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
Quantum suicide is really interesting, I’ve always thought something like this could be possible and this is the first time I’m learning that there’s a word for it. There’s something intuitive about it, I bet lots of people also feel the same way. I’ve been in a few potentially near-death situations and one specific thought always pops into my head afterwards, “I wonder how many versions of me just died from that.”
Yes and it is also important to point out that if this is true, there is even more reason to be careful with your life and health.
You would have a situation where your family experiences your death in one reality, but you might continue on disabled in another. It only requires you to be conscious, but your physical condition doesn’t matter beyond that.
That’s a terrifying thought. But then what happens when you get very old? We don’t live forever. And even if some life extension technology is discovered before we die, what about everyone in the past who died? Did they all end up in a reality where some incredible technology figured out how to keep everyone conscious indefinitely? What about people who lived before we even knew what viruses were? As intuitive as it feels, it doesn’t seem to pass the smell test. I would guess that some of the “intuition” I’m feeling is actually just a fear of dying
I would imagine it could continue on until it absolutely can’t anymore. At which point it either ends, or some kind of ascension or rebirth.
Hopefully your soul, higher power, the universe, etc would have choice or mercy at some point. Maybe you eventually accomplish what you needed from this life.
If it is purely physics without choice then you would eventually find yourself as one of the world’s longest living people. It would keep branching until the very last reality where there are no more where you can possibly survive. At least you would have a good answer when people ask your secret to long life lol.
There’s this hypothesis called Quantum Archaeology, I’m not a scientist and I don’t know how believable this is (If you think you understand Quantum Physics, it means you definitely don’t and all that), but there’s an idea that the universe may “remember” details about… well… everything, and this “memory” could be tapped into by a sufficiently advanced computer capable of datamining reality itself… Allowing you to bring anyone back from the dead, provided you have enough ink in your 3D Printer and all the 1’s and 0’s that make up what ancient people mistook for a soul.
I gave you how I understand it, it’s likely more complicated than that if it’s indeed real. (Never got a solid answer one way or another, a friend of mine talked about it once… He was very anti-mysticism and pro-rationalism, so I took it more seriously than I would have if some Spirit Science Hippie told me about it… He up and vanished one day, never found out what happened.)
If Quantum Archaeology AND Quantum Immortality/Quantum Suicide hold true, it’s possible that once you get old enough the only timelines left to “jump to” are societies in the far future where Quantum Archeaology is a puzzle that’s been cracked.
Heck, maybe Heaven & Hell and are merely some Dyson Swarm powered Alien Satellite somewhere that’s just been left to “Crunch the numbers” as it were. I don’t know, anything’s possible in an infinite and unknowable universe.
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.
Thanks for sharing
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.
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.
Thank you for your post!
Has anyone asked why he avoids the topic?I think it might be a mixture of trauma related to the circumstances regarding his death and revival and any lingering feelings regarding it. I might ask him in detail what he experienced someday.
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.
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.
FYI, there is a community, !nde@lemmy.world, if anyone here is interested in this kind of thing.
Thank you!
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.
- !nde@lemmy.world
- !paranormal@lemmy.ml
- !paranormal@lemmy.world
- !paranormal@sh.itjust.works
- !rag_and_bone@lemm.ee
- !xphiles@lemmy.world
CRYPTID
UFO / UAP
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First time you got shot? Either where you live or where you work is not a place where I would want to be.
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I didn’t plan on doing that, but thanks for your review nonetheless. If there was a button asking for if the review was helpful, I would press it
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
You’re counting the dream?
good point
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 used to work with adults who had seizures and it was terrifying to watch but we did what we had to do for them. But I was always curious what it was like for the person experiencing the seizure. Like, what exactly do you remember? If you don’t mind going into detail, if not, I’m sorry I asked.
Do you remember falling to the ground and then your consciousness jumps to waking up and there’s nothing between?
I didn’t feel it coming on, the first thing I remember is someone helping me. They thought I was dead. I was unconscious on the ground with eyes open, hit my head on the floor and bit through my tongue so I was bleeding from the mouth. When I woke up I had no idea where I was or what happened so I was very agitated. At least for the type of seizures I have, its like an on-off switch. There are other types though.
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.”
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.
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Same. I am between believing in souls or not, so this is a topic worth pondering.
Maybe you fall a bit more agnostic then?
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Anti god or anti religion? I’m pretty ok saying, “i don’t know, nobody knows, i guess I’ll find out one day, or not.”
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Not sure that atheism excludes belief in life after death, tbh. We’re all alive right now with no god, after all.
Well, i am, but I’m still not sure about the rest of you.
Actually, now you come to mention it…
This is exactly why I always wonder. I recall reading every single comment on a Reddit’s thread (at least 2000 comments)
You might be interested about reading experiences of general anesthesia and split brain experiments aswell then. It’s really weird how human consciousness works.
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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.
“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.
Well I got better!
What doesn’t kill you …
Wait, actually it did kill you! 🫢
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.
