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1. Introduction to Coma and NDEs
A coma is a deep state of unconsciousness, during which an individual is not able to react to their environment. Someone in a coma cannot respond to any form of stimulation whatsoever. Coma can be caused by an underlying illness, or it can result from head trauma. A comatose person is still very much alive, but he or she is not simply asleep. The brain wave activity in a comatose person is very different from that of a sleeping person; you can wake up a sleeping person, you can’t wake a person in a coma. There are reports of people waking from a coma and recounting a classic near-death experience (NDE). Some reports involve the comatose patient being able to visualize and hear what is happening while in the comatose state. When triggered by a coma, NDEs provide a unique window into the nature of human consciousness and its resilience in the face of near-fatal conditions.
The relationship between comas and NDEs raises compelling questions about the boundaries between life and death, as well as the mechanisms of the brain during periods of extreme dysfunction. Accounts from coma survivors often describe a heightened sense of awareness, vivid imagery, or encounters that seem more “real” than ordinary reality, despite their brains being in a severely impaired state. These reports challenge traditional neurological models and spark debates about whether NDEs are purely physiological phenomena or glimpses into a deeper metaphysical reality.
This article includes three examples of NDEs occurring while the experiencer is in a coma. One NDE is from a woman named Derry Bresee. Another NDE resulting from coma comes from a highly publicized article in Lancet medical journal from the Dutch NDE study in 2001. The third NDE resulting from coma comes from Dr. Eben Alexander – a neurosurgeon.
2. Derry Bresee’s Near-Death Experience
Derry Bresee is a grandmother and registered nurse who was involved in a near-fatal car accident with her youngest son which resulted in her NDE. Her son had just gotten his driver’s license and was driving home from the DMV with Derry as a passenger when he accidentally pulled out in front of a gravel truck that couldn’t stop in time. Although the accident almost ended her life and put her into a coma for which she had her NDE and eventually recovered, Derry is thankful to her son for this accident because of the wonderful blessings her life because of it. In describing her life since her NDE, Derry says, “Prayer is a tangible force – a power for good here on this Earth!”
The following is Derry Bresee’s NDE testimony in her own words sent to Kevin Williams and published in his book, Nothing Better Than Death.
“Many people ask me what was the first thing I thought or felt when I came out of my coma, about three weeks after the accident. I could feel Christ‘s love and compassion for me and I believe the prayers of many for me made him tune into me personally, and led to my incredible experience with Christ in that heavenly garden. I now no longer hope that there is a heaven and that Christ’s life experience and atonement are real. Now I know! Just as I know that I gave birth to all five of my children and tangibly held them in my arms.
“My testimony of Christ burns within me. Now, when I think of him, I have a visual memory of him looking at me there in that heavenly garden.
“I now have the time to focus on spiritual things daily because I can no longer work as a nurse.
“I thank God I’m able to communicate with others instead of being severely brain injured and unable to communicate as was expected.
“All the doctors say my recovery, to the extent I function now, is a miracle!
“I had a near-death experience after I’d been seriously injured in a near fatal automobile accident which caused me to stop breathing necessitating the use of a ventilator and an accompanying coma. Since coming out of my coma I’ve had vivid remembrances of the time I was on the other side of veil in a heavenly realm.
“There was a bright mist permeating everything. The light was everywhere, it even passed through me! I can remember looking at my hand and the light passed through it. I could see my hand was transparent, but this did not surprise me. As I walked with this heavenly personage his countenance shone forth with such a brightness that I can’t describe. I knew this heavenly personage was Jesus because I recognized him as a familiar friend. He didn’t announce who he was because this wasn’t necessary.
“I remember walking with Jesus, but we weren’t walking in the physical sense, the best way I can describe our walking was that we were walking in mid-air, floating above the ground of this beautiful garden we were walking in. Everything in this garden had an overall whiteness and brightness about it. I was seeing the bright green of the plants. I could see the water, and a bright glow surrounded it and the burbling of this water had a musical sound to it, the water fairly sang! The water was so sparkling clear! I remember wanting to bend over and take a drink from the stream that was running through this garden we were walking through.
