These NDE accounts were submitted to our website and are published here anonymously. Minor edits have been made to protect the identity of the experiencer and others who may have been involved with the experience. Note to researchers and authors: IANDS cannot grant permission to publish quotations from these NDE accounts because we have not received permission from the NDE authors to do so. However, we advise authors who wish to use quotations from these accounts to follow the Fair Use Doctrine. See our Copyright Policy for more information. We recommend adopting this practice for quotations from our web site before you have written your book or article.
I was a child, 6 or 7 years old. It was a hot summer day and our family decided to go for a swim in a local abandoned gravel pit. I believe I was the oldest child there, bored with the "babies" and wanted to go join the adults who were swimming in a deeper area of the gravel pit. I tried to join them, but was told to return to where I had been. I went back to where I thought I had been, but upon walking into the water, stepped into a hole and felt nothing beneath me.
I was 5 years old and playing with neighborhood friends in the backyard of the people who lived behind our family. I don't know what happened to trigger my condition, but I had great difficulty breathing and became extremely upset. As I walked away from my friends I could not breathe.
When I was eight years old, I was attacked by two men who physically and sexually abused me. One of them wanted to drown me in a nearby river and so he took me to the river’s edge. Moments before he held me under the water, my body went into “freeze” mode and I remember giving up the fight and surrendering. He put his hands around my neck and held me under the water facing up. I remember seeing the sun from under the water and feeling an incredible sense of panic, which, within seconds, was replaced with an unlimited amount of peace and serenity.
In September 1990 I was scheduled to have major surgery to remove my gall bladder. I wasn't at all scared because I had a hysterectomy the year before and it went like clockwork. I climbed onto the table and the next thing I remember was a feeling of flipping over and thinking how strange it was that I could see the floor. I wondered if they had turned me over, and why I didn't see the table not the floor. The next thing I experienced was zooming up to the ceiling and looking down on a body, I say "a" body because I didn't realise at first that it was mine! I zoomed in without moving and realised that it was my body and it was dead.
I went for an ablation for atrial fibrillation. The night prior to the procedure my doctor came in to talk. He asked me if I was up for the procedure and I told him I did not feel good about this, and he reassured me that I would do fine given I was young and in good health. The procedure began early the next morning. I was put under general anesthesia for what would be the next nine hours. Well into the procedure the doctor found a cluster of "hot spots" the bad areas that cause interruptions in the electrical pathways of the heart and the atrial fibrillation. He ablated the first area then went for the second one and it caused my heart to stop beating. Within some time it restarted on its own. He went on to the third area and my heart stopped again but this time it did not restart.
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