Chapter 21
Have you ever had a dream so real that when you woke up, you needed a moment to convince yourself it hadn’t actually happened? Maybe you dreamed about a conversation with a friend, and it was so lifelike that the next day you almost brought it up with them—before catching yourself. Or maybe you’ve had one of those falling dreams where your whole body jerked awake, your heart pounding, your muscles clenched, absolutely certain you had just tumbled off a cliff.
Dreams can feel startlingly real. So can hallucinations. So can drug-induced visions. And this simple fact forms the backbone of one of the most philosophically elegant objections to near-death experiences. The argument goes like this: NDErs say their experiences felt incredibly vivid and real—more real than ordinary waking life, even. But vividness is not the same thing as truth. An experience can feel absolutely real and still be absolutely false. Therefore, we cannot infer from the fact that NDEs feel real that they are real.
This is the argument that John Martin Fischer and Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin develop in chapter 5 of their book Near-Death Experiences: Understanding Visions of the Afterlife. And I have to say upfront: taken in isolation, this argument contains a genuine philosophical insight. They are right that vividness, all by itself, does not prove accuracy. That’s a legitimate logical point. If all we had to go on was the claim that NDEs feel incredibly real, the skeptics would have us cornered.
But here is the problem. That is not all we have to go on. Not even close. And Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin’s argument, for all its philosophical polish, quietly ignores the full range of NDE evidence in a way that makes their conclusion look much stronger than it actually is. They build a careful case against an argument that no serious NDE researcher is actually making—and in doing so, they sidestep the real challenge that veridical NDEs pose to physicalism.
In this chapter, we are going to do three things. First, we will lay out Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin’s argument as fairly and fully as we can. These are sharp, careful philosophers working out of a premier university press, and they deserve a fair hearing. Second, we will identify the specific weaknesses in their reasoning—places where their argument misrepresents or simply ignores key evidence. And third, we will build the strongest possible response, showing that when vividness is combined with independent verification, the evidential picture changes dramatically. The result, I believe, is a powerful case that Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin’s objection, while philosophically interesting, ultimately fails to account for what the NDE evidence actually shows.
Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin open chapter 5 of their book by acknowledging that near-death experiences are unusual in their clarity. They note that NDErs “often describe their mental processes during the NDE as remarkably clear and lucid and their sensory experiences as unusually vivid, surpassing those of their normal waking state.”1 They cite Bruce Greyson’s analysis of 520 NDE cases showing that 80 percent of experiencers described their thinking during the NDE as “clearer than usual” or “as clear as usual,” and that enhanced mental functioning was reported even more often when the person was physiologically closer to death.2 So far, so good. NDEs are remarkably vivid. Everyone agrees on that.
The philosophical move comes next. Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin argue that two prominent NDE researchers—Jeffrey Long and Eben Alexander—make an unjustified leap from the vividness of NDEs to the conclusion that those experiences accurately represent reality. Long, they note, argues that the enhanced and even “supernormal” vision reported during NDEs is “powerful evidence that something other than the physical brain is responsible for vision during NDEs.”3 Alexander, after his own famous NDE during bacterial meningitis, described what he experienced as “more real than the house I sat in, more real than the logs burning in the fireplace.”4
Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin see a common error in both cases. Long and Alexander, they say, both move from a claim about the lucidity of a near-death experience to a further claim about its accuracy—its correspondence with external reality. And this, they argue, is a mistake. Here is their key distinction: an experience can be “real” in the sense that someone genuinely had it, without being “real” in the sense that its contents correspond to what is actually true. People really do have hallucinations. People really do dream vivid dreams. But those experiences do not accurately represent the world.5
To drive this point home, Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin compare NDEs to dreams. They observe that dreams can be lucid—sometimes intensely so—without anyone concluding that the contents of a lucid dream correspond to external reality. Nobody thinks that dreaming about flying means you can actually fly. Why, then, should we treat the lucidity of an NDE any differently?6
They press the point further by appealing to the neurologist Oliver Sacks and his work on hallucinations. Sacks documented many cases of vivid, lucid hallucinations—not the foggy, dreamlike hallucinations most of us imagine, but sharp, detailed, perceptually rich experiences that seemed completely real to the person having them. Sacks noted that hallucinations can “mimic perception in every respect” and can have “the vivid detail and externality of perception.”7 Some subjects in sensory-deprivation studies described brilliant colors and landscapes of extraordinary beauty. And all of these hallucinations were caused by perfectly physical factors: sensory deprivation, Parkinson’s disease, migraines, epilepsy, drug intoxication, or the state just before falling asleep.8
The conclusion Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin draw is straightforward. Since we know that vivid, lucid experiences can be produced by purely physical causes and can fail to correspond to reality, we cannot use the vividness or lucidity of NDEs to infer either (a) that they are caused by nonphysical mechanisms, or (b) that their contents are accurate depictions of some transcendent reality.9 This is the core of their chapter 5 argument, and they present it with clarity and confidence. If you are a reader encountering this debate for the first time, you might find their case quite compelling. It has the ring of simple, undeniable logic: vivid does not mean true. How can anyone argue with that?
Now, Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin do grant one important concession. They acknowledge that NDEs are not merely vivid—they are also coherent. Unlike most dreams and hallucinations, NDEs tend to have an orderly, structured quality: a sequence of events that unfolds in a way that makes narrative sense. They concede that this combination of vividness and coherence “is important and distinctive” and “gives some reason to believe that their contents are accurate.”10 But they immediately qualify this concession. Even this combination, they say, provides only “some reason”—not “overwhelming” or “strong” evidence—for supernaturalism. It is a data point, they insist, but not a convincing one on its own. The case for supernaturalism, they argue, “should be cumulative, built on various pieces of independently plausible evidence.”11
Finally, Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin address the role of sincerity. They freely grant that NDErs are sincere. These are not liars. These are not con artists. These are people who genuinely believe they experienced something extraordinary. But sincerity, the philosophers argue, is not evidence of truth. People can be sincere and still be wrong. “Sincerity grabs the ear,” they write, “but only good evidence compels belief.”12
So that is the argument. Vivid does not mean veridical. Lucid does not mean accurate. Sincere does not mean true. We need more than the phenomenology—the felt quality—of NDEs to conclude that they represent genuine encounters with a reality beyond the physical brain.
Fair enough. But do we have more? That is the question Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin never adequately confront.
Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin’s argument has the feel of a well-crafted legal brief. It is clean. It is logical. And it is aimed squarely at a target. The problem is that the target is the wrong one. They spend an entire chapter dismantling an argument that no serious NDE researcher actually relies on in isolation—and in doing so, they quietly avoid the much harder challenge posed by the full body of NDE evidence.
Here are the specific weaknesses.
