What happens after we die? This is a question that human beings have been asking themselves since we were able to understand the concept of death.
A variety of answers have been provided for this question. Some religions tell you that you will live out eternity in either paradise or damnation, depending on your actions during your time alive. Others say that you get reincarnated.
Some more scientific approaches claim that nothing happens. Brain activity ceases, and so does everything about you.
Regardless of all these hypotheses, it is a question that still haunts many people on a day-to-day basis.
Some people who may have a better understanding of “life after death” (or the lack thereof) are those who have experienced near death experiences. This means people who have actually been clinically dead for a certain amount of time.
Thankfully, a lot of these people have shared their experience on Reddit (source at the end of the article) to help us come to our own conclusion on this issue. Enjoy!
I had a near death experience in which I was ejected from an automobile.
When I regained consciousness a man came to me and said everyone survived.
The man was there before any paramedics arrived. The craziest part of it all was that looking at that man gave me the most powerful sensation of deja vu ever.
Maybe I hit my head too hard, but it was an insane experience. It was as if I have seen that man before.
When I was twelve I drowned in the Gulf of Mexico. I was out pretty far from my family and the current picked up into a rip.
I had always been a very strong swimmer and I knew what to do: swim parallel. On this occasion I wore myself out and started to sink beneath the water. I remember struggling to breathe.
Then, I took a big breath of water and everything stopped. The only way I can describe it is by saying it was being at Zero. I wasn’t scared or excited. I was just Zero. I was looking through the water and I blacked out.
During that time, my mother was swimming out to me (she’d been a surfer all her life) and pulled me to shore and gave me CPR until I coughed up water.
There was something eerily comforting about being at Zero.
My aunt had an experience like this when she was 18. She always suffered from chronic seizures that made her pass out.
One day she had one while no was around and was found later on by my grandmother. The doctors luckily arrived in time to resuscitated her.
She explained that she was in brightest, most peaceful hallway.
She wandered aimlessly through it, until she found a massive door closed on one end. She told my grandmother that she tried as hard as she could to open the door. Tapping, slamming, even kicking it would not allowed the door to break free.
She looked back to see the back of the corridor gone, replaced with an emergency room instead. She was lying on a stretcher while multiple nurses and doctors were frantically working to revive her.
She gave up on the door, turned around and headed for the surgery room. She inevitably reached the room, and reentered her body.
She passed away at the age of 42, about nine months ago. Heart failure after multiple seizures. She left behind two young daughter and a husband.
We like to think that the doors opened for her.
AnonymousWhen I was 8 I learned how to fix small engines. That being said, my dad had an old flat head Briggs and Stratton 5.5hp engine that didn’t work. He also had a riding lawn mower that had no engine nor blades.
He gave me the task of getting the engine running so that I could put it on the riding lawnmower and have fun whenever. I was so anxious at school the next day.
Well, that day, I tore apart the motor and had it running by bed time. The next day we had the thing mounted and riding around.
Flash-forward a few weeks. Me and my older sister were out riding when my shoelace got caught on the back spindle. It pulled me off and was dragging me (mind you only going as fast as it would go).
My sister stopped and went in reverse which caused her to go right onto me.
The chain and chain wheel caught my lower right back ripping my skin open and pulling my large and small intestine out. Severed my right lung, broke my spine in 2 places and shredded my right kidney.
I felt the thing roll onto me then everything went blank. Couldn’t see, move, speak or anything. No pain as well. All I remember was the blackness.
After my father got my heart beating again I remember laying there in pain. Also remember feeling my back and being short of breath. I felt what I still believe was my stomach in my hand while I was feeling my back.
Once I was in the ambulance everything went blank except this time I saw myself laying there and the medics shocking me. I felt a hard pull and I was back in myself. Few minutes later I was on a table with strangers in white all around me.
I remember them in a panic then standing next to my grandmother who passed away when I was 3. She told me she was my Nana.
We were there watching them jolt my heart with tiny round paddles. She kept telling me it was ok. They called my death time at 6:06 pm. Then all of a sudden I wake up and I’m all fixed and stapled up.
My parents told me i had died 3 times. The first for 5 minutes. The second was a little more then 12 minutes. But the last time was astonishing to the doctors. My heard stopped beating for 20 minute.
My parents made them continue jolting my heart. They told me the doctor kept telling them that I was going to have a 98% chance of being brain dead.
I’m 25 years old and am healthy as ever. I’m fully capable of walking as well.
I had an allergic reaction to something I ate and passed out while I was splashing water on my face. At some point my heart stopped and got restarted while I was in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.
I remember a feeling of being sucked backwards extremely slowly, like being pulled through water, and this blackness fading in and out. At one point it faded back in and I was staring out at a garden.
It wasn’t filled with flowers, just dust and patchy grass. There was a playground with a merry-go-round in the middle and two children running around it. A boy and a girl.
It’s difficult to describe but I got the feeling that I could choose if I wanted to stay or leave, but every time I tried to go back I was held in place.
