I once made a short video that opens with fifteen seconds of moving images made by AI: an hourglass, a candle, curtains. Then someone appears on screen and says it plainly. What you just saw wasn't real. But the feeling inside you is.
What almost dying did to 344 people
Can imagining your own death actually change how you live?
It can change how you feel about your life within minutes, even when you know the scene is made up. That part has been measured. Whether it changes how you live is harder to show. The study below followed people who had really come close to dying, over many years. For them, the change itself took years.
That study began in 1988, in ten hospitals in the Netherlands. Pim van Lommel, a Dutch cardiologist at Rijnstate hospital in Arnhem, and three colleagues followed people whose heart had stopped and who had been brought back by a medical team. Without that team, every one of them would have died. In the end, 344 patients took part.
Within a few days of being revived, each of them was asked one question: do you remember anything from the time you were unconscious? Of the 344, 282 remembered nothing. The other 62 did. Some had watched themselves from outside their own body, moved through a tunnel, seen a light, met relatives who had died, or seen their life pass before their eyes.
What changed in the people who remembered something?
Two years later, and again after eight, the researchers recorded long interviews with them, and with a comparable group whose hearts had also stopped but who remembered nothing. Only the first group showed the change van Lommel describes. They were less afraid of death and more interested in what their life was for. That change took several years.
How close they had come did not determine it. Whether someone remembered anything had nothing to do with how long their heart had been stopped.
Van Lommel's conclusion is that what they went through while their hearts were stopped is what changed them.
What the video says out loud
Back to that video. It came with notes for the video editor, and they spell out the order.
First come the fifteen seconds of AI images, cinematic and still. Under them, only the sound of a room: soft ticking, a candle flickering. No voice and no text on screen. Then the picture fades to the speaker, who says: what you just saw wasn't real. But the feeling inside you is.
The notes end with a line for the editor: this video isn't trying to sell, convince or explain.
Why say out loud that the images are fake?
Because pretending turns the video into a trick, and a trick is something you watch from the outside. Once you know a machine made that image of an hourglass, there is nothing left to judge in the image. What remains is your own reaction to it, and nobody else made that part.
A made-up scene and a real feeling. That is the claim, and you can test it.
A fire on the twentieth floor
What did the students in the fire study actually do?
They imagined their own death on paper. In 2011, four American psychologists published a study with 113 students at Eastern Washington University, a public university in the state of Washington. Araceli Frias and Philip Watkins, both of that university, led it. Each student sat alone with a researcher and was handed a booklet.
One group read a scene and was asked to imagine it as vividly as they could, as if it were really happening. You wake up in the middle of the night in a friend's apartment on the 20th floor of an old building downtown. You hear screams and smell choking smoke. You try to get out of the room and the building, and you can't. In the end you give in to the fire, and you die.
Then they had three minutes for four questions on paper. What did you think and feel while you imagined this? How would you handle the final moments? What kind of life had you led up to that point? How would your family react?
A second group only had to describe their thoughts and feelings about their own death. A third group imagined an ordinary day: breakfast, laundry, cleaning up.
What did imagining the fire do?
It made the students more grateful. Before and after, everyone rated how grateful, thankful and appreciative they felt. In the fire group, those scores went up. In the ordinary-day group, they did not. The group that only wrote about death ended up in between.
One detail makes this study matter for the question here. The fire was not picked at random. The scene comes from Philip Cozzolino, an American psychologist, and his colleagues, who designed it for a study published in 2004. They built it to contain the core of what people describe after almost dying.
Almost dying, on paper, then, for students who knew the whole time that nothing was burning.
Did the students stay more grateful?
Nobody checked. The questions came a few minutes after the fire, in the same session, and then the study was over. In their paper, the researchers write: "It seems likely that our participants' confrontation with their own death was soon forgotten."
They leave open whether it would last if people did this more often. That needs more research, they write.
Three minutes and a pen
How can I try this myself?
Use the four questions the students got. Picture one specific night that turns out to be your last, somewhere you know. Then take three minutes and write down what you thought and felt, how you would handle the final moments, what kind of life you had led up to then and how your family would react. Last Hour Experience is a cinematic, guided audio experience of about an hour in which you live through your own final hour and then reflect; this exercise asks for three minutes and a pen.
Do I have to picture a fire?
No. Pick a scene that is concrete and your own. In the study, gratitude rose most in the students who went through a scene. The researchers explain it like this: when you write about death in general, you can keep it abstract, at a safe distance. In a scene, you go through it yourself.
What do I do with the paper afterward?
Keep it somewhere you will see it, and read it again a week later. The students were never asked a second time, and their own researchers guessed they soon forgot. Rereading your answers is the step the study left out, and that step is yours.
None of it happens
I built Last Hour Experience on the same principle as that video: a made-up scene and a real feeling. You sit at home with headphones on and live through your own final hour, and none of it happens. The hour at home grew out of a six-hour seminar in South Korea that simulated your last day. At the end of it, I lay in a real coffin with the lid closed, and I climbed back out of it. What you notice about your own life during that hour is yours, and so is what you do with it the next morning.
Questions people ask. One of them is me.
Is imagining your death the same as almost dying?
No. In the Dutch study, 62 of the 344 people whose hearts had stopped remembered something, and the change in them took years. The students imagined a fire for a few minutes and answered questions right after. The scene was built from what people describe after almost dying. The study with the students did not test whether the scene has the same effect.
Isn't it morbid to imagine your own death?
It can sound that way. In a 2011 study at Eastern Washington University, students who imagined dying in a fire came out more grateful, and their overall good mood barely changed. What rose was gratitude, which is close to the opposite of morbid.
How often should I imagine my own death?
The research does not say. The researchers asked themselves the same question and left it open: could people hold on to that gratitude if they did an exercise like this regularly? Once is a start. Rereading what you wrote, a week later, costs very little.
When should I leave this exercise alone?
When death is already close: fresh grief, a serious diagnosis, or thoughts of ending your own life. Then this is not an exercise. Talk to someone you trust, or to your doctor. In the United States you can call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, at any hour.
Sources
Near-death experience in survivors of cardiac arrest, the Dutch study by cardiologist Pim van Lommel (cardiac arrest is the medical term for a heart that stops) and three colleagues, published in 2001 in The Lancet, a British medical journal. The 344 patients in ten hospitals, the 62 who remembered something, the comparison after two and eight years, the change that took several years and the finding that it did not depend on how long the heart had been stopped all come from there.
Near-Death Experiences during cardiac arrest, an essay from 2021 in which van Lommel describes the same study himself, on the website of the Essentia Foundation, a nonprofit that publishes essays about consciousness. The start in 1988, the question asked within a few days, the 282 who remembered nothing, what people described and what changed in them come from there.
Death and gratitude: Death reflection enhances gratitude, the 2011 study by Araceli Frias, Philip Watkins, Amy Webber and Jeffrey Froh, psychologists at Eastern Washington University and at Hofstra University in New York, published in The Journal of Positive Psychology, a journal for research on what makes a life go well. The 113 students, the fire on the twentieth floor, the four questions, the three minutes, the three groups, the results and the line about forgetting all come from there. The same study names Philip Cozzolino and his colleagues, in 2004, as the makers of the fire scene.
The video and the notes for the editor are from my own archive. I made the video for Vita Florentis, my company. The seminar in South Korea is described on About the Founder, a page on this website.