The central flaw in Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin’s chapter 5 is that they treat the vividness argument as though it stands alone—as though NDE researchers are saying, “NDEs feel real, therefore they are real.” They then knock this isolated claim down and act as though they have dealt a significant blow to the pro-NDE case.
But nobody is making that argument. Not in those simple terms.
The actual argument from NDE researchers is far more nuanced. It goes like this: NDEs feel remarkably real and they contain elements that can be independently verified. The vividness is one data point. The veridical perception is another. The two together form a picture that is much more difficult to dismiss. When a cardiac arrest patient describes watching her own resuscitation from a vantage point near the ceiling, names the instruments used, identifies which staff members were present, and reports a conversation that took place in the hallway—and every one of those details checks out—the skeptic cannot simply wave this away by pointing out that dreams can be vivid too.13
Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin are well aware that veridical cases exist. They discuss the Pam Reynolds case and the dentures man from van Lommel’s Lancet study elsewhere in their book. But in chapter 5, when they are specifically attacking the phenomenological quality of NDEs, they set the veridical evidence aside almost entirely. This is a rhetorical move, not a logical one. It makes the NDE case look weaker than it is by artificially isolating one strand of the evidence from the larger web.14
Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin lean heavily on the comparison between NDEs and dreams. But this comparison breaks down at the very point where it matters most.
Dreams do not produce veridical perception of real-world events. You can dream that you are flying over your neighborhood, but your dream will not accurately report the color of the car your neighbor just parked in his driveway. You can dream about a conversation with your doctor, but your dream will not correctly describe the surgical instruments she is using to operate on your body in another room. Dreams are internally generated experiences that reflect the dreamer’s memories, anxieties, and imagination—not the external world as it currently exists.15
NDEs, by contrast, do include reports of accurate perception of the external world, and those reports have been verified in case after case. This is not a minor difference. It is the difference that makes the dream analogy fundamentally misleading. To compare NDEs to dreams and then conclude that NDEs are probably brain-generated is to ignore the single most important feature that distinguishes NDEs from dreams: their repeatedly verified correspondence with objective reality.16
The appeal to Oliver Sacks and vivid hallucinations suffers from the same weakness. Yes, hallucinations can be vivid. Yes, they can mimic perception in remarkable ways. But hallucinations do not produce accurate, verifiable information about events happening outside the patient’s sensory range. The Charles Bonnet syndrome patient who sees elaborate visual hallucinations is not reporting real events in the next room. The migraine sufferer who experiences brilliant colors is not accurately describing a conversation happening in the hospital corridor. Hallucinations are, by definition, internally generated experiences that do not correspond to external reality.17
The veridical NDE cases are categorically different. In those cases, patients report specific, detailed, verifiable information about real events that they could not have perceived through normal sensory channels—while their brains showed no measurable activity. This is not what hallucinations do. Pointing to the vividness of hallucinations does nothing to explain veridical perception during cardiac arrest.18
There is a fascinating moment in Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin’s chapter where they actually concede the force of the point we are making. After arguing that vividness alone proves nothing, they acknowledge that the combination of vividness and coherence in NDEs “gives some reason to believe that their contents are accurate.”19 They further agree that the case for supernaturalism “should be cumulative, built on various pieces of independently plausible evidence.”
Think about what they are admitting here. They are granting that the phenomenological quality of NDEs does provide some evidential weight. And they are acknowledging that the real question is whether a cumulative case can be built.
We agree completely. The case is cumulative. And it has been built. Vividness plus coherence plus veridical perception plus occurrence during documented absence of brain activity plus cross-cultural consistency plus children’s NDEs plus blind NDErs plus the stability of NDE memories over decades plus the depth and permanence of life transformation—all of these together form a cumulative case that Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin’s chapter 5 does not even begin to address.20
There is one more weakness worth noting. In chapter 5, Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin take a curious detour to address the role of medical credentials in the NDE debate. They observe that many prominent NDE researchers—Long, Alexander, van Lommel—are medical doctors, and they suggest that these researchers sometimes trade on their medical credentials to lend authority to claims that fall outside their expertise. Being a cardiologist, they note, does not make you an expert on the philosophy of mind.20b
This is a legitimate caution. Medical credentials do not automatically make someone a reliable philosopher of consciousness. But Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin’s point cuts both ways. Being a philosopher does not make you an expert on what happens in a cardiac arrest ward. The NDE evidence is fundamentally medical and empirical evidence. It involves clinical observations of patients, monitoring of brain function, verification of perceptual reports against medical records, and controlled prospective studies in hospital settings. Medical researchers are precisely the people best positioned to gather and evaluate this kind of data. When van Lommel designs a prospective study of 344 cardiac arrest survivors, or when Parnia sets up the AWARE study with hidden visual targets in resuscitation bays, or when Sartori conducts a five-year clinical study with a control group—these are acts of medical research, and the fact that the researchers are physicians is a strength, not a weakness.20c
Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin are philosophers, and their philosophical analysis is valuable. But philosophizing about whether vivid experiences could be inaccurate is no substitute for examining whether particular vivid experiences were inaccurate. And the empirical data—gathered by medical researchers using medical methods—consistently shows that veridical NDE reports are accurate. You can philosophize about whether experience X might be false. Or you can check whether experience X was false. The checking has been done. And the results favor the experiencers, not the philosophers.
So what happens when we stop treating vividness in isolation and start looking at it alongside the rest of the evidence? The picture changes dramatically. Here is the positive case.
Nobody denies that dreams and hallucinations can feel real. The question is whether they produce independently verifiable information about the external world. The answer, consistently, is no. Dreams do not give you access to real-time events happening outside your body. Hallucinations do not accurately report what the surgical team is doing in the operating room. Drug-induced visions do not tell you the correct details of a conversation between two nurses in a hallway you have never visited.
But veridical NDEs do exactly this. And they do it with a consistency that demands explanation.
Janice Holden, a leading NDE researcher, conducted a comprehensive review of every published case of apparently veridical perception during NDEs from 1975 through 2006. She found 107 such cases from thirty-nine different publications by thirty-seven different researchers or research teams. Using the most demanding criterion—classifying a case as inaccurate if even one detail failed to correspond to reality—Holden found that only 8 percent of cases contained any inaccuracy whatsoever. Meanwhile, 37 percent of cases were confirmed as completely accurate by independent, objective verification.21
Stop and think about that for a moment. If NDEs were merely vivid hallucinations—brain-generated fantasies with no connection to external reality—we would expect the accuracy rate of veridical claims to be somewhere near zero. After all, a hallucinating brain is not processing real sensory data. It is generating its own content. The odds of a hallucination consistently matching real-world events in verifiable detail are extremely small. And yet here we are: 92 percent of veridical NDE reports contained no demonstrable errors, and over a third were confirmed completely accurate by objective sources.22
As Holden herself observed, these results raise a pointed question: how can an allegedly hallucinatory phenomenon produce such astonishingly accurate content?23
This is the evidence that Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin’s chapter 5 needs to explain. And it does not.
