I clinically died 3 times as a 12-year old on the operating table due to blood loss from a severed femoral vein.
No bright light or conversation or dream. I woke up in the recovery room thinking heaven looked ‘kinda tacky’.
FTR, the longest ‘downtime’ was 25 seconds and,yes, it HAS coloured my outlook on life
YMMV
-Mitch
Hi Surly. I don’t mind sharing this in general. I just don’t want to be bothered trying to prove it to anyone. Lots of people don’t believe in this type of thing, and that’s ok. The problem is, some of these same people insist upon trying to convince me that it didn’t happen. IMO, that’s just stupid and a waste of time for all involved.
It’s long, but I couldn’t decide how to shorten it.
I was 10 or 11, in or around that age, when I went with our old neighbor’s family to a horse show in Ohio, in their motorhome.
B. and I were in the very back, on the two sofas, one on each side of the cabin. P. and K. were at the table, playing cards. Their parents were in the front, just driving down the highway.
B. and I were talking and I remember getting sleepy.
This part is what S., their mom, told my mom:
They were driving down the road, when all of a sudden, K’s head just went “thunk!” down on the table. S. jumped up to check on K., and screamed at her husband to pull over.
B., K. and I were all out cold. They took us out and laid us on the side of the road, and started slapping our faces and wrists. K. came to fairly quickly, B. and I took longer. I remember that B. also went into convulsions, but I don’t remember if she said I did.
What I remember is this:
I remember talking to B. and getting sleepy. The next thing I know, I’m being pulled up quite quickly, but in a floaty, weightless kind of way. When I looked down, I could see the motorhome on the side of the road, I could see people laying on the shoulder, with other people leaning over them, but I have no concern as to who they are, or what they are doing. It just didn’t matter to me at all.
I was propelled up, and entered darkness while being pulled toward the moon. (I was a kid. Never heard of an NDE. That big, round, white light looked like a full moon to me.)
I am aware of a voice in my head, asking if I had any questions, and I couldn’t think of any. What I do remember feeling, but have a horrible time describing, is how I felt. The way I’ve always thought of it, and maybe because I was young when it happened, is it’s the most incredible sense of “okayness” that you can imagine. All is right, ok, and safe. That everything is as it should be. And I had a true sense of being loved. Really, truly loved. A most amazing feeling.
When I am in the light, a lady with short, dark hair and dark eyes comes to talk to me. I don’t remember exactly what she wore, but I want to say a white robe type of thing. My memory could just be adding that. I honestly don’t remember. She knelt in front of me, and said that I needed to go back. Without talking, she said that. And without talking, my entire being wanted to stay. She “said” I needed to go back, because my mother needed me. That I understood, right? My mother needed me. I was a little confused, because I knew my mother didn’t need me. There was some concept of agreements. That I had made agreements, and needed to follow through on those. At that point, I agreed to go back.
The very next instant, I am sucked back into my body.
I open my eyes to P. leaning over me, slapping my face…
I remember being in the back of the police car, waiting for the ambulance. I remember being really out of it, but probably more due to the carbon monoxide poisoning than anything else.
A lot of this is fuzzy. It’s been 30 years; I’ve considered hypnosis to take myself back so I could remember it all. The two sensations I remember most were the sense of “okayness” and that feeling of being drawn back into my body.
The feeling of okayness is something that I’ve yearned for time and again. It’s also something I’ve tried to remember the feeling of during some of my darkest times.
I’ve not shared the story that often. Most have met it with skepticism. But, I don’t care whether anyone believes me or not. Because I remember it. I can still visualize it. I have absolutely no doubt whatsoever that it happened. None.
Thanks, Der Trihs! Apparently I’m actually somewhat memorable around here. But I’ll elaborate a bit more than that post.
You see, I had a seizure at 16 months, due to a high fever. They tried all sorts of things to get my fever down, but it kept rising. At some point I stopped breathing, and couldn’t be resuscitated. They declared me dead. But my parents refused to believe it. They got all their church friends together and held a prayer meeting. Forty-five minutes later, I started breathing again. Obviously, everyone said it was a miracle.
When searching for a cause for why this happened, it was noticed that I’d had my MMR shot only a few days before. While correlation does not equal causation, I’ve been wary of vaccinations ever since. I’ve only gotten the ones I absolutely had to. And you’d better bet I got a doctor’s waiver so I didn’t have to get the booster when I entered junior high.