I went through all the reasons I wanted to go back, and when I told the presence I didn’t want to abandon my mother whatever held me finally let go.
I snapped back into my body. Heart had stopped for six minutes.
When I was 14 and at a party, I drank way too much. (I was sort of an alcoholic even at that age, due to easy access to alcohol at the time. Also a family full of alcoholics who didn’t care.)
Woke up on the bathroom floor vomiting my guts out, in and out of consciousness. I could faintly hear my brother in the background calling for an ambulance.
Woke up in a hospital bed where the doctor said I had been dead for 2 minutes, but they managed to revive me. My blood alcohol level was 0.56.
In my experience, being dead was like being asleep. Absolutely no difference. No flashbacks, no afterlife that I could recall. It was exactly like sleeping. Very peaceful.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, I continued to drink heavily for years after that incident because I hadn’t learned my lesson apparently. I eventually sought out help after another scare, but that’s a story for another day.
18 months sober.
Not me, but a friend of mine overdosed one day while doing some stuff with his buddy.
His buddy hadn’t done anything yet so he wasn’t imagining all of the signs of death on this guy (no pulse, cold skin, blue lips). My friend told me that those few minutes he was considered dead he saw nothing but white.
Everything around him was bright white and in the distance was a dark shadowed tree. He then saw a woman, also dark and shadowed, so he wasn’t able to see her face. But her presence made him happy.
She held out her hand to him and for a while he debated whether or not he should go with her. He decided not to and she simply walked away. Then he woke up again.
Before that event he defined himself as Catholic but was never really religious. Afterwards he turned his life around and started devoting himself to helping others.
Stupidly mixed alcohol, meds and summer heat (young and stupid).
Smoked a “self made cigarette”, the area used to be popular for shops where you go in and pick your flavors and what not. Well, they also laced it with spice I think (very common in the area as well).
Anyways. I started feeling faint, then eventually passed out. Was carried back to my apartment, husband at the time refused to call 911. I stopped breathing multiple times and, according to friends and said husband, my heart stopped.
I remember darkness except for where I was standing. It was as if I was standing on tiles that would light up only if I stepped on them. I saw something a little in the distance so walked towards it (in retrospect, kinda dumb to walk towards the light). At the end was my best friend, who had died, on a platform on these little tiles.
I hugged him and screamed at him begging him to let me stay with him. He pushed me off slowly and told me it was ok, but I couldn’t stay, that I “have to go back, it’s not time.”
I screamed for him as I felt myself being pulled away from him. He kept saying it will be ok, I had to fight because it wasn’t time. The light around him grew darker.
I woke up gasping for air and trying to call his name. My husband and best friend was standing over me, shaking me trying to get me to breathe and wake up fully.
Yeah. That’s all.
My heart was stopped for a short time following a car accident. I woke up in the operating room and was then in a coma for 2 weeks after that.
I saw nothing. It was exactly like being asleep.
The interesting bits are what you feel when dying, your body is dumping all of its wonderful chemicals and time slows down from the adrenaline or whatever. I saw the truck hop the median, I saw the car spinning like a carnival ride, which felt like at least 30 seconds when in reality my car only turned less than one full turn.
DMT is a hell of a drug, but the being dead part isn’t interesting or any sort of a religious experience.
Luckily you can’t remember what pain feels like. In retrospect this experience is a lot more interesting than it was at the time. It’s a lot like being high, in that your priorities are shifted really strangely while you’re in it.
I didn’t care that I was messed up so much as that they were cutting off my pants or that I had $10 in change in the ash tray that I didn’t want whoever recovered my car to steal.
PS: Severe internal bleeding doesn’t really hurt so much as makes you feel too warm and want to throw that space blanket the emts put on you off.
AnonymousAbout 5 years ago I had to get some pretty major surgery. I have had several over the years and this was going to be the last one.
I always get nervous about having surgery, but this time I knew something was going to go wrong. It sounds silly but I felt so strongly about it that I wrote a will and left it on my dresser just in case.
Anyway, things go wrong during the surgery and I start to bleed out. Things went even further south and then my heart stopped beating. I found out later that I was dead for several minutes.
Now I don’t know if this was real or a hallucination or a mixture of the two.
I woke up in what looked like space but there wasn’t any stars or light. I wasn’t floating so to speak, I was just there. I wasn’t hot/cold, hungry, tired, just a peaceful neutral kind of thing. I knew there was light and love somewhere nearby but I had no urge or need to go to it right away.
I remember thinking over my life, but it wasn’t like a montage. More like I was idly flipping through a book and snippets stood out here and there.
I don’t remember making a decision to stay or go back, I just woke up in the ICU two days later.
Whatever it was, it changed my thoughts on a few things. I am still afraid to die, but I’m not worried about what happens after that.
Sources:
1.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1ecfs8/redditors_who_have_died_then_been_resuscitated/
2.