There is another powerful line of evidence that bears directly on the “vivid doesn’t mean veridical” objection: the memory research.
If NDEs were merely vivid dreams or hallucinations, we would expect NDE memories to behave like dream memories or hallucination memories. Specifically, we would expect them to fade, distort, and degrade over time, as dreams and imagined events typically do. But that is not what happens.
In 2013, a team of researchers led by Marie Thonnard at the University of Liège in Belgium published a landmark study on the characteristics of NDE memories. Using the Memory Characteristics Questionnaire—a validated tool that measures sensory detail, emotional intensity, self-referential processing, spatial context, and other features that distinguish different types of memories—Thonnard and her colleagues compared NDE memories to memories of real events, imagined events, and dreams.24
The results were striking. NDE memories did not resemble dream memories. They did not resemble memories of imagined events. Instead, NDE memories had more characteristics of real-event memories than any other category—including, remarkably, more phenomenological characteristics than memories of events that the participants knew for certain had actually happened.25
In other words, when you put NDE memories under the microscope using validated psychological tools, they look more like memories of real events than anything else in the person’s memory bank. They contain more sensory detail, more emotional richness, more spatial context, and more self-referential content than even ordinary real memories.
This finding was confirmed and extended by subsequent studies. A 2014 study by Charland-Verville and colleagues, also from the University of Liège, found the same pattern even in NDEs that occurred during non-life-threatening events—suggesting that the memory characteristics are tied to the NDE itself, not merely to the medical crisis.26
Why does this matter? Because it undercuts Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin’s central analogy. They compare NDEs to dreams and hallucinations. But the memory science tells us that NDE memories are categorically different from dream memories and hallucination memories. The brain encodes NDE memories the way it encodes memories of real events—actually, even more so. Whatever NDEs are, the brain treats them as real experiences, not as fantasies.
Now, Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin might respond that this does not prove NDEs are real. The brain can be fooled. Fair enough. But we are building a cumulative case, remember? The phenomenological quality of NDE memories is another piece of evidence that points in the same direction as the veridical cases: toward the conclusion that NDEs are, in some meaningful sense, real encounters with an external reality, not internally generated hallucinations.27
There is a related finding that deserves attention. Bruce Greyson, one of the most respected NDE researchers in the world, conducted a study comparing NDE accounts given at the time of the experience with accounts given by the same individuals two decades later. If NDE memories were confabulated or reconstructed—if they were elaborate fantasies that grew and changed with each retelling—we would expect significant differences between the early and late accounts.28
But Greyson found remarkable stability. The NDE accounts remained essentially unchanged over twenty years—a degree of stability that far exceeds what we see with ordinary memories, and especially with confabulated or imagined memories, which tend to drift, expand, and become contaminated by later information over time.29
Pim van Lommel’s prospective study in the Netherlands found the same thing. When he followed up with NDE experiencers years after their cardiac arrests, their accounts had not changed in any significant way.30 These memories were not growing or morphing with the passage of time. They were fixed—locked in, the way memories of profoundly real events tend to be locked in.
Dreams fade. Hallucinations blur. Even ordinary memories degrade and shift over two decades. But NDE memories hold firm. That is another piece of evidence that does not fit the “vivid but not veridical” story.
One of the most telling pieces of evidence against the hallucination comparison comes from NDErs themselves—specifically, those who have also experienced hallucinations, lucid dreams, or drug-induced altered states. These people have a unique ability to compare their NDE with other altered states of consciousness, and they consistently report that the NDE was fundamentally different.
Jeffrey Long’s research through the Near Death Experience Research Foundation (NDERF), which has gathered thousands of NDE accounts, includes many cases of experiencers who had prior experience with hallucinations, lucid dreams, or drug-induced states. When asked to compare, these individuals consistently described the NDE as more real, more coherent, more orderly, and more meaningful than any hallucination or dream they had ever experienced. The NDE was not like a hallucination. It was not like a dream. It was, in their experience, a categorically different kind of event.31
Michael Sabom, a cardiologist who began his NDE research as a skeptic, reported the same pattern. His patients who had experienced both NDEs and drug-induced or anesthesia-related hallucinations insisted that the two were nothing alike. The hallucinations were foggy, disjointed, and bizarre. The NDE was clear, organized, and felt more real than everyday waking life.32
Now, Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin might say that subjective reports of difference are not decisive. People can be wrong about the nature of their own experiences. Fine. But when thousands of people who have experienced both NDEs and hallucinations unanimously report a categorical difference between the two, and when that report is consistent across cultures, age groups, and medical conditions, it constitutes significant evidence that NDEs are not simply a species of hallucination.33
There is also a logical asymmetry here that Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin overlook. When someone says, “My NDE was nothing like a hallucination,” the skeptic’s response is essentially: “You are wrong about the nature of your own experience.” But think about how strange this is. We generally trust people to distinguish between different types of experiences. If someone tells you, “I was awake—I wasn’t dreaming,” we do not normally respond with, “Actually, you probably don’t know the difference between waking and sleeping.” If a patient tells her doctor, “This pain feels different from my usual headache,” the doctor listens, because people are generally reliable reporters of the qualitative character of their own experiences. The skeptic who dismisses the NDEr’s testimony about the qualitative difference between NDEs and hallucinations is applying a standard of doubt to NDE reports that we do not apply to any other category of first-person testimony. That asymmetry deserves an explanation, and the most natural one is that the skeptic’s conclusion is driving the evaluation of the evidence rather than the other way around.
Here is a point that Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin’s chapter 5 does not adequately address. The vividness of NDEs is not just interesting in itself—it is interesting because of when it occurs.
NDEs happen during cardiac arrest, severe trauma, deep coma, and other conditions where the brain is severely compromised or shows no measurable activity at all. Under these conditions, if consciousness is purely a product of brain activity, we would expect any experience to be confused, fragmented, and chaotic—if we would expect any experience at all. That is what a compromised brain produces. Ask any neurologist. A brain starved of oxygen does not generate clear, coherent, detailed, organized experiences. It generates delirium, confusion, and fragmentary hallucinations—if it generates anything.34
Yet NDEs are the exact opposite of what a compromised brain produces. They are lucid, organized, richly detailed, and involve enhanced mental functioning. Greyson’s analysis showed that mental clarity during NDEs was greater when the person was physiologically closer to death—exactly the reverse of what the physicalist model would predict.35
Let me put this as plainly as I can. Imagine you are a mechanic, and someone brings you a car engine that has been completely drained of oil and coolant. The pistons are seized. The temperature gauge is off the charts. And someone tells you, “While the engine was in this condition, it ran better than it ever has—smoother, faster, more efficiently than when it was in perfect working order.” You would find this incredible. Engines do not perform better when they are failing. They perform worse. That is what failure means.
