Are "near-death experiences" real?

The arguments for supernaturalistic interpretations of N.D.E.s are glaringly problematic. Many of the most visible proponents of the idea that N.D.E.s prove the existence of an afterlife are doctors. They include Eben Alexander, a neurosurgeon; the cardiologist Pim van Lommel; and the oncologist Jeffrey Long. It is important to emphasize that their conclusions are not medical but philosophical. The ideas that the mind can separate from the body and have contact with a heavenly realm are clearly not medical conclusions, and physicians have no special authority here. After all, they are physicians, not metaphysicians. I trust my physician to interpret my blood work, but not to let me know that my soul left my body when I was under general anesthesia. It is striking that some doctors employ such homeopathic doses of logic. They are trapped in a kind of tunnel vision.

It would be desirable to have a more plausible interpretation of N.D.E.s which they are real in both senses: They really occur and they are accurate. I propose that we interpret N.D.E.s as fundamentally and primarily about our journeys from life to death — dying. Most N.D.E.s depict a journey toward an imagined guarded realm, but not a successful passage to it. Just as in the literature on living forever, such as the ancient “Epic of Gilgamesh” or myth of Tantalus or the quixotic search for the Fountain of Youth, we come ever so close, but in the end we don’t quite make it. In N.D.E.s we get right to the gates, but we don’t go through; we get right to the edge of the universe, but we stop there.