I have been clinically dead on two occasions. Once from meningitis, 108 F fever, seizures and heart stopped for 4 minutes.
The second time was severe blood loss, requiring 4 transfusions, surgeries, cpr, oxygen and defibrillator after my heart stopped.
The first time I remember getting tunnel vision, then kind of floating from the ceiling watching the room. I was a child then and my brain definitely wasn’t working, but I was too young to know about out of body experiences.
The second time was in my 20’s with no head injury. Everything just started whiting out and seeming far away. I sunk back while attempting to explain to the nurse and then that was it. She looked really concerned and ran out, but I had no cares or pain at all. Just a fading into the distance.
It was like I didn’t exist, time didn’t exist. Totally different than sleeping or anesthesia. Slowly became aware of a noise. It went on until I slowly started to see as well. Then some basic awareness started again. I noticed the loud noise was the air being forced out of my lungs from CPR. It went on a bit, I was aware of it but not concerned or thinking anything.
The doctor doing it was telling them to ready the defibrillator again, and in that pause I said I was awake and/or attempted to move. That was about the time I even realized what was happening. Somehow the room had filled with at least 8 concerned people and all that time had passed instantaneously for me.
They said I had no heartbeat for several minutes and had been clinically dead. Spent 3 days in ICU, then two weeks in rehab center, followed by 6 months of recovery. I didn’t eat, drink or go to the bathroom for a week besides IV and catheter. Even trying a single sip of broth after that was so difficult. I had no hunger.
Also to add a follow up. I had ptsd and my only serious interests are meditation, philosophy and spirituality since this occurred. Eastern religions too, despite being raised Mormon. I feel a strong sense that everything in life is illusionary, just a projection of the mind. I don’t remember anything but the no sense of self and timelessness but I feel like there was something more to it.
The hardest part wasn’t being dead, but the absolute misery of the early dying process and then the long recovery. Death was peaceful.
What a great post. Thank you for sharing it and all the best for you!
People often think about death as some kind of positive non-existence when in reality death can’t by definition be experienced. If it feels like something then it’s the process of dying people are talking about. Not being dead. I believe the closest thing to death we can “experience” is general anesthesia and the people who have gone thru that know there’s nothing to experience. Just a teleportation from one moment to another.
This actually makes me believe in some form of “rebirth”. Not in the sense most people think about it but since consciousness can only experience being but not “not being” then it seems very likely that death just means that your experience moves from one place to another. If there’s a break in between you can’t experience it. You just can’t help but keep having experiences.
Really interesting stuff. Sam Harris made a fascinating podcast about this subject. As a subscriber I can give free links to the full episode if you’re interested. Just send me a PM.
Since I was dead and did not experience self, time or consciousness while this happened the closest I can explain it is that I just didn’t exist during that period of reference. It was like time travel, and did not feel like anesthesia, the time completely felt like it did not happen. It was minutes but might as well have been thousands of years, there was no concept of time at all.
My personal theory is that whatever death is, it exists outside of the concept of time. It seems that your consciousness resets and you find yourself alive again. In my case back in the same body but if reincarnation is possible then in a new life.
The perceived time doesn’t seem to need to be in any time frame or chronological order. Maybe you instantly skip over many years, or even transfer to the past.
Here is a theory I came up with entirely based on my own experiences, only to find out it is a real quantum physics theory:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide_and_immortality
Basically you find yourself in the reality where you somehow survive, because the one where you didn’t you don’t have consciousness. Both times incredibly unlikely circumstances saved me that also happened to occur at the exact moment needed.
I’m not sure how to pm on here but maybe if you send me one I can see it to check out your links.
More about time:
https://interestingengineering.com/science/what-einstein-meant-by-time-is-an-illusion
Sam Harris believes in life after death?
No and even if so then not in the way any religion describes it.
You literally just said he did!
Edit: I may have been too quick to say that
You mind showing me the quote where I said that?
I may have misread or misunderstood, but it sounded like you said Sam Harris believed that somehow you experienced a form of “rebirth”, where you appear somewhere else after death, and talked about this on a podcast.
If that’s not what you meant, I apologize, that is how I understood what you wrote.
Incredible story. This is making me reflect on a lot of things. I’ve had the same feelings re: projection of the mind, and I feel much calmer hearing this. Thank you so much for sharing.
Check out the Law of One for some funky spiritual stuff. There might be something in there that makes sense of this reality for you.
- BrooklynMan ( @BrooklynMan@lemmy.ml ) English38•1 year ago
I don’t want to discuss the incident in detail because it was very traumatic, but long story short, I had a near-drowning incident when I was 12 (technically not a drowning because I survived). I was technically dead for several minutes.
I saw nothing. total blank. I remember flashes of struggling to get to the side of the pool one moment, and flashes of waking up in an ambulance the next. then it cuts out again, and then I woke up in a hospital room with tubes in all my holes (plus some tubes in new holes) and surrounded by my mom and brothers.
