what do people experience during close encounter

Most people who come close to dying never report anything unusual at all. But somewhere between 10 and 20% do 24. Jan Holden, who has studied these accounts for decades, describes what they report: consciousness functioning apart from the physical body, perceiving the material world from outside themselves, and interacting with what they call transmaterial domains, deceased loved ones, spiritual entities 4. The person experiences it as real, sometimes more real than ordinary life.

These experiences range from very simple, with just one or two features, to profoundly complex 4. Some people meet beings of light, others review their entire lives, still others find themselves in landscapes they cannot describe with earthly language . Most are predominantly pleasurable, even ecstatic, though about 10% are distressing . The content varies wildly from person to person, but certain threads appear again and again: the sense of leaving the body, encountering a presence, feeling unconditional love, and returning changed.