What is a Near Death Experience?
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What Does the Experience Mean?
This hub is in answer to the request, "Have you ever had a Near Death Experience?"
I did have such an experience.
I was in my mid-30s (I'm 56 now) and I had gone through a week of increasingly intense anxiety that included both auditory and visual hallucinations and a sense of impending doom. I had very recently had a baby, and later (much later) I was able to talk about what happened to me with both a neurologist and a psychotherapist. Both hypothesized that the bad week I had that culminated in this strange experience with light was probably due to post-partum psychosis: a condition that is transitory and fairly unsual, but that does happen to a small number of new mothers.
It's kind of like post-partum depression, only on acid.
Anyway, I majored in psychology for my B.A., so even as I was experiencing these distressing things I knew it was not right. I figured I was having a psychotic breakdown and would shortly be locked up. I even recall paging through my abnormal psych textbook trying to find the name for what might be plaguing me.
Having these symptoms upset me, a lot. My marriage was not strong and I was worried that my spouse, who had great insurance, would have me committed and I would never get back out. After about a week of ever worsening symptoms and greater and greater terror, I had the experience, during prayer (I was praying, of course, for it to stop) of exiting my body through the top of my head into an incredibly bright light. The light was no ordinary light: It was alive, and the feeling of being inside this light was frankly indescribable.
Since the whole point here is to describe it, I'd have to sum it up this way: The light was composed of pure love, complete knowledge, and a sense of timelessness. Within the light, time could clearly be seen as a partial construct with limited functionality. Time was like a string running through this eternal space that extended in all directions. It wasn't that time didn't exist, just that, in the context of eternity, it was somewhat less important than it is to us in daily life. OK, a lot less important. Barely important at all.
I don't know how long this experience lasted, but when it was over, my symptoms were gone and I felt fine again.
So what did it all mean?
I don't know.
As I mentioned, I was able later to be cleared of any diagnosis of permanent mental or neurological illness by competent professionals, but there is still the possibility that the experience was pathological. That possibility exists however, only outside the experience.
Within the experience, the notion that it was pathological is not a real possibility. So there's no way to resolve that really: The experience itself exists outside of 'normal' reality and it's only an experience. I have no way to measure it, test it, prove it--All I have is what I personally experienced, which by now is hard to recall and harder to communicate. In some ways, the experience was so incommensurate with normal reality that it was impossible to translate almost immediately, and just as hard to retain.
There is no evidence that I was actually near death. However, many people have had experiences which include the elements common to NDEs even though they were not clinically dead. Some elements of the typical NDE are present in mystical union with God, certain yogic states, various drug-induced states, and even in some UFO and UFO abduction experiences.
NDE-like experiences can also be triggered by extreme stress.
For a long time, I interpreted my experience as God. The light was God. This seemed obvious to me immediately. However, over time, I began to question this explanation. I do think that what I experienced was as real (to me), actually more real than daily reality. But it's not like I came out of it and founded my own religion or anything, so I have to consider that it might be something I don't understand and maybe won't understand anytime soon.
I will say this: I've met plenty of people since then who have had similar experiences, and I don't think it's weird or wrong or kooky or any other such perjorative thing. I'm not ashamed of it, and I accept it at face value. I don't think it was a delusion or anoxia or any such thing. I think it was 'real', insofar as anything that happens to us ever is real.
I also think it's a fairly common experience.
It did change me.
After the NDE, I underwent a long course of therapy (about five years) for post-traumatic stress disorder. It was a very painful time in my life. During that time, having that NDE to hang onto helped me keep moving forward when I really didn't want to. In retrospect I do believe that this is why I had the experience, as a kind of crutch.
Does the human mind generate these experiences under certain conditions? Are they totally imaginary or do they point to a higher reality? What is their purpose?
We don't know. I think skeptics and believers alike are dishonest when they claim to know.
Shakespeare had a good line about it though:
There are more things in heaven and earth Horatio than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Indeed.
