Jeremy Renner and the Science of Extraordinary Near-Death Experiences

A little over two years ago, the actor Jeremy Renner was run over by a seven-ton snowplow. In a new memoir, he wrote that as he lay near death, he experienced something extraordinary.

He could see his entire life at once, and felt an “exhilarating peace” and a connection to the world. He also saw family and friends arrayed before him, telling him not to let go.

“What I felt was energy, a constantly connected, beautiful and fantastic energy,” Mr. Renner wrote. “There was no time, place or space, and nothing to see, except a kind of electric, two-way vision made from strands of that inconceivable energy, like the whipping lines of cars’ taillights photographed by a time-lapse camera.”

What Mr. Renner described is “classic for near-death experiences,” the term researchers use for such events, said Dr. Jeffrey Long, the founder of the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation.

Dr. Long’s foundation has collected more than 4,000 accounts similar to Mr. Renner’s. Some people who have come close to death have recounted a sense of energy, peace and absence of time, as Mr. Renner did. Some have also described watching their body from above, moving through a tunnel toward a light and even meeting God.

The general public may be familiar with these events through a genre of memoirs that present near-death experiences as proof of a Christian afterlife. But they have been reported across countries, demographics and religions, as well as by atheists, and have been a subject of scientific research for decades.