People who have died and came back, what was your experience?

danielsuperxx@lemm.ee to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 172 points –
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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.

Glad you made it and are hopefully doing ok. I work with kids with disabilities and the near drowning kids or 'choked on a pill' kids are the hardest. I just imagine the range of emotions a family goes through in that short time.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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FYI, there is a community, !nde@lemmy.world, if anyone here is interested in this kind of thing.

Is there a community or hub similar to /r/creepyaskreddit?

I need my spooky fix!

I never came across that subreddit! On a quick search I found there is a direct equivalent in the form of !creepyasklemmy@lemmy.world . It's not very active but there's only one way to change that! There might be another community that's more active and basically the same thing, but, like I said, I only did a very quick search, just to see if there was a community with a directly corresponding name.

Here's some other communities you might be interested in, though, that I grabbed from my subscriptions list:

PARANORMAL / MISC.

CRYPTID

UFO / UAP

Side note: I don't know if I was clinically dead in any of these.

I have three experiences. When I was 10 I was hit by an SUV travelling 50+ mph while walking across a highway. It knocked my shoes off and threw me dozens of feet. I still don't remember anything. Apparently I was unconscious for awhile. First responder said they saved my life while waiting for an air lift to take me to the hospital. It was the kind of nothing when you sleep and wake up.

The second I mixed a bunch of drugs. I think I was on 5 different ones. I took an absolutely massive rip of air duster and instantly my body was gone and so was anything resembling reality. I remember thinking ohhh I'm dead. My being and/or individuality was melting / merging into this infinitely recursuve fractal pattern. The sense I was an individual was an illusion. Then I snapped back into consciousness.

The third I definitely don't think I was dead, but it was a very relevant dream. The kind of dream that is so vivid it is indistinguishable from reality. I was completely sober at this point in my life (in part because of the experience above and another experience with hallucinogens where I saw the exact same thing the VFX artists made in the exorcism of emily rose, but I saw it before the movie was even made).

The dream started with me at my own funeral. I was for lack of a better word a spirit. I've never had dreams like this before or after.

The most fascinating thing was the sense of need and/or desire was completely gone. I felt the most free I had ever felt in my life. But I did have tasks. I had to visit my best friend Brant. He was in a very dark small place that I kind of transported to he was dead/ a spirit too. He apparently hasn't had a source of light here and I apparently had a small bit of shine. Because the room lit up a bit when I entered. We laughed about how weird it was that there were shadows even though we were semi transparent. Then my dad (whom I never saw but apparently was guiding me through my tasks) said I don't know how long you have left you need to go. So I left and I visited/transported to my mom who was also a spirit. We danced together. She was skinny and wearing a bright red dress. There was more light here but it was still nondescript. Then I woke up .

I sobbed like a baby for probably 30 minutes when I woke up. The biggest change was that I had desires again. I desperately wanted to stay in that state I was in during the dream. The best I can describe it is if you had a good job, had great sex, ate an amazing meal, than sat in your most comfortable chair next to the people you love, for a brief moment you wouldn't feel any base human level desire just a vague satisfaction. It was like that but times 100 and it was just the default state.

Since they dream I've only told it to strangers and Brant. Brant had since died via suicide at age 25. My mom who has been obese most of my life, has lost significant amounts of weight and now owns a strikingly similar dress. Honestly I don't know what to make of it. It still spooks me. It changed my life.

I know I'm stating the obvious here but it's insane that you almost died three times

My friends started calling me a cat because they said I had 9 lives. lol

It knocked my shoes off

Definitely dead here.

My being and/or individuality was melting / merging into this infinitely recursuve fractal pattern. The sense I was an individual was an illusion. Then I snapped back into consciousness.

You disconnected from quantium decoherence and momentarily experienced superposition?

So your experiences are:

"I was unconscious as a kid" (At least this one kind of fits)

"Took a lot of drugs."

And "I dreamt it"

Cool.

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."

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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.

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.

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

Oh, I can assure you with the utmost confidence that you were not dead for half a hour. If you’re going to make something up, at least do a little googling beforehand.

Technically it is possible if the reason for cardiac arrest was hypothermia. The longest documented time between cardiac arrest and resuscitation is almost 7 hours. That's where the old adage "No one is dead until they are warm and dead." comes from.

Source: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24882104/

“Most survivors had a favourable neurological outcome.” Fascinating. I suppose I stand corrected on many points here. Thanks for the link!

For the record, I still roundly call bullshit on OP’s claim here :) Feels like dying in a snow drift or something would be a detail they’d include.

I didn't want to include the cause of death because it seems even more outlandish and unbelievable than the duration of death, and the cause of death essentially deanonymizes my account. But I guess this username is already toasted from being used too much so I added evidence to my op.

Dude. I stand corrected and I apologize. I am generally incredulous on the internet as a rule, and I figure my defenses were particularly high given the sort of woo-woo shit that comes with a post like this.

Sorry. If it counts for anything I learned a metric fuckton from this exchange.

No worries bro. I got way more upset than I needed to. We're good, my friend.

I really should start lying and say I saw the matrix or something. Give the woo-woos an aneurysm.

It's also possible if you get cpr the entire time like we did.

I can assure you I was. I was getting CPR the entire time. Maybe don't run your mouth without knowing the full story?

I wasn't the only one that went down in this accident either, the other kid was out for 38 minutes. Again, CPR the entire time

And if you're wondering why they kept trying cpr for so long, it was because they were our teachers and the SRO who all knew us.

Some fat, white old dude that wears all red and rides a sled in the sky stole my birthday.

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.

I was sitting in nothingness, in front of me a meticulously sorted grid of worlds. I was in the process of putting earth back into its place when I woke up. For the next couple of minutes I was convinced that I'm literally god.

If someone died, they won't come back. That's what dying means.

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.