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Beyond The Veil/NDE Near Death Experiences
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Complete Idiot's Guide to Near-Death Experiences
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Dying to Live: Near-Death Experiences
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Comments
Very good hub and subject matter; glad you wrote about it.
I enjoyed this hub I saw this request also and I am about to post my answer shortly it is different to yours in some respects but some aspects of it are very close. Like you I am not sure that I was near death but the experience is very much like what has become known as a NDE good luck with your challenge
Thank you Nancy's Niche!
Enlydia--I think these sorts of experiences are actually quite common, but people are embarassed to talk about them because they are afraid other people will make fun of them. Thanks for sharing that about your husband.
maggs224--I'll be looking forward to reading your experience in your hub when you finish it. Thanks for commenting here!
How interesting. I also have had OBE (Out of Body experiences) and my spirit exited through my head. I agree...these experiences are not dreams-there is a reality to them that I cannot shake. Sleep Paralysis, OBE and NDE are so intertwined and hard to understand. Could they be tricks of the brain? Are they "real"?
I also had PSTD after my NDE-because of something I experienced in an OBE after my initial MICU stay. I would have flashbacks of this experience over and over again-sometimes while driving. It freaked me out! :-) (This OBE experience that I refer to was a bad one-one where I encountered something terrifying that I will not share on HubPages).
You were healed in some way by this light and I think this is beautiful. Thank you for sharing your experience with us.
Thank you K.D. Clement--I have heard of terrifying encounters during OBEs and during sleep paralysis, and I am not convinced they are only a trick of the brain. It does seem that these kinds of experiences are related in some way, but there do seem to be more questions than answers. Thank you for your comment.
Thank you for posting this. I've known many people who had NDE experiences and I've had a few spiritual experiences in my life too.
What's telling, and chilling in this account is the very real threat that anyone who has a spiritual experience of that debt runs the risk of it being pathologized and literally being locked up for indefinite potential life sentence with psychological pressure and harassment to deny the experience -- however positive it may be.
I wound up facing that risk over various physical disorders with clear undeniable symptoms that I didn't know at the time resembled the side effects of long term use of antipsychotic drugs. The body motions and gestures needed to relieve various chronic physical pains and the results of muscle spasms caused by my skeletal abnormalities and unusual physical stresses look like tics that psychotics have -- and until very, very recently I had no real proof that these weren't some kind of psychosis.
The only thing I had to hang onto for my sanity was knowing I wasn't a threat to self or others -- and that for all the times I thought of suicide when the chronic physical pain reached the suicide level, the more I knew I wouldn't because I also knew from experience that the pain would pass if I did certain home-remedy things like distraction, the meditations that sometimes led to those spiritual experiences directly and various physical comforts none of which are available in any psych ward.
Being different is a crime that isn't a crime and there's a big whopping area where freedom of religion is a joke and you can be not-jailed for your beliefs, even when those beliefs do not do a dang thing but make it easier for you to get through another hard day.
There's something wrong with it in a big way and the drugs with all their dangers are overprescribed. They can get prescribed for cultural differences or lack of foreign language skills. I remember that a Chinese man from a fairly rare to travel region got locked up as schizophrenic and speaking his own private language for 30 years until someone visiting someone else in the institution happened to hear him -- it wasn't Mandarin, but he was speaking intelligibly and the visitor eventually got him reevaluated with an interpreter. It turned out to be a plot by relatives to get hold of his assets, which they succeeded in doing.
I have had two good therapists in my life, both of whom mostly were educating me in various things that I hadn't learned given my hard life, things I'd never experienced or understood from outside. Out of hundreds of dangerous therapists who left me worse off than if I'd never gone into their offices and always riding a razor edge of terror that some point of conscience or worldview, some private matter of my internal self organization would be unspeakably horrifying to them and I'd lose all my civil rights.
So thank you for sharing that particular fear too -- it's a common but intensely personal human experience and one that carries so many risks in real life that it's probably grossly underreported.
