Children experience subtle but lasting inner shifts after their return from a near-death experience, something that sets them apart from other children. Many children change profoundly in their perception, their behavior, and their relationship to life and death. They speak with calm certainty that death is not an end but a homecoming. It is a reunion, a return to a place already known.
Children in our book, Where the Light Begins, describe a place we tend to forget amid the noise and haste of everyday life in this world. Tiago describes it as: “I was with everything that lives.” Or in Adelina’s words: “It’s always there. But we forget. Until it welcomes us again.”
Besides having a different perspective on death, children who return from the threshold of death also have a different view on life. Many children appear unusually calm and quiet after the experience, emotionally older, or more attuned to their inner perception. The silence is experienced as meaningful. They listen more attentively and respond with greater clarity.
And these children know that everything is connected. Animals and nature, along with greater compassion and heightened sensitivity to the suffering of others, often take on greater importance. As a result, they often perceive the inner emotional states of other people that others tend to overlook. Noémi describes it with these words: “I don’t listen with my ears. I listen with the part that knows when someone is sad.”
What children bring back is a deep inner knowing that our ordinary reality is only a surface layer. They know the true place of our origin that feels more real than our everyday life. This place from which we come belongs not only to human beings, but also to animals. Like Emil explains it: “They’ve seen that place too, the one where everything breathes together.”
A doorway to that place might also reopen within our everyday life, but only in silence: “I think silence isn’t a lack. It’s a beginning,” as Noémi says.
Another deep inner knowing they gain is that nothing is lost, everything matters. Anna puts it this way: “I know now that nothing is lost. Not a smile. Not fear. Not love. Everything continues. Even when we can’t see it anymore.”
And children know a presence that cannot be named. The presence is always there. It knows us and in extreme situations, such as near-death experiences, we also come to know this presence.
This presence could be understood as an all-encompassing, tangible field of resonance. A deep connection between humans, animals, nature, and consciousness that connects all life through an invisible thread. In this view, the presence would not be “someone,” but rather the sustaining network behind everything.
What children experience as the true place of our origin might be a form of consciousness independent of the brain that allows life to continue on another frequency. Thus, maybe what children return with is a remembrance of what we once knew before the world taught us to forget. Their stories invite us to listen more carefully to silence, to connection, and to the possibility that consciousness extends far beyond the limits we usually assign to it and continues in ways we are only beginning to understand.
Read true stories of children’s near-death experiences and how they responded to them in our book Where the Light Begins: Stories of Near-Death Experiences and After-Death Communications by Children and How They Experience Them Differently Than Adults.
Ralph and Daniela Klose are German authors and long-term collaborative partners in the fields of neuroscience, psychology, and consciousness research. Their book Where the Light Begins explores near-death experiences in children.
Ralph is a retired neuropsychologist with over three decades of clinical and academic experience, and Daniela is a medical writer and translator specializing in neuropsychology and transpersonal psychology. For many years, they worked as ghostwriters for researchers across Europe. They now write under their own names, connecting scientific expertise with years of hospice and end-of-life care experience to explore near-death-experiences and liminal states of consciousness. https://drklose.com
