DMT and near-death experiences: the same outline, with different contents

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People who come close to death sometimes describe leaving their body, a tunnel, bright light, meeting beings and a border they could not cross. People who take DMT sometimes describe something similar. That overlap has fed one of the best-known claims about DMT: that it is what the brain produces at death. This article looks at the narrower, testable question. How alike are the two experiences, measured carefully? What do recordings of dying brains show? And what happened when researchers hid targets that only someone outside their body could see?

Whether the brain actually releases DMT when you die is a separate question, with its own rat studies and fact-checks. We cover it in does the brain release DMT when you die? and do not repeat it here.

What counts as a near-death experience?

A near-death experience (NDE) is an unusual state of consciousness reported by some people who were, or believed they were, close to death. A large 2019 study lists its typical features as the perception of leaving the body, feelings of peace, bliss and timelessness, a life review, the sensation of travelling through a tunnel and an irreversible threshold. These reports are broadly comparable across cultures (Martial et al., 2019). That NDEs are reported is well documented; what causes them is not. Evidence: established.

Researchers usually measure NDEs with the Greyson Near-Death Experience Scale, a 16-item questionnaire with cognitive, affective, “transcendental” and “paranormal” subscales; a total of 7 or more is the conventional threshold for an NDE (Timmermann et al., 2018). Because it is a questionnaire, it records whether broad features are present, not what exactly was seen or felt.

DMT on a near-death questionnaire: the 2018 study

At Imperial College London, 13 healthy volunteers received placebo in one session and intravenous DMT in a later one, then completed the Greyson scale. All 13 scored at or above the threshold after DMT, and their scores were compared with 13 age- and sex-matched people who had reported an actual NDE (Timmermann et al., 2018). Three details from the paper matter for the comparison:

• One participant scored exactly 7, the threshold, after placebo. A questionnaire threshold can be reached without any drug.
• The item that differed most was “Did you come to a border or point of no return?”: near-death survivors averaged 1.00 out of 2, the DMT group 0.23. This difference was significant only before correction for multiple comparisons.
• On “Did you see deceased or religious spirits?”, survivors averaged 0.92 and the DMT group 0.46.

Higher NDE scores went with stronger ego dissolution and mystical-type ratings, and with two traits measured beforehand, absorption and delusional ideation (Timmermann et al., 2018). The authors list the limits themselves: placebo always came first, the near-death group had to pass the threshold to be included while the DMT group did not, and the samples were small. Evidence: preliminary.

Same outline, different contents: the 2025 interview comparison

A questionnaire asks whether a feature was there. A 2025 study asked what was actually there. Researchers coded 36 interviews from a field study of people using DMT at home and compared them, theme by theme, with 34 written near-death narratives (Michael et al., 2025). The broad outline matched: 95% of DMT participants reported at least one “canonical NDE theme”, such as a bright light, a sense of dying, a void, leaving the body, tunnel-like structures or beings of light. The contents did not:

Several classic NDE features, including light at the end of the tunnel, out-of-body experiences in the classic sense and dramatised returns to life, were entirely absent from the DMT accounts, while life reviews and deceased people were almost absent. DMT accounts had many features of their own, including fantastical other worlds and beings that were neither human nor animal, and no recognisable sequence of stages. The authors call DMT “NDE-mimetic”: it shares a basic structure with NDEs but differs in content (Michael et al., 2025). The participants were experienced users and the near-death narratives were written, not interviewed, so the two sets are not perfectly comparable. Evidence: preliminary.

Which drug reports read most like near-death experiences?

If DMT were the near-death molecule, its reports might be expected to read most like NDEs. A 2019 study tested this with language analysis, measuring the semantic similarity between about 15,000 drug-experience reports covering 165 substances and 625 NDE narratives. Ketamine, an anaesthetic that blocks NMDA receptors, came out most similar, followed by salvia and then a series of serotonergic psychedelics including DMT (Martial et al., 2019). The authors suggest ketamine as a reversible experimental model of NDE phenomenology. Evidence: preliminary; self-selected online reports.

