People nearing the end of their lives have described some extraordinary experiences, including seeing relatives who died decades earlier, encountering unfamiliar landscapes, and travelling through strange spaces filled with light. Some even report seeing people waiting for them, leaving caregivers with accounts that are difficult to explain. Now, researchers investigating these experiences have uncovered recurring details that are attracting fresh scientific attention.
Two separate studies published in 2026 have examined what people experience as they approach death and during near-death experiences. One gathered accounts from 239 hospice volunteers and palliative care professionals, while another asked 50 people to reconstruct the unusual environments they remembered encountering near death. Their findings revealed patterns involving familiar faces, unusual shapes, and unexpected relationships between geometry and color. Scientists still cannot explain exactly why these experiences happen, but the findings offer a fascinating look at the final stages of human life.
Hospice Workers Have Reported Extraordinary Visions Before Death
Researchers in Italy investigated end-of-life dreams and visions by surveying 239 hospice volunteers and palliative care professionals. The study, published in Death Studies in March 2026, examined experiences patients had described while receiving end-of-life care. These included dreams that felt unusually realistic and visions people reported experiencing while fully awake. The researchers wanted to understand how frequently caregivers encountered these accounts and how they interpreted them during their work with dying patients.
Some of the descriptions were unusual enough to stand out. One patient reportedly described seeing a white horse galloping along a beach, while others spoke about staircases and open doorways. Many accounts involved people the patients had known during their lives, particularly relatives and friends who had already died. One woman reportedly dreamed about her late husband, who told her, “I’m waiting for you.” Such accounts often involved familiar people appearing in circumstances that patients described as vivid and emotionally significant.
The experiences were frequently comforting, particularly when patients described seeing someone they had deeply missed. For people approaching the end of their lives, dreams involving deceased relatives could bring a sense of reassurance during an uncertain period. However, the researchers also encountered accounts involving painful memories and relationships that had never been resolved. This suggests that end-of-life dreams and visions can carry complicated emotions, depending on the people and experiences appearing in them.
The Italian research relied on caregivers remembering and reporting what patients had shared with them. It therefore cannot establish precisely how many dying patients experience these visions or independently confirm every account. Nevertheless, the findings revealed how frequently such experiences enter conversations in hospice settings. They also raised questions about how healthcare professionals should respond when patients describe seeing deceased loved ones or unfamiliar places.
Scientists Asked 50 People To Draw Their Near-Death Experiences
A separate research project approached near-death experiences from an unusual direction. Researchers wanted to understand the spaces people remembered encountering during these events, including the familiar tunnels and bright environments frequently described in personal accounts. Instead of relying entirely on written descriptions, the team asked participants to reconstruct their experiences visually. The research was published in Frontiers in Psychology in 2026 and involved 50 people who reported having experienced near-death events.
The researchers used guided online sessions and a collection of geometric illustrations to help participants represent the environments they remembered. Participants divided their experiences into different stages and selected shapes that resembled the spaces they recalled encountering. They also indicated where they believed they were positioned, how they moved through the environments, and which colors they remembered seeing. Researchers then compared the resulting drawings to identify similarities across the accounts.
Four broad categories of spaces emerged from the analysis. Some participants described conical environments resembling tunnels that appeared to extend toward a distant point. Others remembered broad, curved spaces resembling archways, while another group described flatter environments with gently curved boundaries. The fourth category involved spaces that seemed to surround the observer completely, resembling the interior of a sphere or oval.
The researchers found that these configurations appeared repeatedly across the drawings, despite participants having highly personal experiences. The study offered a different way to examine something that traditional questionnaires can struggle to capture. People may find it difficult to describe unusual environments through ordinary language, particularly when the memories involve movement, light, and unfamiliar spatial sensations. Drawing those experiences gave researchers additional information to compare.
