What Happens When We Die?
10 real-life stories from people who have died and come back to life.
Heaven, the undiscovered country, the afterlife - whatever you want to call it, death and what lies beyond has been a preoccupation of mankind for millennia.
Once breathing and heartbeat ceases in a patient, they are considered to be clinically dead. However, thanks to the wonders of medical science - and sometimes sheer dumb luck - death is sometimes a reversible condition. The people that come back from the dead often return with fascinating and sometimes chilling stories of their encounter with the great beyond.
There are many common elements that often feature in Near Death Experiences (or NDEs), including white lights, floating, tunnels, out-of-body experiences, feelings of peace, love and safety, feelings of fear or loneliness, encounters with deceased relatives and religious experiences to name but a few.
Scientists are unsure as to why these experiences occur, but it is likely that they are the body's response to extreme trauma in one way or another. Many accounts bear similarities with the hallucinogenic effects of the drug DMT, and it was thought for a while that this could be the cause of the phenomenon, but there is little evidence to suggest that this can be produced by the human body.
Could these be proof of life after death, or even the reason why we came up with the idea of the afterlife in the first place?
In a Reddit thread started by user hoogly_boogly, Redditors have been sharing their experiences of what happened to them after they died, and they make fascinating reading.
10. Near Drowning
User Usagii_YO describes their experience with a childhood drowning:
"8 years old, drowns at a local YMCA pool. Over in the deep end unsupervised. Suddenly "awaken" on the side of the pool only then to see two lifeguards pulling my body out of the pool. CPR didn't work. 5 minutes later "I" get put on a stretcher and wheeled off in the ambulance. The gravity of the situation or realization made me "stuck" where "I" was while my physical body was headed to the hospital and probably the morgue. As that realization of death sunk in, this intense sensation of a warm motherly presence started to materilze. Had no idea who she was, she just insisted to stay calm and there's nothing to worry about. She made me count backwards from 5. At 1 I "wake up" in the ambulance. It's worth noting that me "waking up" was the sensation of being shot through a cannon from the pool where I drowned to down to street into the ambulance."
Other Redditors have commented theorising that the "counting back from five" could well have been the paramedics counting chest compressions or even a defibrillator count.
The "warm, motherly presence" is another common trope, one study showing that 69% of those interviewed report a feeling of "overwhelming love" (perhaps most likely to be translated as motherly love in an 8-year-old) during an NDE and many actually report a feeling of disappointment on returning to their body in the "real world".