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Heaven Is for Real presents the true story of a four-year-old boy in Nebraska who reported to his parents that he visited heaven under anesthesia during a life-threatening operation. The boy did not flatline during the operation, making it technically difficult to classify his memories as a near-death experience (NDE). Yet his reported memories share so many features with NDEs that most reports about the film call the boy’s experience an NDE; given the similarities, it is not unlikely that his experiences arose from neurochemical events similar to those in NDEs. NDEs have been written about repeatedly since the 1980s, when they first became publicly known. A Medline search for peer-reviewed articles published between 1980 and 2014 revealed 314,863 articles containing the words near death experience. Yet, despite all that has been written about NDEs, reliable scientific research on this phenomenon does not exist, leaving most researchers agreeing that NDEs are as yet unexplained (Agrillo, 2011). In the absence of a scientific understanding, various theories to elucidate NDEs have been suggested, but none yet accounts for all the features of NDEs. Thus, what the scientific community knows is that NDEs occur relatively commonly, but what causes them is beyon