The same logic applies to the brain. If consciousness is produced by brain activity, then a brain in cardiac arrest—with no blood flow, no oxygen, and a flat-line EEG—should not be producing consciousness at all, much less consciousness of enhanced clarity and vividness. The fact that it apparently does is not just puzzling for the physicalist. It is, on physicalist assumptions, nearly impossible. It is like finding a car engine that runs best when it has no fuel.
This is a significant problem for the “vivid but not veridical” objection. Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin compare NDEs to dreams and hallucinations in healthy brains. But NDEs typically occur in brains that are not healthy—brains that are clinically dead, or nearly so. The comparison breaks down because the conditions are fundamentally different. A healthy brain can generate vivid dreams and hallucinations. A brain in cardiac arrest with a flat-line EEG should not be generating anything—let alone experiences that are more vivid, more coherent, and more orderly than normal waking consciousness.36
Van Lommel’s landmark Lancet study in 2001 confirmed this pattern across 344 cardiac arrest survivors. Only 18 percent reported NDEs—but those who did consistently reported enhanced, not diminished, mental functioning during a time when their brains should have been completely offline.37 And here is the really telling detail: if NDEs were produced by a dying brain—if they were simply the last electrochemical gasps of neurons starved of oxygen—then we would expect all cardiac arrest patients to have them, or at least most of them. After all, every brain that undergoes cardiac arrest suffers the same oxygen deprivation. But only a minority report NDEs. This selectivity is another fact the dying-brain hypothesis struggles to explain, and it further undermines the comparison between NDEs and the vivid hallucinations that can be produced by known brain mechanisms.37b
To ground all of this in concrete reality, consider several cases that illustrate the combination of vivid experience and verified accuracy. These are not vague reports from unreliable witnesses. They are specific, detailed, and independently confirmed.
The famous “dentures man” from van Lommel’s Lancet study was brought into the hospital in a coma after cardiac arrest. A nurse removed his dentures during resuscitation and placed them in a drawer of the crash cart. A week later, when the patient regained consciousness, he immediately recognized the nurse and told him exactly where his dentures were: in the drawer of that specific cart, in that specific room. He described the room, the cart, the drawer. He also described the resuscitation procedures in detail, including specific actions by specific staff members—all while he had been clinically dead with no measurable brain activity.38
Was his experience vivid? Absolutely. Was it veridical? Also absolutely. The dentures were exactly where he said they were. The details of the resuscitation matched. The nurse confirmed it all. This is not a dream. Dreams do not tell you where someone put your teeth while you were dead.
Or consider the many cases catalogued in The Self Does Not Die by Rivas, Dirven, and Smit—a collection of over 100 verified paranormal cases from NDEs. These include patients who reported events in distant rooms, identified people they had never met, described medical procedures they had never witnessed, and provided information that was subsequently confirmed by independent investigation. In many cases, the reports were given immediately upon regaining consciousness and verified by the medical staff who were present.39
The power of The Self Does Not Die lies precisely in the cumulative weight of its case collection. A skeptic might explain away one case as coincidence or lucky guessing. But when case after case after case produces the same pattern—vivid, detailed, out-of-body perception that is subsequently verified by objective witnesses—the coincidence explanation becomes increasingly untenable. As Robert and Suzanne Mays note in the foreword to the book, the assembly of a large number of similar cases “makes it exponentially more difficult for pseudoskeptics to dismiss this evidence as mere anecdotes, to write them off as fraud or confabulation, or to make ad hoc arguments that are specific to only one or a few cases.”39b This is, in fact, exactly the cumulative methodology that Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin themselves say should be used to evaluate the evidence. The irony is that when it is used, it points powerfully in the opposite direction from their conclusion.
Penny Sartori’s five-year prospective study in the United Kingdom provided a particularly clean test. She compared the resuscitation descriptions of patients who reported out-of-body experiences during their NDEs with those of patients who did not have NDEs but were asked to guess what had happened during their resuscitation. The results were telling: the non-NDE patients could not accurately describe what had happened. Many guessed incorrectly about which procedures were used. Many assumed the defibrillator had been used when it had not. Their guesses were riddled with errors and misconceptions based on popular television portrayals of resuscitation. The NDE patients, by contrast, gave surprisingly accurate descriptions of the specific procedures, equipment, and staff actions during their own resuscitations.40
Think carefully about what Sartori’s study shows. If veridical NDE perception were merely the product of lucky guessing or post-hoc reconstruction from overheard conversations or general medical knowledge, then the non-NDE patients should have performed comparably. They did not. The non-NDE patients guessed incorrectly, frequently, and in predictable ways—ways shaped by television medical dramas rather than by what actually happened in the room. The NDE patients, by contrast, gave descriptions that matched the specific details of their individual resuscitations. This controlled comparison is devastating to the hallucination hypothesis, because it shows that NDE-based knowledge is categorically different from what guessing or imagination can produce.
Michael Sabom, a cardiologist who started his NDE research as a thorough skeptic, found the same pattern decades earlier. He carefully questioned cardiac arrest patients about their resuscitation procedures. His skepticism began to erode when patient after patient gave descriptions of their resuscitations that matched the medical records in specific, idiosyncratic details—details that varied from one resuscitation to another and could not have been guessed from general medical knowledge. Each resuscitation is different, Sabom emphasized. The specific sequence of interventions, the equipment used, the complications encountered—these vary case by case. A hallucinating brain might generate a generic resuscitation scene, but it could not generate the specific details of this particular resuscitation, in this particular room, at this particular time. Yet the NDE patients did exactly that.40b
This is exactly the kind of evidence that the “vivid but not veridical” objection needs to explain. It is not enough to point out that hallucinations can be vivid. The question is: can hallucinations produce specific, accurate, verifiable information about real-world events that the experiencer could not have known through normal sensory means? The answer, from every study we have, is no.41
And this is the point Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin’s chapter consistently sidesteps. They tell us that vivid experiences can be inaccurate. Granted. They tell us that hallucinations can feel completely real. Agreed. They tell us that we should not leap from vividness to truth without additional evidence. We concur. But then, when the additional evidence is presented—case after case of independently verified, objectively confirmed, accurate perception during documented brain inactivity—their chapter has nothing to say. The objection, for all its philosophical elegance, is aimed at a straw man. The real argument for the evidential significance of NDEs was never about vividness alone. It was always about vividness plus verification. And that combination, once you look at the actual case evidence, is extraordinarily difficult to explain away.
