I sit down with Dr. Bruce Greyson, one of the world’s foremost experts on Near-Death Experiences, who has dedicated nearly 40 years to studying this fascinating phenomenon. He is the author of several books, including After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond. Dr. Greyson is a Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia and the former director of UVA’s Division of Perceptual Studies. Dr. Greyson’s interest in Near-Death Experiences began just months after graduating from medical school, when an unconscious patient in the emergency room later described an out-of-body experience in vivid detail. This encounter challenged his beliefs about the relationship between the mind and the brain, sparking a lifelong journey of scientific exploration that has led to over a hundred medical publications on Near-Death Experiences. Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS) at University of Virginia After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond Check out our Merch Follow us on: Instagram, TikTok, Twitter For business inquiries contact: [email protected] If you have experienced something paranormal or unexplained, email us your story at [email protected] To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What are Near-Death Experiences (NDEs)?
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That strikes me, is that I've had a lot of vivid dreams before, powerful ones. I've had a lot of scary dreams. That being said... About five minutes after waking up, I've completely moved on. I don't change my life. Even if I received an omen in one of the dreams, I would probably forget about it within three minutes. You know, these people change their lives after these, right?
Right. And that's not true of hallucinations. People don't change their lives with hallucinations. But we hear a consistent set of after effects from near-death experiencers. And the most consistent thing we hear is that they're no longer afraid of death. Whether they were or not before, they're not afterwards.
And when I first heard that, back decades ago, I was a little concerned because as a psychiatrist working in the emergency room, I'd seen a lot of people who were considering suicide, but were deterred because they were afraid something bad would happen if they killed themselves. And here we're telling them, nothing bad will happen. Death is wonderful. Are we going to make people more suicidal?
So I did a study with people who had been admitted to the hospital with suicide attempts. And I studied those who had near-death experiences as a result of the suicide attempt, which is about 20% of them, and those who didn't. And we followed them up for month after month, and we found that those who had a near-death experience were much less suicidal, which kind of surprised me.
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Chapter 2: How did Dr. Greyson become interested in NDEs?
And as I said, that's the smallest group, and I've only heard that from people who were raised in a religion that preached that, either Roman Catholics or fundamentalist Protestants. I've never heard anyone else describe those.
Interesting. So, I mean, we'll get to the life review and everything, but you haven't really encountered people – facing bad parts of their life or things they did wrong or anything like that? Have you seen any examples of that?
Yes. I will say, though, about the unpleasant experiences, we try to find what makes them unpleasant, and we really can't find anything. It's not true that nasty people have unpleasant experiences. A lot of traditional Catholic saints throughout the centuries have written about the dark night of the soul, where they had terrifying spiritual experiences.
And I've known people who were career criminals or some on death row who had blissful experiences. So it's not how you live your life necessarily. It may be related to your mental state when you go into the experience. I'm not sure about that. We don't have enough data on that yet. Most people who report a life review report both memories of good things they've done and of bad things they've done.
And remembering the bad things is not pleasant. But they do not say, for the most part, that they were being judged by someone else, by a deity or an angel or anything like that. They report being guided through the review, but the judging comes from them themselves. And they say, oh, gosh, I made a mistake that time. They don't talk about sin. They talk about making mistakes.
And when they come back, they're often determined to correct those mistakes. And they're glad they had this experience. So they have a second chance to do better this time.
Let's just get into the life review, actually. This is a major thing I wanted to talk to you about, but this is something that is commonly reported. You call it the life review, and it's a cliche. People say that their lives flash before their eyes when they die, but this is literally reported. It's actually, in certain episodes of the show, this has happened to people in various forms, but how...
How is this happening for people in physical space? How is this life review taking place? Are there themes to that? Does it happen differently each time? And what is being shown?
Yeah, again, we're faced with the fact that people say there are no words to describe it, so they use metaphors.
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Chapter 3: What are the common characteristics of NDEs?
And she wanted to go out and play with the dog. And the grandma said, no, you stay here with me. And she later woke up in the hospital bed, lots of broken bones, lots of gashes. And she found out several days later that her dog had died in that accident. She didn't know that at the time of her near-death experience.
So we hear that again and again, that people encounter people or animals sometimes that had died, but they didn't know they had died.
Is it usually loved ones that they're greeted by?
Usually. Sometimes they're unknown people. Okay.
I talked to a guy one time that said that he was with a group of people that he knew to be his family from a different life. Like, and he had, he tried to explain this to me, but it was just like a sense of knowing that. But then they also were sitting there and kind of catching each other up on what they'd done in this life. And this was during an NDE.
Yeah. Well, again, people say that I have to talk about this in metaphors. And when they say, you know, I met my mother in my near-death experience. And I'll say, well, how do you know it was your mother? And sometimes they will describe her physically. And, you know, they usually describe them as they were in the prime of life, not when they were dying.
But occasionally they say, well, I didn't actually see a physical body. I saw this worm glowing entity. I could tell by the way it made me feel that was my mother. I felt her hugging me, but he didn't actually see the figure of his mother. So it's all people's interpretation of what they're experiencing.
That's fascinating. Can you talk to me about some of the people who you work with and mentor at DOPS and any of the exciting studies you have coming up in the future?
Oh, yeah, there's about a half dozen of us who are actively researching things now. Jim Tucker, who is currently directing the division, has been primarily working with young children who claim to remember past lives. These are preschool kids. Uh, and they often describe very detailed, uh, facts about a past life that in many cases can be verified. People they couldn't have known about.
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