My dad did. He’s never fully went into every detail, but he has talked about it in bits in pieces over the years and he said quite a bit as I was struggling with the passing of my mother. From what I know he had a major heart attack and there was a point where the chest pain just… stopped and one second he was there and the next second he just wasn’t. He described it as like, leaving his body in some way and being surrounded by light, warmth and peace. He apparently met and was hugged by family members and relatives he hadn’t seen in years. He’s always been pretty limited beyond that, but from what I gather it felt like they were there to greet him briefly but didn’t have the expectation for him to stay with them. Kind of like “hey, we’re here but it’s not time yet” in the way he’s talked about it.
There’s been claims in the family he has always been hesitant to talk about but apparently he saw relatives there that died long before he was even born and was able to recognize these dead relatives in extremely old family photos. I don’t know how true that is, but whenever anyone in the family tries to discuss it he actively avoids the conversation.
- argv_minus_one ( @argv_minus_one@beehaw.org ) 4•1 year ago
This is the stuff religion is made of.
Too bad religion always gets twisted into being about eternal suffering and killing unbelievers and whatnot.
I agree. Unfortunately people become very dogmatic with organized religion, and it’s often taken in a simplified way that humans can understand. It’s scary but truthfully, there are facts about the universe that humanity does not know nor understand, isn’t meant to know or understand, and likely will never know or understand.
Seeing my own mothers passing and the unexplained events that occurred towards the end of her life, I do believe my dads story and what he experienced. I have my own woo woo beliefs beyond that though, specifically that the “light” people see might be the true incomprehensible form of whatever being made this universe.
I lost my mom this year. She lost her mom as a child and was the last of her siblings to go. I hope they were there to greet her. She was really looking forward to that.
I hope my mom is with her dad.
FYI, there is a community, !nde@lemmy.world, if anyone here is interested in this kind of thing.
I don’t know if this counts. I had a stroke while I was sleeping. I had very vivid nightmares that night, almost the worst nightmares I’ve ever had. It’s made me terrified of dying in my sleep. If my final experiences are going to be like that I absolutely do not want to go out in my sleep.
“He died peacefully his sleep” is something people only say for catharsis.
You mind if I ask what those nightmares were about?
I don’t remember, I just remember it being horrible. Nothing religious or anything like that. Realizing I lost one of my eyes took over memories of the dreams.
Night terrors are still top of the list for nightmares though.
I would not really compare it to dying, but having had seizures, you can appear dead and then wake up really disoriented and scared. Your brain basically shuts off for a moment.
I witnessed this once years ago during the start of a class I was attending. Girl from the back gets up and starts walking towards the door, mumbling. She seemed off, so I stood up and asked if she was okay. She fell straight back and I tried to catch her but failed. She foamed at the mouth and started turning blue. I had no idea what to do. Medics show up and the class clears out, but I stayed because she basically half fallen on me. When she woke up she looked straight at me and said “hi.”
If someone died, they won’t come back. That’s what dying means.
- argv_minus_one ( @argv_minus_one@beehaw.org ) 3•1 year ago
Zombies are people too, you bigoted necrophobe!
Idk I’ll tell you when I wake up from being dead
Don’t forget to make sure you’re buried with your alarm clock, most people oversleep after they die.
I didnt actually die, but I came pretty close. I lost a ton of blood, started tk get tunnel vision, blacked out, then there was nothing, then I regained consciousness after getting a transfusion. Not sure how long I was out, but they said I was white as a sheet.
There’s just a gap in my memory like going to sleep and not dreaming. The waking up was brutal though. I had zero context of anything around me but my brain was still fully functioning. It was weird. For context I was dead for half an hour and in a medical coma for a week or so.
I imagine that’s how the first true ai will feel. It still will “know” information, how to speak, etc, but it will have no idea wtf is going on
Edit: apparently people haven’t heard of CPR and doubt my claims.
Here’s your evidence
https://abcnews.go.com/amp/US/hero-teacher-helps-save-teens-struck-lightning/story?id=11829631
Can you define “death” in the context of your question? I feel you might have referred to some forms of reversible coma.
They are. People colloquially refer to a stopped heart as “coming back from the dead.” Obviously you cannot truly come back from the dead if its your brain that’s dead.
Some fat, white old dude that wears all red and rides a sled in the sky stole my birthday.
I’ve been very lucky and haven’t come close to death (yet), but I have had some dream experiences that resembled NDEs.
I tried three times to control what I dreamed about. The dreams weren’t like dreams, is the best way I can put it - they were very short, very vivid, and clearly linked to the “intention” I’d requested. The second dream featured a pair of strangers trying to tell me something.
The last one, I went down a long tunnel (like a storm drain) and ran into people who, indeed, drove me out and told me I shouldn’t be there. After that, I wasn’t able to do it again.
Unsure if just weird dreams or if I actually got too close to something. The thing that makes me think there might be something in NDEs, tbh, is the stories palliative care nurses seem to have.