“When I tried to scoop up water with my hands the water ran through my hands, literally, and it wasn’t wet! Jesus stopped walking and looked at me while I was bent over trying to drink this water. I could feel his eyes on me. My thirst for this water – even though I wasn’t able to put to my lips and drink it – was gone at that moment! I can’t describe the sensation I felt when the water was running through my hands, but I did feel something. I felt this overwhelming desire to experience everything about this garden.
“When I and the heavenly being talked it wasn’t with our mouths, but I knew we were communicating, his countenance fairly shone, and how he felt about me shone forth about him. He simply exuded love and concern and caring for me just by standing there. The feeling of peace I felt was indescribable!
“I was given the choice that I could either come back to this Earth and live more life or stay with him there in Heaven. We both knew that returning to this Earth would be a struggle because I’d told him that I wanted to return to this Earth if I could help myself and others. He knew that I didn’t want to live more life on this Earth if life meant being trapped in unresponsive body, unable to communicate. The look of love in his eyes filled me with joy then, and as I remember that feeling of joy I felt then I’m filled me with joy anew.
“I don’t know how I did this, but then I remember that I was in a hospital room looking at my husband holding my hand and talking to me. Only I wasn’t seeing from the vantage point through my own eyes. I recognized that was my body, but I was outside of it, looking at my body. As I viewed this scene I felt a strong desire that I wanted to return to this Earth and live more life with my husband, if I could communicate with him and help him. I was understood and the desires of my heart were heard.
“The next thing I remember was being trapped in my body while others cared for my physical needs. I can remember that I could tell what the nurses were thinking about me by how they touched me. I knew if they thought I was going to live or not through their touch. I knew if they thought they were caring for a basically dead person whose spirit wasn’t there. I remember trying to scream out, ‘Look! I’m alive! I’m in here! I’m going to live!’ I relaxed and trusted that person much more if I knew that they knew they were caring for a living person. I obviously could read their thoughts!
“While in my spirit body I remember communicating telepathically, this is how I and Jesus communicated in that heavenly garden. It was so easy, it required no effort, you thought the thoughts and they were communicated. Speaking through my physical mouth is so difficult, and frustrating, and sometimes you’re misunderstood, and they get the wrong meaning of what you’re trying to say. The phrase that the world uses of being soul mates is referring to the communication between two souls, spirit to spirit communication.
“To communicate on a spiritual level is very profound. I believe I’ve had this spiritual gift ever since my near-death experience, and it has profoundly blessed my life as I use it. I feel this great need to communicate on a spiritual level with others, and one of the only ways I’m able to communicate in this way is through writing. I have to prepare myself mentally to be able communicate on a spiritual level. You have the time to do this as you are writing in your home, without distractions. We are what we think. I find trivial thoughts distracting, I rarely watch TV and then only if it stimulates good thoughts. I listen to different music now, and gravitate towards the ethereal.
“My near-death experience has changed me. I desire righteousness and I abhor evil. I’m actually quite thankful for my accident, even though it has changed my physical abilities adversely, at the same time my spiritual abilities have blossomed enormously. Ever since I woke up from my coma I’ve had an attitude of peaceful hopefulness. I believe the reason why I still live, one of the reasons I came back to this Earth to live is because I’m supposed to testify that the spirit world is real and beautiful, and that Jesus is who he says he is, he is our brother, and we knew him well as a friendly brother in the spirit world. This knowledge, this belief, affects every facet of my life, and my desire to communicate this to others is why I am here on Earth now relating this experience to all who will listen.”
Watch a YouTube video podcast with Derry Bresee:
3. A Veridical NDE Triggered By Coma in the Lancet
The following veridical NDE testimony was published in a study in the Lancet, a British medical journal. It’s the latest in a long series of efforts to document the existence of NDEs, something that for the most part has remained in the realm of the paranormal.
A man who had collapsed in a meadow was brought to a hospital, unconscious and with no pulse or brain activity. Doctors began artificial respiration, heart massage and defibrillation.
A nurse trying to feed a tube down his throat saw that he wore dentures and removed them. The patient was moved to the intensive care unit.
