What is a Distressing Near-Death Experience?
Near-death experiences (NDEs) are often profound psychospiritual events. Most near-death experiencers (NDErs) report that their experience was dominated by pleasurable feelings such as peace, joy, and bliss. However, less commonly, some NDErs have reported that their experience was dominated by distressing, emotionally painful feelings such as fear, terror, horror, anger, loneliness, isolation, and/or guilt. Greyson and Bush (1996) classified 50 reports of distressing NDEs into three types: • The most common type included the same features as the pleasurable type such as an out-of-body experience and rapid movement through a tunnel or void toward a light but the NDEr, usually because of feeling out of control of what was happening, experienced the features as frightening. • The second, less common type included an acute awareness of nonexistence or of being completely alone forever in an absolute void. Sometimes the person received a totally convincing message that the real world inclu