Hi robert,
It's true, religious experience is pretty much indistinguishable from psychosis, and the pressure to 'conform' experientially is intense from all sides. Historically speaking, mental hospitals have always been places that political dissidents and marginalized groups could be locked up indefinitely without recourse.
I've been thinking about a hub on drugs for some time now but haven't been able to get an angle that sounds right. Basically I think we are all being overmedicated to no good end, and that often these medications just allow us to stay in the very situations that made us sick in the first place. Then, when we develop side effects from the medications, we can get more medications for the side effects. It's all about money and conformity. It's very disturbing.
That said, I think anomalous experiences are actually quite 'normal', and if people felt freer to speak of them without stigma or ridicule, they would.
Thanks for your thoughts, as always.
Thank you pgrundy for responding to this request. What can I say except that your writing unified a number of requests that I have been putting out there as a way of understanding.
We are Hormonal Beings - The Subtleties of Perimenopause
Dissolving into Wholeness - The Moment of Oneness with Nature – Zen and the Art of Being
Is perception an individual's truth?
Does Time Really Exist?
Do you think mental illness is linked to the endocrine system?
The last one, especially, is one that I think more and more about as I counsel those around me. The subtlies of our hormones and the incredible realities that come forth. Your words just unified a number of these requests for me. Many thanks.
Thank you reggie, I'm so glad. Sometimes it's scary to speak personally and honestly but usually when I do it I discover someone else can relate, and that makes it worth the risk. All the best to you!
near death is scary thing to happen and I have been several time with this I guess,when I got look a heart attack when I sleep,that is scary cause my "NO audio scream "make me hostage by myself inside,it like my body is my tube that I wish I should not has
This is a very interesting story. Thank you for sharing your epierience with us. I have had an OBE also. It was when I was a child. I remember seeing my body lying on the ground and I was floating up. I could see the top of houses. Then, I came back into my body.
Furthermore, I can relate to the anxiety. I went through this for about a year. I wrote a hub about it. I remember feeling like "things were not real." I thought I was going insane and would be locked away forever. However, I managed to overcome it and am doing much better now.
Great Hub!
Thank you for sharing that, Useful Knowledge. I think these kinds of experiences are really more common than most people think. I appreciate you taking the time to comment. :)
Fascinating experience-- if that doesn't sound too Spockish, because I tend to be a logical type.
I can say that I have had a similar experience-- not quite so intense I think, but after this mini-enlightenment, I later became uncomfortable with my ability to 'see through' people as if I could know their thoughts.
A lack of faith perhaps, but most of this gift was removed. The remnants that remain are... that I know there is a good, positive and powerful presence in charge. I try to honor that , though my hub on NDE regarding publishing is more corporeal.
I have read several books about this very subject and these people who experience NDE come from all walks of life; all religions (or no religion); all educational backgrounds, etc., and the related experience is much the same for everyone. Those that are religious believe that God is at the end of the tunnel of light, and those that are not still feel a warm welcoming feeling.
Just because we cannot "prove" such things does not mean it does not exist. I believe that it does exist and most people come back from the experience no longer afraid of death.
Great hub!
Hi Rochelle--I took something similar away. I've read lots of physiological explanations but haven't found any of them terribly compelling. Some experiences seem to be in a whole different category. Thanks for your thoughts on this.
Peggy W--It does seem to be a fairly universal experience. That's kind of reassuring in a way. Thank for stopping by.
Enlydia Listener says:
7 months ago
Thanks for sharing that experience...I have always been intrigued with stories like that...my husband told me reluctantly about an experience that could be somewhat classified as a NDE...he had just taken a Vioxx (which has been taken off the market)....he was sitting in armchair...and he felt himself raising out of his body...his conscious part continued to rise through one floor of the house and then through the attic...until he was high above the house....he looked down and would have continued ...but he said NO! and refused to ascend...then he went back down into his body...my husband says he is a nuts and bolts person...he is not given into fantasy...so I believe that the experience was true...though on what level of truth, who can say? I think it sounds like your experience was help sent by God during a rough time when no one else was able to help you...