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.
If you can imagine the fields that electrical lines go through, where there is no residents and they just clear the area for the power lines, it was like that.
There was a tree in the middle and a well worn path around it. I was walking the path. It looked like an oak tree. It was very large and it’s presence came to walk with me.
I told it that I was ill and that this seemed like a nice place. The entity (I’m non-religious so I don’t know what it “was”) told me that I was not done and that I should return. That I would be happy one day.
It was so peaceful, beautiful, but the forest seemed dark and scary. The trees on both sides seemed like a place that I did not want to go, I only wanted to go toward the water.
Then I saw a bright light and I woke up in the ICU. I hope this doesn’t turn into some kind of religious debate or some kind of medical versus spirituality thing. This was my experience. Take it as that.
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.