The Color Patterns Revealed Something Particularly Unusual
The most striking finding involved the relationship between the shapes participants remembered and the colors associated with those environments. Of the 28 conical spaces reconstructed during the study, 22 were achromatic. This means participants remembered them using black, white, gray, or light without recognizable colors. The result suggested a strong association between tunnel-like environments and colorless visual experiences.
The broad, curved spaces produced a noticeably different pattern. Of the 31 environments belonging to this category, 27 were described as containing color. The difference was particularly interesting because these spaces appeared much more expansive than the tunnel-like environments. Researchers also found a mixture of colorful and colorless descriptions among the other geometric categories, suggesting that the relationship was strongest between the two main groups.
The numbers offer a closer look at the contrast:
- Conical spaces: 22 of 28 were described as achromatic.
- Broad, curved spaces: 27 of 31 were described as containing color.
- Other geometric spaces: These showed a mixture of colorful and colorless descriptions.
These findings do not mean everyone approaching death experiences a tunnel or sees a particular color. The participants were describing memories of near-death experiences, and their accounts varied considerably. However, the recurring relationship between geometry and color gave researchers a measurable pattern to investigate. It also suggested that visual details could provide information that ordinary interviews might overlook.
Scientists Have Identified Possible Neurological Connections
The researchers considered whether some of the visual patterns might resemble processes already documented in human perception. One possible comparison involves tunnel vision, which can occur when the supply of oxygen to the retina or brain becomes disrupted. Under certain circumstances, a person’s visual field becomes restricted, creating the sensation of seeing through a narrow opening. This provides a possible neurological connection to some descriptions of tunnel-like environments during near-death experiences.
Another possible explanation involves how human vision responds to darkness. The eyes use different light-sensitive cells to process information under different lighting conditions. Cones are responsible for color vision and function best in brighter environments, while rods help people see in dim conditions but provide little information about color. When illumination becomes limited, the world can appear increasingly gray or colorless.
The researchers also considered similarities with the Ganzfeld effect, a phenomenon associated with exposure to an unchanging and uniform visual field. Under certain conditions, this can produce unusual perceptual experiences, including patterns and hallucination-like imagery. Some expansive environments described by near-death experiencers share visual characteristics with these experiences. However, these comparisons are possibilities for further investigation rather than explanations established by the study.
There is an important distinction between identifying similarities and proving a cause. The researchers did not monitor participants’ brains during their original experiences, nor did they establish that oxygen deprivation or unusual visual processing produced the remembered environments. Their investigation focused on documenting and comparing the geometry of reported experiences. The neurological explanations remain possible avenues for future research.
An Earlier Hospice Study Found That Deceased Loved Ones Were Common
The 2026 findings also connect with earlier research examining what patients experience during the final stages of life. In a 2014 study published in the Journal of Palliative Medicine, Christopher Kerr and his colleagues interviewed hospice patients about their dreams and visions. The researchers initially enrolled 66 patients, with 59 included in the final analysis. Most participants reported experiencing at least one dream or vision during their time receiving hospice care.
Nearly all the patients described their experiences as feeling real. Some occurred during sleep, while others involved visions experienced when patients were awake. The most frequently reported subjects included deceased friends and relatives, followed by people who were still alive. Researchers also examined how these experiences affected patients emotionally, finding that encounters involving deceased loved ones were particularly comforting.
An especially interesting finding concerned how these experiences changed as death approached. Comforting dreams and visions involving deceased relatives, friends, and even animals became more prevalent among participants nearing the end of life. The research suggested that these experiences could provide meaningful emotional support during an extremely difficult period. For some patients, seeing someone they had lost appeared to bring reassurance when facing their own mortality.
The study was important because researchers spoke directly with patients rather than relying solely on accounts from relatives or healthcare workers. It provided a closer look at how people interpreted their experiences and the emotional significance they attached to them. Although the research could not establish why these encounters happened, it demonstrated that end-of-life dreams and visions deserved serious attention from healthcare professionals.