It is worth noting that Michael Marsh makes a similar move to Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin’s, though from a neurophysiological rather than philosophical angle. Marsh argues throughout his book that the experiences reported by NDErs—however vivid and memorable—are generated by “metabolically disturbed brains especially during the period when they are regaining functional competence.”42 He compares NDE phenomenology to hypnagogic and hypnopompic dream states, arguing that the vividness of NDE imagery is comparable to the vivid imagery that characterizes these sleep-wake transition states.43
Marsh also claims that NDErs “cannot be conversant with the variety of dream-state modes that have been identified and defined neurophysiologically.”44 In other words, experiencers say their NDE was not a dream, but Marsh suggests they do not know enough about the different kinds of dream states to make that judgment. They may have experienced a hypnopompic hallucination and simply not realized it.
But this argument has the same fatal weakness. Hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations do not produce veridical perception. They do not give people accurate information about events happening in other rooms. They do not report the location of misplaced dentures. They do not describe surgical procedures with precision that matches the medical record. Whatever these dream-state modes are, they are not generating verified, accurate knowledge of the external world. Veridical NDEs are. And that difference matters enormously.45
Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin make an important observation about sincerity: the fact that NDErs sincerely believe their experiences were real does not, by itself, prove that those experiences were real. Sincerity is not evidence of truth.46
I agree. They are absolutely right about this. But I want to point out something interesting: this concession actually works against the skeptical case, not for it.
Here is why. The sincerity of NDErs is not the evidence. The sincerity is the motivation to take the evidence seriously. When a cardiac arrest survivor sincerely reports an out-of-body experience and provides specific, verifiable details about events they could not have perceived through normal means—and those details check out—the sincerity tells us we should not dismiss this person as a liar. The verification tells us we should not dismiss them as confused. Together, sincerity and verification make a powerful combination.
Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin are right that sincerity alone is not enough. But sincerity plus verification is a very different matter. And that is what we have in hundreds of NDE cases.47
There is one more piece of evidence worth mentioning here, though it is treated in much greater detail in Chapter 29. NDErs undergo profound, lasting life transformations. They become less materialistic, more compassionate, less afraid of death, more interested in spiritual matters, and more focused on love and relationships. These changes persist for decades. They are documented across cultures and across studies. They are deeper, longer-lasting, and more pervasive than anything typically produced by dreams, hallucinations, or even powerful drug-induced experiences.48
Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin address transformation in their chapter 10. They acknowledge the reality of NDE-triggered transformation but argue that transformation does not prove that the experience had a supernatural cause. A powerful hallucination, they suggest, could produce lasting change too. To their credit, they reference the transformative potential of psychedelic drug experiences as a comparison.49
They are right that transformation alone does not prove supernatural origin. But here again, we are not looking at transformation alone. We are looking at transformation that occurs alongside veridical perception, during documented absence of brain function, in a coherent and orderly experience that the brain’s memory systems encode as more real than ordinary reality. The cumulative weight is what matters. And the transformation evidence adds one more strand to the rope.50
Taken together, the evidence presents a consistent picture. NDE memories behave like real-event memories, not like dream or hallucination memories. NDE memories remain stable over decades, unlike confabulated or imagined memories. NDErs who have experienced both NDEs and hallucinations report a categorical difference between the two. Enhanced mental functioning occurs during states of severe brain compromise, contrary to physicalist predictions. And veridical NDE reports show an accuracy rate that is completely inconsistent with hallucination or confabulation.
The science, in other words, supports what the experiencers have been saying all along: NDEs are not dreams. They are not hallucinations. They are experiences of a fundamentally different and distinct kind—experiences in which consciousness appears to function not only independently of normal brain activity, but better than normal brain activity typically allows.51
Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin are right that vividness alone does not prove veridicality. But vividness combined with independent verification, combined with memory science, combined with the testimony of people who can compare NDEs to hallucinations, combined with the paradox of enhanced cognition during severe brain compromise—this combination is something the skeptics have not explained. And until they do, the “vivid doesn’t mean veridical” objection, while philosophically tidy, remains inadequate to the evidence.
This is a fair point, and I want to take it seriously. It is true that the Thonnard study, by itself, does not prove that NDEs correspond to an external reality. What it does, however, is remove one of the key supports for the skeptical position. If NDE memories behaved like dream memories—fading, distorting, becoming less detailed over time—that would be strong evidence for the hallucination hypothesis. The fact that they instead behave like (and actually exceed) real-event memories is significant evidence against the hallucination hypothesis. The direction of the evidence matters, even when the evidence is not individually conclusive.52
The skeptic is right that this evidence is not decisive by itself. But it does not need to be. It is one strand in a cumulative case. When you combine it with the veridical evidence, the stability findings, the experiencer testimony, and the enhanced cognition during compromised brain states, the picture becomes increasingly difficult to explain on the hallucination model.
Additionally, there is a logical problem with the “sufficiently intense hallucination” response. If we are postulating a hallucination so intense that the brain encodes it as more real than actual reality—and this hallucination also happens to produce accurate, verifiable information about the external world—we are no longer talking about anything that resembles known hallucinations. We are postulating a hypothetical brain state that has never been documented, that has no parallel in neuroscience, and that just happens to perfectly mimic what we would expect if consciousness were genuinely functioning apart from the brain. At some point, the ad hoc nature of this explanation should give the skeptic pause.53
A skeptic might press the point that subjective reports are inherently unreliable. People misjudge the nature of their experiences all the time. A person can be absolutely convinced that an event happened when in fact it was a false memory. So why should we trust NDErs who say their experience was different from a hallucination?
There are several problems with this objection. First, while it is true that people can misjudge individual experiences, the consistency of the NDE testimony across thousands of cases, cultures, and decades makes systematic error implausible. We are not dealing with one confused person. We are dealing with a global pattern in which people from vastly different backgrounds, with vastly different prior experiences, consistently report the same categorical distinction between NDEs and other altered states.54
Second, many NDErs do have extensive experience with altered states. Long’s NDERF database includes doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals who have experienced drug-induced states, anesthesia awareness, ICU delirium, and other altered states of consciousness in their professional lives. When these experienced observers report that the NDE was fundamentally different, their testimony carries significant weight. These are not naive laypeople who have never encountered a hallucination. These are people who know what altered brain states look like—and they say the NDE is something else entirely.55
Third—and most importantly—the veridical evidence provides an objective check on subjective testimony. The question is not merely whether NDErs feel their experience was different from a hallucination. The question is whether their experience produced results that hallucinations do not produce—specifically, accurate, verifiable information about the external world. It did. That objective check transforms the subjective testimony from mere opinion into corroborated evidence.56
Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin’s broader philosophical strategy includes the suggestion that future neuroscience may be able to explain NDEs in purely physical terms. They acknowledge that current neuroscience cannot fully explain NDEs, but they suggest that our present inability to detect brain activity during certain NDE conditions may simply reflect the limitations of our current technology. Perhaps future instruments will reveal brain activity in states where we currently measure none.57
This is a promissory note, not an argument. It asks us to withhold judgment because some future discovery might solve the problem. But science does not work on promissory notes. We evaluate the evidence we have, not the evidence we hope to have someday. The evidence we currently have shows that veridical perception occurs during states where no brain activity can be measured. That evidence needs to be explained now, not deferred to a future technology that may never materialize.58
Moreover, even if future technology did detect some minimal brain activity during cardiac arrest, that would not explain veridical perception. The question is not merely whether some neurons are still firing. The question is how a severely compromised brain could generate experiences that are more clear, more coherent, and more accurate than anything a healthy brain produces during normal waking life. Finding a few residual neurons sputtering in a largely inactive brain would not solve that mystery. It would deepen it.59
A skeptic might accuse us of cherry-picking—selecting only the most impressive NDE cases while ignoring the many cases that contain no veridical elements. After all, most NDEs do not include verifiable out-of-body observations. Doesn’t that undermine the evidential value of the ones that do?