A 2024 online survey of 31 people who had had both an NDE and a psychedelic experience found the two overlapped in mystical-type features but differed in sensory ones: NDEs scored higher for disembodiment and psychedelic experiences higher for visual imagery. That survey covered several psychedelics, not DMT alone (Martial et al., 2024). Evidence: preliminary.

What happens in a dying brain? The gamma surge debate

In 2013, a University of Michigan team recorded brain activity in rats during experimentally induced cardiac arrest. Within the first 30 seconds they found a brief, global surge of synchronised gamma (fast) oscillations before the recording went flat, with activity levels exceeding those of the waking state (Borjigin et al., 2013). Evidence: preliminary, in rats.

In 2023, the same group analysed recordings from four comatose patients as ventilator support was withdrawn. Two of the four showed a rapid surge of gamma power and of connectivity, including in a posterior “hot zone” proposed as important for conscious experience (Xu et al., 2023). The authors are explicit that this activity is suggestive of conscious processing but “does not demonstrate it”, that they cannot know what, if anything, the patients experienced, and that the surge may be a sign of a dying process unrelated to consciousness. They judged muscle contamination of the recordings unlikely. Evidence: preliminary, from two patients.

Not everyone accepts the signal as it stands. A 2024 critical review argues that gamma recorded at the scalp is easily contaminated by muscle activity, and that the perimortem surge, while genuine activity, may arise deep in the brain, in the amygdala, and reach the cortex by volume conduction, mimicking cortical gamma. Its author concludes there is little evidence the surge could underlie NDEs (Shaw, 2024). This is a single-author review published on an open peer-review platform. Neither recording study measured DMT. Evidence: unresolved.

The hidden-target test: what AWARE-II found

Some NDE accounts describe seeing the room from above. AWARE-II tested whether such perception could be verified. Across 25 hospitals, researchers built independent audiovisual tests of awareness into resuscitation, using a computer and headphones, alongside brain monitoring. Of 567 in-hospital cardiac arrests, 53 people survived and 28 completed interviews. Eleven of those 28 reported memories or perceptions suggestive of consciousness, and 6 described a transcendent “recalled experience of death” (Parnia et al., 2023).

The result for the hidden test was stated plainly in the paper’s abstract: nobody identified the visual image, and 1 of 28 identified the auditory stimulus. Low survival limited what the study could test (Parnia et al., 2023). This is a null result from a small number of survivors, not proof that out-of-body perception never happens, and it says nothing directly about DMT. It does show that the claim can be tested with targets, and that so far the targets were not found. Evidence: preliminary.

Why do near-death memories feel so real?

People often describe near-death memories as unusually vivid. A 2013 memory study compared eight coma survivors’ NDE memories with their memories of real and imagined events, using a standard memory-characteristics questionnaire. The NDE memories carried more characteristics than memories of real events, including more self-referential and emotional detail (Thonnard et al., 2013). Vivid memory shows how intense and salient an experience was; it does not show that its contents were accurate. Evidence: preliminary, from eight people. The same question for DMT is covered in why DMT can feel more real than reality.

Common claims, rated

On the last row, a 2018 review argues that the tiny amounts of DMT detected in the brain are not enough to produce psychoactive effects and offers explanations of how stress and nearness to death can alter consciousness without DMT (Nichols, 2018). Similar experiences can have different causes. Evidence: unresolved.

What we still don’t know

• Whether the shared outline reflects a shared brain mechanism, or simply that any overwhelming, body-dissolving experience gets described in similar words (unresolved).
• Why deceased relatives and being sent back are common in NDEs but rare or absent with DMT; context, expectation and real danger are all candidate explanations (unresolved).
• Whether the perimortem gamma surge is cortical, subcortical or partly artefact, and whether anyone experiences it (unresolved).
• Whether hidden-target studies with more survivors would change the AWARE-II result (unresolved).
• Whether DMT plays any role in the human dying brain; it has never been measured there (unresolved).

The fair summary: DMT can produce experiences with the outline of a near-death experience, and that makes it a useful laboratory model for some of its features. But the contents differ in ways that matter, other drugs match NDE language as well or better, and nothing measured so far links DMT to the dying brain. For more, read what is DMT, DMT entity encounters and DMT time dilation.

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