A week later, the nurse saw the man again. He immediately recognized the nurse as the person who had removed his dentures and also remembered other details of what had happened while he was in a deep coma. He said he had perceived the events from above the hospital bed and watched doctors’ efforts to save his life.
Researchers say this evidence supports the validity of NDEs and suggests scientists should rethink theories on one of the ultimate medical mysteries: the nature of human consciousness.
Most neuroscientists believe consciousness is a byproduct of the physical brain, that mind arises from matter. But if NDEs are really what those who experience them say they are, does this mean people can be conscious of events around them even when they’re physically unconscious, when their brains show no signs of electrical activity? Apparently so.
“Brain chemistry does not explain these phenomena,” Dr. Bruce Greyson said. “I don’t know what the explanation is, but our current understanding of brain chemistry falls short.”
4. A Veridical NDE Triggered By Coma From Dr. Eben Alexander
For over twenty-five years, Eben Alexander III, M.D., FACS, has practiced as a neurosurgeon. In 2008, Dr. Alexander had an NDE due to bacterial meningitis from E. coli which changed his understanding of NDEs and consciousness in general. After spending a week in a deep coma, effectively brain dead without a functioning brain, his survival rate was put well below 10 percent with the understanding that, if he did somehow survive, he would spend the rest of his life in a nursing home. But Dr. Alexander made a miraculous recovery and described an incredibly profound NDE from when the neocortex of his brain was completely shut off.
Dr. Alexander’s NDE is quite remarkable; especially because his NDE includes a veridical perception of his birth sister Betsy, who died before he discovered his birth family existed. After his NDE he received a photo of her and realized Betsy was the guardian angel who guided him through heaven.
The following is a description of Dr. Eben Alexander’s NDE testimony from a Newsweek article entitled: Proof of Heaven: A Doctor’s Experience With the Afterlife.
Dr. Alexander found himself in a place where the boundaries between the senses had dissolved. Sight and sound were no longer separate; they flowed together in a seamless unity. He could hear the shimmering beauty of luminous beings above him, and at the same time, he could see the music they created – waves of joy and perfection unfolding in radiant form. Nothing in this realm could be observed from a distance. To perceive something was to become part of it. The very idea of looking at something no longer made sense, because separation itself did not exist. Everything was distinct, yet everything was intertwined – like the intricate patterns of a Persian carpet or the delicate symmetry of a butterfly’s wing.
And it was on a butterfly’s wing that his journey truly began.
Dr. Alexander was not alone. Beside him was a woman – young, with high cheekbones, deep blue eyes, and flowing golden-brown hair. She was vividly real, more real than anything he had ever known. They moved together across a vast, living landscape of color and motion, carried along on what he gradually realized was the wing of a butterfly. Around them stretched an endless river of butterflies, millions upon millions, rising and falling like waves through the air, dipping into forests and sweeping back upward in a living current of light and life.
The woman wore simple clothing, like that of a peasant, but its colors – soft blues, indigo, and warm orange-peach – glowed with an intensity that surpassed anything he had ever seen on Earth. When she looked at him, her gaze carried something beyond ordinary human emotion. It was not romantic love, nor friendship, nor any familiar category. It was something higher – an all-encompassing love that contained every form of love within it, yet exceeded them all.
Without speaking, she communicated directly with him. Her message flowed through him like a gentle but undeniable wind, and he understood it instantly, with absolute certainty.
“You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever. You have nothing to fear. There is nothing you can do wrong.”
The words – or rather, the meaning behind them – filled him with overwhelming relief. It was as though he had finally been given the rules to a game he had been playing his entire life without ever fully understanding.
She conveyed another truth just as clearly: they would show him many things here, but eventually, he would have to return.
Return? The question arose within him without words. Back where?
Before he could fully grasp the answer, a warm, divine wind swept through the landscape. It felt like the perfect summer breeze, alive and conscious, moving through him and around him. As it passed, everything shifted – vibrating at a higher frequency, as though the entire world had risen into a new octave of existence.
He began to ask questions, not with language, but with pure intention: Where am I? Who am I? Why am I here?