Not at all. Consider an analogy. Suppose someone discovers a diamond mine, and skeptics object that most of the rocks in the mine are not diamonds. Does that prove there are no diamonds? Of course not. The existence of ordinary rocks does not diminish the significance of the diamonds that are found. What matters is whether the diamonds are real—and in the case of veridical NDEs, the verification shows that they are.60
Not every NDE will produce verifiable out-of-body perception. Many NDEs occur in settings where verification is impossible—the patient was alone, or the details of the experience pertain to a transcendent realm that cannot be checked against physical evidence. But when NDEs do include verifiable elements, those elements check out at a remarkable rate. The 107 cases in Holden’s review, the over 100 cases in The Self Does Not Die, the cases in Sartori’s prospective study, the dentures case, the Pam Reynolds case—these are not isolated curiosities. They are a consistent pattern. And a consistent pattern of accurate veridical perception during documented brain inactivity is exactly what we would expect if NDEs were real and exactly what we would not expect if they were hallucinations.61
There is another important point here. The fact that not all NDEs include verifiable OBE components does not weaken the veridical cases—it simply means that not all NDEs are equally testable. Many NDEs involve traveling through a tunnel, encountering a being of light, or experiencing a life review. These elements are not the kinds of things we can verify against a medical record. But they are experienced alongside the same enhanced clarity and “more real than real” quality that characterizes the veridical cases. The veridical cases, in other words, are not outliers within the NDE phenomenon. They are windows into the whole phenomenon—windows that happen to provide an objective check on the subjective experience. And that check, when it is available, consistently confirms that the experiencer’s perception was accurate.61b
A skeptic might try a different tactic. Instead of defending the “vivid doesn’t mean veridical” objection, they might concede it and say: “Fine. Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin’s chapter 5 addresses a weak version of the NDE argument. So what? The other skeptical arguments—timing, cultural conditioning, memory distortion, the dying brain hypothesis—are the real challenges. You have not defeated those by rebutting chapter 5.”
We agree that chapter 5 addresses a relatively narrow issue. But there are two reasons why this chapter still matters.
First, the “vivid doesn’t mean veridical” argument is one of the most frequently repeated skeptical talking points in popular discussions of NDEs. Whenever someone describes an NDE and says it felt “more real than real,” the most common skeptical response is some version of “hallucinations can feel real too.” This argument has an outsized influence on public perception, even if it is relatively modest within the academic debate. It needed a thorough response, and now it has one.61c
Second, and more importantly, the process of rebutting this argument forces us to assemble several lines of evidence that will be important throughout the rest of this book: the Thonnard memory research, the Greyson stability findings, the Holden veridical review, the Sartori controlled comparison, and the paradox of enhanced cognition during compromised brain states. These are not just responses to Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin’s chapter 5. They are building blocks of the cumulative case that unfolds across Parts IV, V, and VI. Every piece of evidence we have assembled in this chapter will reappear in later chapters, where it will be integrated into the larger argument. The “vivid doesn’t mean veridical” objection, in other words, is not a dead end. It is an entry point into the strongest evidence for the reality of NDEs.
Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin are right about one thing: the case for the reality of NDEs should be cumulative. We agree. And that is precisely why their chapter 5 fails. By isolating vividness from the rest of the evidence and then showing that vividness alone does not prove accuracy, they create the impression that they have dealt a blow to the pro-NDE case. But they have only dealt a blow to a version of that case that no one is making.
The actual case is this: NDEs are extraordinarily vivid and coherent and their memories behave like real-event memories and those memories remain stable over decades and experiencers who have also had hallucinations report a categorical difference and enhanced mental functioning occurs during states of severe brain compromise and veridical NDE reports are independently verified at a rate completely inconsistent with hallucination. Every one of these facts is documented. Every one has been tested. And taken together, they form a cumulative case that the “vivid doesn’t mean veridical” objection does not come close to answering.62
I want to be clear about what we have and have not established in this chapter. We have not proven that every NDE is a genuine encounter with a transcendent reality. We have not proven that consciousness definitely survives bodily death. What we have done is show that one of the most frequently deployed skeptical objections—the argument that the vividness of NDEs is evidentially irrelevant because other vivid experiences are inaccurate—fails to account for the actual evidence. The objection works only if you artificially isolate the phenomenological quality of NDEs from the verification evidence, the memory science, the experiencer comparisons, and the brain-state paradoxes. Once you bring the full evidence into view, the objection collapses under its own weight.
This matters for the larger argument of this book. Every skeptical explanation of NDEs faces the same fundamental challenge: it must account not just for one feature of the NDE phenomenon, but for all of them simultaneously. It is not enough to explain the vividness. You must also explain the veridical perception. It is not enough to explain the tunnel and the light. You must also explain the accurate report of a conversation in a different room. It is not enough to explain why NDEs feel real. You must also explain why they produce results that match reality. And you must do all of this while also explaining why these experiences occur during brain states that, on physicalist assumptions, should produce nothing at all.
I respect Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin. They are serious thinkers who have pressed important questions. Their insistence on rigorous reasoning is exactly what this field needs. But rigorous reasoning requires engaging the full body of evidence, not just the strand that is easiest to challenge. And when the full body of evidence is on the table, the conclusion seems clear: these experiences are not merely vivid brain-generated illusions. They are something more. Something that demands a better explanation than the skeptics have yet provided.63
In the end, the question is not whether vivid experiences can be inaccurate. Of course they can. The question is whether these particular vivid experiences—with their verified content, their unique memory signatures, their occurrence during flat-line brain states, and their life-transforming power—are best explained as mere hallucinations. I believe the evidence says no. The data says no. And the cumulative case, when honestly assessed, says no.
