Van Lommel interviewed hundreds of heart patients at his hospital who had all clinically died, some for five minutes or longer, before being resuscitated. Of these, a significant percent reported an ongoing experience after the medical monitors had pronounced them to be dead. Half were aware they were "dead," and some had out-of-body experiences in which they witnessed the actions of the hospital staff around their bodies. The startling results of this study have created a worldwide sensation and serve as the basis for this book. Book jacket.

Pim Van Lommel is a world-renowned cardiologist and medical expert on near-death experiences. For more than twenty-five years he worked as a cardiologist at an eight-hundred-bed teaching hospital in the Netherlands where he began studying near-death experiences in patients who survived a cardiac arrest. In addition to his sensational study published in the distinguished British medical journal The Lancet, van Lommel has authored chapters in several books about near-death experiences and also published many articles about the subject. Over the past several years, van Lommel has been lecturing all over the world on near-death experiences and the relationship between consciousness and brain function. In 2005, he was granted the Bruce Greyson Research Award on behalf of the International Association of Near-Death Studies. In 2006, the president of India awarded him the lifetime achievement award at the World Congress on Clinical and Preventive Cardiology in New Delhi. Visit the author online at www.pimvanlommel.nl.