Each question was answered instantly – not with words, but with immense bursts of light, color, and love that surged through him like waves. These responses did not silence his questions; they fulfilled them completely. The knowledge they carried was immediate and undeniable, entering him directly. It was unlike thought as he had known it on Earth. These insights were solid, tangible – more real than physical matter – and they conveyed truths that would have taken years, perhaps lifetimes, to understand in ordinary consciousness.
Then the journey shifted again.
He moved forward into what seemed at first to be a vast, infinite void – completely dark, utterly black. Yet the darkness was not empty or frightening. It was rich, full, and deeply comforting. Paradoxically, it was also filled with light – a hidden brilliance that emanated from a radiant orb nearby.
This orb felt alive, conscious, and intimately connected to him. It acted as a bridge between himself and the immense presence surrounding him. He sensed that it was somehow the same being as the woman who had guided him before, now appearing in a different form. Through it, he felt himself being welcomed into something far greater – a cosmic reality that seemed like a vast womb, nurturing and infinite.
Later, he would find words that came close to describing this place: a “dazzling darkness,” a blackness that was not the absence of light, but its deepest expression.
The experience was so extraordinary that, had he heard it from someone else in his former life, he would have dismissed it as delusion. Yet what he encountered felt more real than anything he had ever known – more real than his wedding day, more real than the birth of his children.
It demanded explanation.
As a neurosurgeon, Dr. Alexander had spent decades immersed in the scientific worldview that consciousness arises solely from the brain. But now that belief had been shattered. What he had experienced revealed a universe not defined by separation, but by unity – a universe woven together at every level. And more than that, it was a universe grounded in love.
Before, such ideas had seemed abstract, philosophical. Now they were undeniable realities.
Dr. Alexander became convinced that consciousness does not originate in the brain, but instead uses the brain as a vehicle. The implications were profound. Everything he had been trained to believe about mind and reality would have to be reconsidered.
Returning to ordinary life, he found that many people – especially his colleagues in medicine – struggled to accept his account. Their polite skepticism made it clear how difficult it would be to communicate the depth of what he had experienced.
Yet in some places, he found unexpected resonance.
When he entered a church for the first time after his experience, he saw it differently. The stained-glass windows shimmered with the same luminous beauty he had witnessed beyond. The music of the organ echoed the living waves of emotion and thought he had felt. And a simple painting of Jesus breaking bread reminded him of the central truth of his journey: that human beings are loved – completely, unconditionally – by a divine presence far greater than he had ever imagined.
Dr. Alexander had once believed that science alone held the key to truth. Now he understood that this view was incomplete. A new understanding would emerge – one that embraced both scientific inquiry and spiritual insight, united by a shared commitment to truth.
He knew this transformation would take time – far beyond his own lifetime. Reality was too vast, too complex, to ever be fully captured. But the direction was clear: toward a vision of the universe as multi-dimensional, evolving, and intimately known by a loving intelligence that cared for every being within it.
He remained a man of science. But he was no longer the same man.
Dr. Alexander had seen something profound – something that reshaped his understanding of existence itself. And he was certain of one thing: the journey to uncover the true nature of reality, however long and difficult, would be worth every step.
5. Conclusion
When we look at NDEs that happen during a coma, a clear pattern starts to show. This pattern challenges what we usually think about consciousness, how the brain works, and even what it means to be alive. Stories like the powerful, life-changing experience of Derry Bresee, the accurate observations reported in a study from The Lancet, and the well-known case of Dr. Eben Alexander all point to something that can’t be explained easily by simple brain activity. Researchers like Dr. Bruce Greyson state that current ideas about brain chemistry don’t fully explain what’s going on.
What makes these coma-related NDEs so interesting is the strange situation they show. People report clear awareness, organized thoughts, and meaningful experiences at times when their brains are badly damaged or not showing any activity at all. This raises an important question. Could consciousness exist without normal brain function?
Scientists are still studying these experiences. But the stories in this article suggest something bigger. Human consciousness might be stronger, wider, and more mysterious than we once thought. Whether you look at it from a brain science, psychology, or spiritual view, these coma-related NDEs push us to rethink what it really means to be conscious – and maybe even what it means to be alive.