For those of us who come to this evidence as Christians, there is an additional layer of significance. Scripture teaches that we are more than our bodies. The soul is real, and it survives the death of the body. Paul writes of being “away from the body and at home with the Lord” (2 Cor. 5:8). Jesus told the thief on the cross, “Today you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43). The souls of the martyrs cry out from under the altar (Rev. 6:9–11)—conscious, articulate, and present with God. The veridical NDE evidence does not replace Scripture. But it does corroborate what Scripture has always taught: that human consciousness is not reducible to the physical brain, and that death is not the extinction of the person. The skeptics have made their case against this view. They have brought their best philosophical arguments to bear. But the evidence—the hard, empirical, independently verified evidence—points in the other direction.64
Vivid does not always mean veridical. Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin are right about that. But vivid plus verified is a very different story. And that story is the one the skeptics have yet to tell us how to explain away.
↑ 1. Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin, Near-Death Experiences: Understanding Visions of the Afterlife (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), chap. 5, citing Greyson et al. (2009): 229.
↑ 2. Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin, Near-Death Experiences, chap. 5.
↑ 3. Jeffrey Long, Evidence of the Afterlife: The Science of Near-Death Experiences (New York: HarperOne, 2010), 61, as cited in Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin, Near-Death Experiences, chap. 5.
↑ 4. Eben Alexander, Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012), 129–130, as cited in Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin, Near-Death Experiences, chap. 5.
↑ 5. Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin, Near-Death Experiences, chap. 5. They distinguish between an experience being “real” (it genuinely occurred) and being “accurate” (its contents correspond to external reality).
↑ 6. Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin, Near-Death Experiences, chap. 5.
↑ 7. Oliver Sacks, Hallucinations (New York: Knopf, 2012), ix, xiii, as cited in Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin, Near-Death Experiences, chap. 5.
↑ 8. Sacks, Hallucinations, 229, as cited in Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin, Near-Death Experiences, chap. 5.
↑ 9. Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin, Near-Death Experiences, chap. 5.
↑ 10. Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin, Near-Death Experiences, chap. 5.
↑ 11. Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin, Near-Death Experiences, chap. 5.
↑ 12. Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin, Near-Death Experiences, chap. 5.
↑ 13. See the extensive catalogue of verified cases in Titus Rivas, Anny Dirven, and Rudolf Smit, The Self Does Not Die: Verified Paranormal Phenomena from Near-Death Experiences (Durham, NC: IANDS Publications, 2016). See also Janice Miner Holden, “Veridical Perception in Near-Death Experiences,” in Janice Miner Holden, Bruce Greyson, and Debbie James, eds., The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences: Thirty Years of Investigation (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2009).
↑ 14. Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin engage veridical cases elsewhere in their book (chaps. 2–3), but their chapter on vividness (chap. 5) treats the phenomenological quality of NDEs in isolation from the verification evidence, which weakens the overall force of their argument.
↑ 15. Chris Carter, Science and the Near-Death Experience: How Consciousness Survives Death (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2010), chaps. 10–11.
↑ 16. For a thorough discussion of why the dream analogy fails when confronted with veridical cases, see Carter, Science and the Near-Death Experience, chaps. 10–11, and Rivas, Dirven, and Smit, The Self Does Not Die, chaps. 1–3.
↑ 17. Sacks, Hallucinations. Sacks himself acknowledges the distinction between hallucinations and veridical perceptions, though he does not engage the NDE literature directly.
↑ 18. Carter, Science and the Near-Death Experience, chap. 14; Rivas, Dirven, and Smit, The Self Does Not Die, chaps. 1–5.
↑ 19. Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin, Near-Death Experiences, chap. 5.
↑ 20. For the cumulative case, see especially the overview in Chapter 31 of this book.
↑ 20b. Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin, Near-Death Experiences, chap. 5. They note that van Lommel, in personal correspondence, emphasized his medical credentials as relevant to the NDE discussion.
↑ 20c. Van Lommel et al., “Near-Death Experience in Survivors of Cardiac Arrest,” The Lancet 358 (2001); Sam Parnia et al., “AWARE—AWAreness during REsuscitation—A Prospective Study,” Resuscitation 85, no. 12 (2014): 1799–1805; Sartori, The Near-Death Experiences of Hospitalized Intensive Care Patients.
↑ 21. Janice Miner Holden, “Veridical Perception in Near-Death Experiences,” in Holden, Greyson, and James, eds., The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences (2009). See also Carter, Science and the Near-Death Experience, chap. 14, for a detailed discussion of Holden’s findings.
↑ 22. Holden, “Veridical Perception in Near-Death Experiences.” The combined figures: 92 percent of cases had no demonstrable inaccuracy; 37 percent were independently confirmed as completely accurate.
↑ 23. Holden, “Veridical Perception in Near-Death Experiences,” as discussed in Carter, Science and the Near-Death Experience, chap. 14.
↑ 24. Marie Thonnard, Vanessa Charland-Verville, Sérge Brédart, Hedwige Dehon, Steven Laureys, and Andrea E. Vanhaudenhuyse, “Characteristics of Near-Death Experiences Memories as Compared to Real and Imagined Events Memories,” PLOS ONE 8, no. 3 (2013): e57620.
↑ 25. Thonnard et al., “Characteristics of Near-Death Experiences Memories” (2013). The study found that NDE memories scored higher on phenomenological characteristics than any other category of memory, including memories of confirmed real events.
↑ 26. Vanessa Charland-Verville, Jean-Pierre Jourdan, Marie Thonnard, Didier Ledoux, Anne-Françoise Donneau, Etienne Quertemont, and Steven Laureys, “Near-Death Experiences in Non-Life-Threatening Events and Coma of Different Etiologies,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 8 (2014): 203. See also the discussion in Rivas, Dirven, and Smit, The Self Does Not Die, foreword.
↑ 27. The cumulative argument from memory science, veridical evidence, and experiencer testimony is discussed further in Chapter 18 (on confabulation) and Chapter 31 (the cumulative case).
↑ 28. Bruce Greyson, “Consistency of Near-Death Experience Accounts over Two Decades: Are Reports Embellished over Time?” Resuscitation 73, no. 3 (2007): 407–411.
↑ 29. Greyson, “Consistency of Near-Death Experience Accounts over Two Decades.” The remarkable stability of NDE memories over twenty years contrasts sharply with the degradation typically seen in ordinary, imagined, and confabulated memories.
↑ 30. Pim van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience (New York: HarperOne, 2010). Van Lommel’s prospective study included follow-up interviews at two and eight years post-NDE.
↑ 31. Long, Evidence of the Afterlife. Long’s NDERF database (nderf.org) includes thousands of accounts, many from experiencers with prior exposure to hallucinations, anesthesia awareness, and other altered states.
