31. Craig argues that our belief in the reality of tense (the objective difference between past, present, and future) is “properly basic”—not inferred from other evidence but grounded directly in experience. For the broader case for dynamic divine temporality and its bearing on the moment-of-death thesis, see Appendix F and Appendix H.
↑ 28. Ladislaus Boros, The Mystery of Death: Awakening to Eternal Life (New York: Crossroad, 1973; repr. with introduction and commentary by Cynthia Bourgeault, Rhinebeck, NY: Monkfish, 2020), II.3 (“Integral Perception and Remembrance in Death”). The first quotation is from Boros’s reading of Bergson’s durée vécue; the second is from the passage immediately following, describing the dying person’s awakening. The convergence between Boros’s philosophical argument and the later NDE evidence is one of the most striking features of this project; see Chapter 16 for the full development.
↑ 29. This model depends on the substance-dualist position defended in Chapter 8. If the soul is a distinct substance from the body, it may have its own native temporal mode that is revealed (not created) at the moment of death. For the philosophical case for substance dualism from veridical NDE evidence, see J. P. Moreland, The Soul: How We Know It’s Real and Why It Matters (Chicago: Moody, 2014).
↑ 30. On the chronos/kairos distinction in the New Testament and its theological significance, see Appendix L. The distinction is not always as sharp in the Greek as popular usage suggests, but the theological weight of kairos as “the appointed time” or “the time of God’s action” is well established. See also Oscar Cullmann, Christ and Time: The Primitive Christian Conception of Time and History, rev. ed. (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1964).
↑ 31. The relationship between subjective and objective time at the moment of death is given its own full treatment in Chapter 14. The philosophical case for why felt time is evidentially significant, not merely phenomenologically interesting, is developed there.
↑ 32. Moody, Life After Life. Moody’s early subjects frequently described altered time perception, though he did not yet have the clinical data to correlate their reports with precise medical timelines. The half-century since has supplied that data in abundance.