There Are Still Major Questions About What Causes These Experiences
Despite the unusual similarities across the studies, researchers face several challenges when investigating experiences connected to death. Near-death experiences are deeply personal, and scientists often have to rely on memories reconstructed after the original event. The passage of time can affect how people remember details, while the emotional intensity of an experience may influence how they describe it.
The 2026 geometry study also had a relatively small, self-selected group of participants. Researchers acknowledged that using a selection of geometric illustrations could have influenced how people reconstructed their memories. The guided sessions may also have introduced subtle biases. Furthermore, the study did not include a comparison group asked to reconstruct other unusual experiences, making it difficult to establish whether the patterns were unique to near-death experiences.
The hospice research faced a different limitation. The Italian survey collected information from caregivers and volunteers rather than directly interviewing every patient whose experiences were described. Meanwhile, medical conditions, medication, and delirium can affect perception and awareness near the end of life. These possibilities need to be considered when interpreting unusual visions, particularly when a patient experiences sudden changes in mental awareness.
There are several questions researchers still need to investigate:
- Why do deceased relatives appear so frequently? Researchers have documented these accounts, but the reasons behind them remain uncertain.
- Why do tunnel-like environments appear colorless? The relationship between visual geometry and color needs further investigation.
- How does the brain contribute? More research is needed to examine the neurological processes that may influence these experiences.
- Are the patterns consistent across cultures? Larger studies could establish whether people from different backgrounds report similar environments and encounters.
- Can these experiences improve hospice care? Understanding their emotional impact could help healthcare professionals respond more effectively to patients.
The findings do not establish that people communicate with deceased relatives or travel to another place after death. They also do not prove that consciousness survives the body’s final moments. What they demonstrate is that experiences reported near death contain recurring features that scientists can investigate through careful research.
What Patients Describe Could Change How Hospice Care Responds
One of the most practical findings across this research concerns how caregivers respond when patients describe unusual experiences. A person receiving end-of-life care might suddenly speak about seeing a deceased parent, meeting an old friend, or travelling through an unfamiliar environment. These accounts can be deeply personal, and the emotional response may be very different from one patient to another.
The Italian researchers found that listening, reassurance, and emotional support were central to how caregivers responded. Their findings also pointed to limited training and uncertainty among professionals when distinguishing end-of-life dreams and visions from possible medical symptoms. This creates a challenge for hospice teams, particularly when patients describe experiences that appear vivid but have no obvious explanation.
A compassionate response requires taking patients seriously while remaining attentive to their medical needs. An unusual experience should not automatically be dismissed as confusion, but sudden disorientation or changes in awareness may require clinical assessment. Healthcare professionals must consider the patient’s condition, medication, and other possible causes while allowing them to discuss experiences that may hold personal meaning.
For families, these conversations can also become significant parts of the final stages of a loved one’s life. Hearing someone describe a deceased relative or a familiar place may raise questions that have no straightforward answers. Caregivers can offer comfort by listening without insisting on a particular explanation. The research suggests that the emotional experience itself deserves attention, even when its underlying cause remains unknown.
The Mystery Of What Happens Near Death Remains Unanswered
Science has identified several recurring features in experiences reported near death, from encounters with deceased relatives to unusual environments with recognizable geometric patterns. The latest findings provide researchers with new ways to investigate those accounts, particularly by examining details that traditional interviews may overlook. Yet the studies leave fundamental questions about consciousness and death unanswered.
For someone approaching the end of life, an experience involving a parent, partner, or friend who died decades earlier may feel deeply real. Researchers can document these encounters and investigate their possible neurological connections, but they cannot yet explain why they happen. For now, one of the most important things caregivers can do is listen when patients describe what they see.
Sources:
- E, R., S, C., A, B., S, D. L., M, C., & L, G. (2026). End-of-life dreams and visions in palliative care: Perspectives, interpretations and practices from Italian professionals. Death Studies, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/07481187.2026.2646873
- Pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov. (n.d.). https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42959079/