Near‑death experiences: survivors’ accounts from Cicoria to Hemingway

Near-death experiences — vivid visions, an overwhelming sense of peace, and encounters with light — keep drawing attention, whether you treat them as spiritual proof or neurological curiosities. Survivors from different backgrounds describe remarkably similar episodes that began when their hearts stopped or their bodies were clinically dead.

Orthopedic surgeon Tony Cicoria, who collapsed while talking on the phone with his mother in 1994, recalled leaving his body and watching resuscitation efforts before being drawn into a blue-white radiance. He later said he felt a sudden replay of his life’s extremes — then, abruptly, he was back in his body.

After a long battle with lymphoma, Anita Moorjani fell into a coma in 2006 and, while clinically near death, perceived herself floating above the hospital bed with a 360-degree view. She says her late father warned her that going further might mean she could not return, but she resisted because the experience was free of pain and fear: "For the first time, all pain was gone. All discomfort was gone. All fear disappeared. I felt so incredible. And I felt wrapped in this feeling of just love. Unconditional love." Within about 30 hours she regained consciousness and her organs began to recover.

Common threads, different lives

Some accounts are brief flashes, others are long narratives that reshape survivors’ outlooks. Four-year-old Annabel Beam says she "went to heaven" after a fall and felt safe sitting in "Jesus' lap," and when rescuers freed her she awoke cured of chronic digestive disorders; her mother later wrote the book Miracles from Heaven. Tessa Romero, who spent 24 minutes without a heartbeat while driving her children to school, documents in her book 24 Minutes on the Other Side how the sight of her own body and a profound calm erased her fear of death.

Other survivors describe darker or more ambiguous spaces. David Dichfield, pulled under a speeding train in 2006, reports meeting beings of light in a quiet dark place; afterward he produced music and art he had never made before, including a symphony titled "The Divine Light." Actor Jane Seymour described an out‑of‑body view during an anaphylactic event on set, watching medical staff work on her while feeling separated from the body.

Research groups and repositories such as the Near‑Death Experience Research Foundation (NDERF) collect thousands of first‑hand accounts. One contributor, a hospitalized four‑year‑old with fever and hallucinations, wrote that she began to "flip through time" and felt no past, present or future until a sudden pull brought her back. Stories vary, but recurring elements include movement away from the body, encounters with light or loved ones, and a choice or pull back to life.

Whether these episodes are spiritual glimpses, brain‑based phenomena triggered by oxygen loss or medication, or a mixture of influences, they continue to challenge simple explanations — and to change the lives of those who report them.

Photo: press material from the event