↑ 32. Michael Sabom, Recollections of Death: A Medical Investigation (New York: Harper & Row, 1982). Sabom was initially skeptical of NDE claims and was persuaded by the consistency and accuracy of the reports he documented.
↑ 33. Long, Evidence of the Afterlife; van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life; Bruce Greyson, After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond (New York: St. Martin’s Essentials, 2021).
↑ 34. Carter, Science and the Near-Death Experience, chap. 13. Carter provides an extensive discussion of the difference between what a compromised brain produces (confusion, delirium, fragmented hallucinations) and what NDEs produce (lucidity, coherence, enhanced cognition).
↑ 35. Greyson et al. (2009): 229, as cited in Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin, Near-Death Experiences, chap. 5. Enhanced mental functioning was reported more often by those who were physiologically closer to death.
↑ 36. Van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life; Greyson, After. The paradox of enhanced cognition during compromised brain states is one of the strongest arguments against purely physical explanations of NDEs.
↑ 37. Pim van Lommel, Ruud van Wees, Vincent Meyers, and Ingrid Elfferich, “Near-Death Experience in Survivors of Cardiac Arrest: A Prospective Study in the Netherlands,” The Lancet 358 (2001): 2039–2045.
↑ 37b. Van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life. Van Lommel repeatedly emphasizes that the selectivity of NDEs—only a minority of cardiac arrest patients report them—is a major problem for purely physical explanations. If a universal brain mechanism produced NDEs, all cardiac arrest patients should have them.
↑ 38. Van Lommel et al., “Near-Death Experience in Survivors of Cardiac Arrest,” The Lancet (2001). The “dentures man” case is also discussed in detail in Carter, Science and the Near-Death Experience, chap. 14, and in Rivas, Dirven, and Smit, The Self Does Not Die.
↑ 39. Rivas, Dirven, and Smit, The Self Does Not Die, chaps. 1–5. The foreword by Robert and Suzanne Mays emphasizes the power of assembling a large collection of verified cases together.
↑ 39b. Robert G. Mays and Suzanne B. Mays, foreword to Rivas, Dirven, and Smit, The Self Does Not Die.
↑ 40. Penny Sartori, The Near-Death Experiences of Hospitalized Intensive Care Patients: A Five-Year Clinical Study (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2008), 212–215. See also the summary in J. Steve Miller, Near-Death Experiences as Evidence for the Existence of God and Heaven: A Brief Introduction in Plain Language, chap. 2.
↑ 40b. Michael Sabom, Recollections of Death: A Medical Investigation (New York: Harper & Row, 1982). Sabom found 32 of his patients had veridical experiences during cardiac arrest and provided a meticulous comparison of their reports with medical records. See also Miller, Near-Death Experiences as Evidence, chap. 2.
↑ 41. Holden, “Veridical Perception in Near-Death Experiences”; Carter, Science and the Near-Death Experience, chap. 14; Rivas, Dirven, and Smit, The Self Does Not Die.
↑ 42. Michael N. Marsh, Out-of-Body and Near-Death Experiences: Brain-State Phenomena or Glimpses of Immortality? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. xvi.
↑ 43. Marsh, Out-of-Body and Near-Death Experiences, chap. 7, pp. 242–243.
↑ 44. Marsh, Out-of-Body and Near-Death Experiences, p. 242. Marsh suggests that experiencers lack the neurophysiological knowledge to distinguish their NDE from hypnagogic or hypnopompic dream states.
↑ 45. Carter, Science and the Near-Death Experience, chaps. 10–11; Rivas, Dirven, and Smit, The Self Does Not Die, chaps. 1–3.
↑ 46. Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin, Near-Death Experiences, chap. 5.
↑ 47. Holden’s 107 cases, the 100+ cases in The Self Does Not Die, and the cases documented in prospective studies by van Lommel, Parnia, Schwaninger, and Sartori all combine sincerity with objective verification.
↑ 48. Van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life; Long, Evidence of the Afterlife; Greyson, After. The transformative effects of NDEs are treated in detail in Chapter 29 of this book.
↑ 49. Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin, Near-Death Experiences, chap. 10.
↑ 50. The cumulative case integrating transformation, veridical evidence, memory science, and brain-state paradoxes is presented in Chapter 31.
↑ 51. Van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life; Carter, Science and the Near-Death Experience; Greyson, After.
↑ 52. Thonnard et al., “Characteristics of Near-Death Experiences Memories” (2013).
↑ 53. This point is developed further in Chapter 31, where we address the ad hoc nature of multiple skeptical explanations applied in combination.
↑ 54. Long, Evidence of the Afterlife; van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life; Allan Kellehear, Experiences Near Death: Beyond Medicine and Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
↑ 55. Long, Evidence of the Afterlife; Laurin Bellg, Near Death in the ICU: Stories from Patients Near Death and Why We Should Listen to Them (Sloan Press, 2016).
↑ 56. Holden, “Veridical Perception in Near-Death Experiences”; Sartori, The Near-Death Experiences of Hospitalized Intensive Care Patients; Rivas, Dirven, and Smit, The Self Does Not Die.
↑ 57. Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin, Near-Death Experiences, chap. 3. They suggest that future technologies may detect brain activity in states where current technologies show none.
↑ 58. Carter, Science and the Near-Death Experience, chap. 13, addresses the “future science will explain it” argument in detail.
↑ 59. Van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life. Van Lommel argues that even minimal residual brain activity cannot account for the organized, coherent, and enhanced nature of NDE experiences.
↑ 60. This analogy is adapted from J. Steve Miller, Near-Death Experiences as Evidence for the Existence of God and Heaven, chap. 2.
↑ 61. Holden, “Veridical Perception in Near-Death Experiences”; Rivas, Dirven, and Smit, The Self Does Not Die; Sartori, The Near-Death Experiences of Hospitalized Intensive Care Patients.
↑ 61b. The relationship between veridical and non-veridical NDE elements is discussed further in Chapter 4. The key point is that the phenomenological quality—the “more real than real” character—is consistent across both verifiable and non-verifiable NDE elements, suggesting a unified underlying experience rather than a patchwork of lucky guesses interspersed with hallucination.
↑ 61c. See, for example, the way this argument is deployed in popular skeptical discussions by Susan Blackmore, Dying to Live: Near-Death Experiences (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1993), and Keith Augustine, “Hallucinatory Near-Death Experiences,” available at the Secular Web (infidels.org).
↑ 62. See Chapter 31 for the full cumulative case.
↑ 63. The broader failure of skeptical explanations to account for the full range of NDE evidence is the subject of Chapter 31.
↑ 64. For the biblical case for substance dualism and the conscious intermediate state, see John W. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting: Biblical Anthropology and the Monism-Dualism Debate, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), and Chapters 26–28 of this book. The relationship between NDE evidence and biblical teaching is treated more fully in those chapters.