The Near-Death Experience Content Scale (NDE-C)
Intro Section
In 2020, a team of researchers led by Dr. Charlotte Martial at the University of Liège — in collaboration with Dr. Bruce Greyson at the University of Virginia – published a significant advance in NDE research: the Near-Death Experience Content Scale, AKA: the NDE-C
While the Greyson NDE Scale (1983) remains the gold standard for identifying whether an experience qualifies as an NDE, the NDE-C was developed to capture what that experience actually contained — with greater completeness, greater nuance, and updated awareness of features the original scale did not address.
Most significantly, the NDE-C includes features that had been documented in the literature for years but never formally measured: the sense that the experience simply cannot be put into words; the impression of dying or being dead; the experience of a gateway; the decision — or compulsion — to return. And crucially, it acknowledges what earlier instruments overlooked: that not all NDEs are peaceful. Approximately 14% are described as distressing, even terrifying. Those experiences are real, and they deserve the same serious attention.
As a clinician, I consider the NDE-C an important companion to the Greyson Scale. Together they offer the most complete picture currently available of what human beings encounter at the threshold.
— Michael Matouk, Limited Licensed Clinical & Forensic Psychologist
The Five Dimensions
The NDE-C organizes 20 items into five meaningful clusters:
Beyond the usual — experiences beyond normal sensory boundaries and temporal perception Harmony — feelings of peace, unity, and belonging to something larger Insight — sudden understanding, encounters, visions of past and future Border — leaving the earthly world, approaching and crossing a threshold Gateway — the passage itself, often accompanied by light
The Scale
The following 20 items are presented here for educational purposes, with full attribution to their authors. In research settings each item is rated on a 0–4 scale of intensity. Here they are offered simply as a framework — a vocabulary for experiences that often feel beyond language.
Beyond the usual
1. Your perception of time was altered. Time as ordinarily experienced — sequential, measurable, moving forward — may dissolve entirely. Many experiencers describe a timelessness that felt more natural than the time-bound existence they returned to.
2. Your thoughts speeded up. Not anxious speed, but a crystalline acceleration — thoughts arriving complete, clear, and with a depth of understanding unavailable in ordinary consciousness.
3. You heard one or several voices which did not have any material incarnation. Not auditory hallucination in the clinical sense. Something more direct — communication received not through the ears but understood immediately, completely, and without ambiguity.
4. You had the feeling of suddenly understanding everything about yourself, others, and/or the universe. Total comprehension. The kind that arrives without effort and cannot be fully carried back — though its outline remains, shaping how experiencers understand themselves and others for the rest of their lives.
Harmony
5. You had a feeling of peace and/or well-being. The peace most frequently described is not passive. It is active, vast, and overwhelmingly present — a state so unlike ordinary experience that many experiencers spend years searching for words adequate to it.
6. You felt a sense of harmony or unity, as if you belonged to a larger whole. The dissolution of separateness. Not the loss of self, but the expansion of it — into something that felt more truly home than anywhere previously known.
Insight
7. You saw or felt surrounded by a bright light without any determined material origin. Warm rather than blinding. Present rather than merely visual. Many describe this light as the most loving presence they have ever encountered — and many identify it as divine, though the label feels inadequate.
8. You experienced unusual sensations — sight, hearing, smell, touch, and/or taste. Heightened rather than diminished. A vividness of perception that experiencers consistently describe as more real than ordinary reality — not dream-like, but hyper-real.
9. You were aware of things beyond what your senses can usually perceive. Knowledge arriving without sensory input. Awareness of events in other locations, of information not previously known — some of which has subsequently been verified.
10. You gained insightful knowledge about the future. Precognitive visions — personal and sometimes global. Among the most studied and most contested features of the NDE, and among the most difficult to dismiss when the visions prove accurate.
11. You had the impression of being outside of, or separated from, your own body. Observation of one’s physical body from an external perspective — often from above, often with remarkable accuracy regarding details of the scene that the unconscious body could not have perceived.
12. You saw or relived events from your past. The life review — not merely memory, but re-experience. With a quality of witness rather than judgment. Many describe understanding, for the first time, how their actions felt to others.
13. You encountered a presence and/or an entity — who might be deceased. Loved ones who had died. Beings of light. Presences of overwhelming compassion. The encounter is almost universally described as the most profound meeting of a lifetime.
Border
14. You had the sensation of leaving the earthly world or of entering a new dimension and/or environment. Not departure from consciousness, but arrival somewhere else — a realm described as more structured, more real, and more beautiful than the world left behind.
15. You had a feeling of non-existence, of being in a total void, and/or of fear. This item acknowledges what earlier scales missed: that some NDEs are not peaceful. A significant minority of experiencers describe darkness, emptiness, terror — experiences no less real and no less worthy of compassionate attention than their peaceful counterparts.
16. You came close to a border and/or point of no return. A threshold — perceived as absolute. A line, a door, a river, a wall of light — beyond which the experiencer understood that return would not be possible.
17. You made the decision, or were forced, to come back from the experience. Some chose. Some were told. Some were sent back with information they were meant to carry. The return is almost universally described as reluctant — and the world returned to as somehow diminished, at least at first.
18. You had the feeling of dying and/or being dead. Not the fear of death but the direct experience of it — or what seemed like it. Many describe this not with horror but with a strange recognition, as if something long feared turned out to be something else entirely.
Gateway
19. You saw or entered a gateway — for instance a tunnel or a door. The passage itself. Tunnel, corridor, door, bridge — the specific form varies across cultures and individuals, though the experience of movement through it toward something luminous is remarkably consistent.
20. You sense that the experience cannot be described adequately in words. Ineffability. Perhaps the most honest item on any NDE scale — the acknowledgment that language, built for ordinary experience, bends and breaks under the weight of what experiencers are trying to convey. If you find yourself here, you are in good company.
A Clinical Note:
The NDE-C was developed because the field had grown. Thirty-seven years of research after Greyson’s original scale, we knew more — about negative NDEs, about the gateway experience, about the profound and lasting sense that the experience simply cannot be put into words. The NDE-C honors that growth.
What I find most significant about item 20 — ineffability — is its clinical implication. When a patient sits across from me and says I can’t explain it, that is not a failure of memory or articulation. It is an accurate report. Some experiences exceed the containers we have built for them. Our task, as clinicians and as a community, is to make space for that — not to demand that the extraordinary fit neatly into the ordinary.
— Michael Matouk, PhDcPLLC
Attribution and Copyright
The Near-Death Experience Content (NDE-C) Scale was developed by Charlotte Martial, Jessica Simon, Ninon Puttaert, Olivia Gosseries, Vanessa Charland-Verville, Anne-Sophie Nyssen, Bruce Greyson, Steven Laureys, and Hélène Cassol, and published in:
Martial, C., Simon, J., Puttaert, N., Gosseries, O., Charland-Verville, V., Nyssen, A-S., Greyson, B., Laureys, S., & Cassol, H. (2020). The Near-Death Experience Content (NDE-C) scale: Development and psychometric validation. Consciousness and Cognition, 86, 103049.
The scale is presented here for educational purposes only, with full attribution to its authors and the University of Liège Coma Science Group. All rights remain with the original authors and publishers.
For the original instrument: University of Virginia Division of Perceptual Studies
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