A near-death experience, or NDE, is a state of consciousness of unusual richness and intensity, reported by people who have come close to death — during cardiac arrest, a coma, an accident, an operation.
One thing needs saying at the outset: the name is misleading. An experience identical in every respect can occur with no threat to life whatsoever — while meditating, during sex, or simply over a cup of coffee. A number of researchers now consider the term obsolete. We go on using it anyway, myself included, for one simple reason: the public knows what it means.
The phenomenon entered public awareness in the 1970s and has been documented ever more closely since the publication of Dr Raymond Moody's book.
What experiencers describe
The accounts are far richer than the lists usually drawn from them — every experience is singular. Yet a number of elements recur with striking regularity, whatever the age, the country or the beliefs of the person:
- Leaving the body — the sensation of seeing oneself from a vantage point outside one's own body.
- Absolute calm, often described as having no equivalent in ordinary life, even in people in acute physical distress.
- A passage: a tunnel, a corridor, darkness crossed towards brightness.
- A light perceived as alive, sometimes accompanied by a sense of love or of understanding.
- Meeting the dead, most often close relatives.
- A life review: one's existence unfolding, sometimes felt from the point of view of others.
- A boundary that must not be crossed, and the return — often against one's will.
Nobody experiences all of these. Some report only one.
The case of Jacques Baranowski
This is one of the best-documented cases I have encountered, and it appears in both my book and my film Témoins.
Verified perceptions
A conversation overheard thirty metres away
During his experience, Jacques Baranowski reported hearing a telephone conversation between a nurse and his biological mother, held in a treatment room some thirty metres from his own.
He also described seeing the surgeon writing out his death certificate — with one particular detail: one arm of the surgeon's glasses had been mended with tape.
More than thirty-eight years after the events, the nurse confirmed what he had perceived.
It is cases of this kind — rare, and checkable — that keep the file from being closed.
How common is it?
More common than people think. Studies of cardiac arrest survivors put the proportion at between 10% and 20%, depending on the criteria used. Set against the number of resuscitations performed worldwide each year, that amounts to millions of people — not counting all those whose experience occurred outside any medical setting.
Many say nothing. The fear of being taken for mad explains why a share of these accounts has never left the family circle.
What does science say?
NDEs are neither belief nor folklore: they are the subject of papers in medical journals and of research programmes at universities.
Where there is consensus
These experiences are real, they are structured in reproducible ways, and they are not a sign of mental illness. On the contrary, in most cases they are followed by lasting psychological wellbeing. Since the 1980s a measurement tool — the Greyson scale — has allowed them to be characterised in a standardised way.
The explanatory hypotheses
Several mechanisms have been proposed, often in combination:
- falling oxygen levels in the brain and a build-up of carbon dioxide;
- a massive release of neurotransmitters and endorphins;
- disturbance of the temporoparietal junction, the region involved in locating the body in space;
- an intrusion of states akin to REM sleep into waking consciousness;
- a surge of brain activity observed at the moment circulation stops, in humans as well as animals;
- the thanatosis hypothesis: the NDE would be the human trace of the death-feigning reflex seen in many animal species faced with a predator — a very old survival response, conserved by evolution.
A hypothesis of another order
Some researchers argue for non-local consciousness: consciousness would not be produced by the brain but filtered or received by it, which would explain how it can persist when brain activity collapses. This hypothesis is a minority position and is strongly contested, but it is defended by clinicians who have run serious prospective studies, and it is the one that accounts most directly for cases such as Jacques Baranowski's.
What remains open
Some experiencers describe scenes that unfolded while they were unconscious and that they should not have been able to perceive. Such cases are rare and hard to verify after the fact — and that is precisely where the argument lies. Sceptics see reconstructed memory; others hold that a single solidly established case would be enough to reopen the question of consciousness.
Afterwards: what changes in a life
This is perhaps the best-documented aspect, and the least talked about. People who have had an NDE describe almost the same transformations:
- the fear of death drops sharply, sometimes disappears;
- priorities shift — less weight given to material success, more to relationships;
- a heightened sensitivity to others.
But the return is not always gentle. Picking up an ordinary life after an experience of that intensity can be difficult, and those around the person do not always follow. It often takes years to integrate what was lived.
NDE, out-of-body experience, clinical death: not the same thing
- An NDE is defined by its content, not by the circumstances: it can occur in the face of a threat to life or entirely outside one.
- An out-of-body experience may be one element of an NDE, or occur on its own — while falling asleep, under anaesthetic, during a fainting spell.
- Clinical death is a medical state — circulation and breathing have stopped — which does not imply that any experience took place.
- End-of-life experiences, reported by dying people or those at their bedside, belong to yet another field.
I have had an NDE. Who can I talk to?
If you have found this page after living through something you cannot name: you are not alone, and what you experienced has been described by thousands of people. It is not a symptom.
Speaking to your own doctor remains an option, and a growing number of health professionals are aware of the subject.
My work on the subject
I have been investigating near-death experiences since 1999, after seeing the documentary adapted that year from Dr Raymond Moody's book.
In 2006 I organised the first international conference on the subject, in Martigues, followed by a second in Marseille in 2013. I directed the documentary Faux départ in 2010. In 2015 I launched a web TV channel devoted to near-death experiences, bereavement and spirituality. I published the book Et si cela vous arrivait ? in 2021, and the docufiction Témoins (From Up Above) was released in cinemas in November 2024.
For that last film I made a choice that drew criticism from both camps: giving sceptics as much room as believers. Specialists in the brain, in coma and in consciousness answer the experiencers on screen, and nobody concludes on their behalf.
The Rosetta protocol
A testimony, however striking, is always collected after the fact. That is the structural weakness of this field of research: we reconstruct, we do not observe.
Rosetta is a research protocol that attempts to break out of that impasse. Its principle: to put in place, in advance and within partner hospital units, a means of objective verification — so that if a patient reports, on waking, having perceived a scene during cardiac arrest, that scene can be checked against something established independently of them.
The aim is not to prove anything. It is to make the phenomenon falsifiable: to create the conditions under which a case could be established, or ruled out, on something other than a person's word.
The protocol grew out of the one outlined in Témoins. It is carried by the association Qualia Science.
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Written by Sonia Barkallah. Last updated: August 2026.