What People Report Seeing: A Content Analysis of 135 Near-Death Experience Conversations

This preprint is a content analysis of 135 of the 138 numbered episodes of the Divine Encounters series published by Next Level Soul, a series of long-form conversations with people who report near-death experiences. Each episode was coded against a published codebook for circumstances (surgery, cardiac events, illness, accidents and others) and for recurring reported features such as out-of-body perception, light, love, life review, and a sense of knowing. The paper reports how often each feature is described, with confidence intervals, how features co-occur, and how accounts differ by circumstance. A narrative section describes recurring themes in the participants' own words, and the discussion sets out limitations: episodes were coded from editorial summaries by a single coder, the sample reflects who agreed to be interviewed, and the statistical tests are exploratory. Guests are cited by episode number and a full coded table is included in Appendix B so the analysis can be checked. The conversations are available at nextlevelsoul.com/divine-encounters/ and nextlevelsoul.com/category/nde/. Competing interests: the author is the founder and host of Next Level Soul.