IANDS provides the following educational resources to learn more about NDEs:
Written by: Janice Miner Holden, EdD; and Bruce Greyson, MD
In an NDE, usually during a close brush with death due to severe illness or injury or during some other extreme circumstance, a person has a lucid and vivid experience of perceiving the material world from a position outside the physical body and/or perceiving and interacting with beings and environments not of the material world.
NDEs typically include several features.
Written by: Jenny Streit-Horn, PhD; Janice Miner Holden, EdD; Noelle St. Germain-Sehr, PhD; and Evelyn Elsaesser, PhD
ADC may occur as any of several types—alone or in combination.
In the following types, the ADCr’s perception may be either in the external physical environment or as internal mental imagery:
For doctors and nurses: How do you recognize a patient's near-death experience? How do you respond to it? This new IANDS-sponsored NDE Medical Training Video provides answers. It is now available on the IANDS Shopping Cart!
This groundbreaking video features six medical professionals, addresses the needs of near-death experiencers, and provides professional and general audiences with knowledge of NDEs.
Training Video DVD only (30 min) ~ $29.95. The institutional NDE Training Package (includes the DVD and supporting training materials) ~ $199. Both items are now available on the IANDS Shopping Cart, discounts available to IANDS members. View the trailer now!
We're glad to hear that you're interested in writing a paper on near-death experiences.
Our bibliography will give you a start. In particular, if you have access to the 2000 book, The Varieties of Anomalous Experience, Bruce Greyson's chapter on near-death experiences offers an excellent overview and includes a description of a very interesting NDE that occurred to a woman documented to have an inactive brain for one hour during surgery.
To locate resources in the library or bookstore, begin by checking listings under the author's name, if you know it, or under the topics of Near-Death, Death, and Dying. You may find books in the sections for Religion, Psychology, or Parapsychology. You may need to ask the librarian or salesperson; the topic is handled differently from place to place.
For magazine articles, look under the same topics suggested for book titles. Use the library's search facility if there is one. Otherwise, check the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature. For some excellent recent magazine and journal resources:
For websites where near-death experiencers post their experiences and sometimes discuss them with others, go to:
If you are interested in actually interviewing people who have had a near-death experience, try these suggestions:
Check to see if there is a local support and interest group near you for near-death experiencers (a Friends of IANDS group: FOI). Use the contact information to learn when and where the group meets. At the meeting, identify yourself as someone preparing to write a paper on near-death experiences.
Run a small request in your school or community newspaper, or post a notice on a high-traffic bulletin board (library, supermarket, wherever in your community people are most apt to stop and browse).
Whenever you interview a near-death experiencer, be sure to guarantee confidentiality-and keep this promise without fail!
How the tabloid papers report near-death experiences
Near-death experiences in history see Book X of Plato's Republic (also here); St. Paul's experience on the road to Damascus; William James Varieties of Religious Experience; and others)
- "The Wizard of Oz" as a near-death experience;
- NDEs in film (see "Resurrection," "Jacob's Ladder," "Ghost," "Flatliners," "All That Jazz," "Heaven Can Wait," "Always," "What Dreams May Come," "Dragonfly," and others)
NDE themes and similarities in Katharine Anne Porter's Pale Horse, Pale Rider; Dickens' A Christmas Carol; Black Elk's Black Elk Speaks
- Similarities between NDE and limbic lobe disorder;
- physiological theories that attempt to explain the NDE (see especially the work of Susan Blackmore);
- levels of consciousness (altered states of consciousness)
Similarities and differences among NDEs across world culture