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 riding my bicycle home after a long day at work and looking forward to the next two days off. I got off my bike and was preparing to cross the road. There was a break in the traffic, or so I thought. I got on my bike and started across. The next thing I know, I'm in this huge field of flowers with a bright, blue sky. I can't describe the colors. (Our language doesn't have the words to describe them properly.) I'm thinking: How did I get here from being on my bike? Then, I started walking toward a light I could see in the distance.
I was the driver of a car with my sister as the passenger. We had a dreadful accident and rolled the car numerous times. My sister was seriously injured and I came away relatively unscathed, apart from shock and a terrible sense of guilt and concern for my sister. (She is fine now.) I had an experience during the days following the accident. I don't remember what I was doing at the time. I remember it came to me as clear as yesterday and has remained with me for life. The experience was just a split second of clarity, less than a blink of an eye. Yet, in that millisecond the experience contained a message as old as the universe.
I was in ICU after a bad car accident with internal injuries and bleeding. This was a Thursday evening. I had part of my liver removed, a collapsed lung, and broken bones. I was sleeping. I believe I had been on very strong pain killers. Later, I learned my vital signs were very weak and the nurses thought I would die. I was not cognizant. At some point I found myself leaving my body.
I was 17 years old and had been suffering from daily headaches on top of around five major, debilitating migraines that month. This is why I simply stopped caring about life with zero desire to live, and did not hesitate to take a combination of anti-depressants and anti-anxiety pills mixed with vodka. I was not literally trying to commit suicide, but I think subconsciously I was quite open to the idea of it, in the event of a physical shut down. I felt more than willing to go with it. I was exhausted physically and had experienced one or two migraines per month and headaches daily for almost a year. I was basically feeling that at such a young age, my life was over and this type of suffering was unbearable and intolerable with no hope whatsoever. My best friend, who lived with my mother and I, was at my bedside the entire time. She witnessed (told me later) that I stopped breathing and my mother had called an ambulance that took me to the hospital to have my stomach pumped.
During the three days between finishing high school and attending graduation, my friends and I decided to go tubing down the river. After being on the river for many hours, we got to a small waterfall, which I was familiar with having camped next to it for a full week the previous year. During that week, we went over the water fall so many times that we got to the point where we could go over without holding on to the tube. The waterfall was relatively small, with a drop of maybe four or five feet. So I tell my friends, "Look, I can go over with no hands!" Big mistake! I hit the river below, fell over backwards, and entered the undertow of the waterfall.
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