This article appeared in the September/October 2021 issue of Discover magazine as "Death Defying." Become a subscriber for unlimited access to our archive.
At the end of Plato’s Republic, the philosopher Socrates shares the myth of Er, a warrior who was killed in battle. Twelve days later, the man comes back to life to tell of the other world he had seen. His soul, he says, left his body to arrive in “a mysterious place,” where others were judged for their deeds and luminous beings descended from above.
While Er’s experience sounds like the stuff of legends, strikingly similar accounts have been reported by real people, stretching across cultures and entire eras in human history. From ancient Greece to the present day, people who survive brushes with death often recount a sense of shedding the physical body and entering another realm or dimension. Some describe intense feelings of peace, passing through a dark tunnel toward a bright light, and reexperiencing life events in rich, panoramic detail. Scientists and doctors categorize these events as near-death experiences, or NDEs.
While there is no widely accepted definition of NDEs, the term typically refers to the mystical, profound experiences that people report when they are close to death. They’re most common in patients who survive severe head trauma or cardiac arrest. In other words, “conditions in which you would die, and stay dead, unless somebody instituted emergency medical procedures to help you,” says Bruce Greyson, a psychiatrist at the University of Virginia who has studied NDEs for nearly 50 years.