I do want to point out that, just like Dusty Rose, I don’t want to talk about any religious significance. Believe what you want. Oh, and, since I was only a baby, I don’t remember any NDEs.
ETA: @Dusty: Hypnosis is probably not a good idea, as you’ll pretty much make up what you don’t remember. You’re memory’s not going to get any better than it already is. Hypnosis is bad about making false memories.
I didn’t breathe for the first 15 minutes after my birth. I’m told.
I’ve experienced similar things, and I’m still a skeptic. I don’t doubt that you experienced it; I experienced many bizarre things as well. What I don’t believe is that it’s anything supernatural. I mean, the mind is capable of simulating absolutely any experience, it happens every night when we dream. Occam’s razor would dictate that things like this are just fabrications of our brain… a dream, and nothing more.
When I was fading in and out of consciousness as my brain was shutting down, I saw and heard people in the room with me. It was as real as anything else I’ve ever experienced. To this day, as far as my memory is concerned, these people existed. I only know they weren’t actually there because logically they couldn’t have been. It seems as real as any other memory, though. It seems like it happened. I distinctly remember them saying to me “it’s OK, just relax, come party with us!”. They were sitting right there on the couch in my living room. Was I seeing some sort of spirits, ghosts, another plane of existence, or merely figments of my imagination as my brain was shutting down and lost its grip on the borders between imagination and reality? The simplest answer would be the latter.
I remember, VERY distinctly remember the feeling I described above, as if my “self” expanded beyond the limits of my body, as if the “essence of me” expanded to fill the whole universe. That was shortly before my senses gave way to the enormous burst of light akin to snow on a TV screen. Was this what it feels like for my soul to leave my body? Was this light the light of the infinite souls in the spirit plane? Or was my brain losing its connection to peripheral nerves, and no longer able to sense the size of my body? And was the endless sea of light just my visual cortex shutting down?
Can anyone provide a cite for any near-death experience, out-of-body experience, etc, that is only explainable by supernatural conditions?
My own “near death experience” didn’t change my life any more than would a really intense acid trip.
If absence of heartbeat qualifies as dead then I was for a short period of time. I was electrocuted during work due to failure to verify my lockout was still in place after lunch. When I came to in the hospital they told me that the paramedics shocked me twice and brought me back. No visions of the afterlife or anything. I was blinded by the initial flash so maybe that prevented me from seeing anything.
My mother had 4 NDEs, and all four were different circumstances in four different decades. In the 40’s, her heart stopped beating during an emergency operation for ectopic pregnancy episode. In the 50’s, she had a severe gallbladder attack, in which her heart stopped beating again. In the 60’s, she got found out that she had a deadly allegy to clams which doctors had a difficult time diagnosing. In the 70’s, she had a heart attack, in which her heart stopped beating. In the 80’s, she passed away from a massive stroke.
She was clinically dead in all 4 circumstances, in fact during the ectopic pregnancy incident, the surgeon told the nurses to “cover her up” but the anesthesiologist said she was still breathing.
She never said that she saw a “light” or anything similar.
Me? I almost drowned when I was a toddler. At a cocktail party/engagement party. when the only that saw me fall into the pool was the mother of the bride. Who was all-dolled up in an expensive cocktail dress and spent all day at the beauty shop. I certainly made a splash that day.
I find stories like yours, Dusty Rose, comforting. I choose to believe in an afterlife and I hope it’s filled with “okayness!”
Don’t have any cites on hand (or any of the books nearby), but I’ve read some stories where people saw things they couldn’t have possibly known. The one that sticks in my memory is the lady who said she was floating upwards and she saw a red shoe on the roof in the gutter. Just a random shoe. On the roof. Some of the nurses decided, why not, see what the top of the hospital really looked like- and they found the shoe.
Again, I know this doesn’t mean anything without a cite, but the amount of stories I’ve read on the subject leads me to believe that they shouldn’t be too hard to find.
(Even if you can’t prove it, I like the shoe one just for the random weirdness of it).
I’m glad you find comfort in it, Surly Chick. I do, too. 
Sorry all, don’t mean to hijack, but…
I didn’t know this!
All I ask is if you’ve ever been dead
and has your sister ever Twisted at the Holocaust?
That is an amazing story. If you have any other details you feel comfortable sharing, please do so!
Not uncomfortable at all, it didn’t really affect me the way it does some people. I was sick and I got better. Wouldn’t know where to begin though, so ask away. 