Near Death and Out of Body Experiences
Table of Contents
Click on the title to go directly to that story, or scroll down the page.
Click on the title to go directly to that story, or scroll down the page.
Near Death Experiences (NDEs) and Out of Body Experiences (BOEs) have been reported for hundreds of years. Just recently, a French medical record from 1740 was discovered which contains the oldest known reference to a near-death experience. People from all walks of life, both children and adults, have had Near Death and Out of Body experiences, and most consider them to be life-altering events.
At the end of 2016 I began conducting interviews with people who have had Near Death and/or Out of Body Experiences. What started as a short article on the subject has grown to a fascinating collection of first-hand accounts of NDEs and OBEs.
The stories you are about to read are true. All are in the exact words of those who experienced them. The only time you'll "hear" my voice is when I ask some clarifying questions.
My sincere thanks to those who participated in this on-going project. If you or anyone you know have had similar experiences please contact me via my contact page.
Note: Barry Pirro holds the exclusive copyright to all content on this page, and on this website.
At the end of 2016 I began conducting interviews with people who have had Near Death and/or Out of Body Experiences. What started as a short article on the subject has grown to a fascinating collection of first-hand accounts of NDEs and OBEs.
The stories you are about to read are true. All are in the exact words of those who experienced them. The only time you'll "hear" my voice is when I ask some clarifying questions.
My sincere thanks to those who participated in this on-going project. If you or anyone you know have had similar experiences please contact me via my contact page.
Note: Barry Pirro holds the exclusive copyright to all content on this page, and on this website.
Cradled in the Light
On May 1st of 2000 it started raining, and it didn’t stop raining for twenty days. There had been a lot of thick fog and the weather was just so unpredictable. My car was in the shop getting fixed and I was given a loaner car. The brakes were soft on the loaner car and I thought, “I’m just using it going back and forth to work. It’ll be fine.” I didn’t bring the car back and I choose to drive it.
It was around one in the afternoon, and it was incredibly dark, foggy and rainy. I was out running errands while my son was at a birthday party. I was on Highland Road when the brakes failed on the car. They just completely went out. It was so foggy that I couldn’t see five feet in front of me. I didn’t want to hurt anybody else, and I knew that I would have to crash the car but I couldn’t see anything. I knew that the local church was down the street and that there was a statue of the Virgin Mary out front, and I thought, “Well, I can always aim for that. If I get to the bottom of the hill I know that I can try to hit that and it’ll stop me rather than hitting one of the big oak trees that are there.”
I was picking up speed, and my car went over the double yellow line on the driver’s side. There were two kids in a Ford pickup coming around the corner towards me and they were over the yellow line as well and we hit head-on. The estimate of the combined speed of our cars was 90 to 110 miles per hour.
The weirdest thing was that the only thing I saw was headlights, and yet there was this really strange sensation that I looked direction into the driver’s eyes before we crashed. Even though I really couldn’t see him, it was as if our eyes met and I remember saying, “I am so sorry.” I was shaking my head and saying, “I’m so sorry” and I just gripped the wheel as tight as I could. I remember hearing the crash and the sound of metal crunching, but I didn’t feel any pain.
I remember feeling the wind being knocked out of me, but I didn’t feel any pain at all. And immediately I felt that I was floating, then all of a sudden I was in this bright, really white-hot intense light, and I knew that I was with a being. It felt as if I was being cradled like a baby in the arms of something much bigger than myself. I was just curled up, curled up in a ball the way you would hold a sleeping child, you know, with your arm under their knees. And I felt like I was sinking so comfortably into the chest of this being, and there was this telepathic communication between us. It didn’t speak to me in a man’s voice or a woman’s voice, it was pure communication -- a knowing, a dialog.
I said, “OK, OK. Now you’ve got me. Am I alive or am I dead? What are you going to do with me, am I alive or am I dead? Let’s get on with this,.” That’s very much the way I am. I don’t want grass growing under my feet, let’s get on with this, come on. It said, “I love to hold you, but you have to go back.” I said, “What if I don’t want to go back? I like it here.” And in kind of a … like it was thinking that I was funny, you know? Almost like “Silly girl. You need to go back.” I said, “But I really like it here and don’t want to. This feels so good.” And I felt no pain.
I felt completely relaxed, and I felt like I was absolutely surrounded by love. It was so full of love, and it was so comforting and so relaxing. It was a feeling of love like I have never, ever felt before in my life. More intense than the love that you feel for your parents, or like how much you love your children. So intense that I didn’t want to leave it.
Barry: Did you get the sense that there was more than one being there, or just the one?
Just the one being. It didn’t feel like there was anyone there waiting for me, like deceased relatives or anything like that. I didn’t go through a tunnel towards the light, just all of a sudden I was in this bright, bright, light. It was just as if I had been plucked from my body right before the point of impact; as if my soul was either thrown right out of my body, or something pulled my soul out of my body.
I felt no pain and I was still cradled there and I said, “I don’t want to go back.” And the message that I got from this being was, “You have to go back. You’re not finished yet.” And, I was not happy about it. I just remember I was NOT happy. It said, “You’re going to go back. I’m letting go of you.” And I felt like I was being like sucked through a vacuum, sucked through a vortex really, really quickly and I was saying, “Wait, wait. I don’t want to go.” And it said, “You have to go back, you’re not finished yet.” And it said, “I will be with you, don’t be afraid. I’ll always be with you, don’t be afraid.”
It was telling me to look for the lights and I’d be OK. And I’m saying, “Wait, what lights? What lights?” It said, “Look for the lights and you’ll be OK.” And then that’s when that bright light I was in started to get smaller and smaller and smaller.
Suddenly, I felt like I hit my body so hard, right in my sternum, right in my heart. I just felt this really sharp pain at that moment and my eyes opened and I gasped for air. I kept hearing it still, ”Look for the lights." There was just that knowing, that telepathic thing going on; and I felt as if something was sitting behind me, in the seat right behind me, and that a hand was on my shoulder that gave me a reassuring squeeze on my shoulder. And it said, “I’ll be with you. You’re going to be OK. I will always be with you. Look for the lights.”
I was trying to make sense of what was going on. The airbag was right up to where my nose was, so the only field of vision I had was as if I had sunglasses on, like just right around my eyes? The windshield was broken and the whole front of the car was pushed back into me. The glass was so close to my eyes that I felt that if I blinked I was going to flick the glass into my eyes because it was just so shattered, like spiderwebbed. And I was like, “OK, I don’t know what else is wrong with me but I know I have my eyes so I’m not going to blink.” And I could still feel this hand, like, this little squeeze on my shoulder and it started to get lighter and lighter, and then I started to see red flickering lights in the glass. Those were the lights that it told me to look for, that I would be OK, and it was the lights of the state trooper with the ambulance coming right behind it.
I believe that during the time that I was with that being, I believe in my gut that I was not alive. Even though there was no medical professional there to take my pulse or do anything, I believe I was dead. I believe that it caught me, stayed with me, and then said, “You’re going back.”
I didn’t see my body, I wasn’t looking down at myself, not then. But here’s what happened. It took them two and a half hours to extract me from the car. They didn’t know how they should do it because the dashboard was down on my leg and kind of holding my leg and stopping me from bleeding out. They weren’t really sure how they should do it without basically my leg being taken off my body because there was nothing there to hold my leg on my body except my skin. All of the bones were broken. So they were trying to save my leg, they were trying to save my life.
I remember when they were going to pull me out of the car and finally get me on a bodyboard, I was like an animal. I understand why animals chew their legs off to get out of a trap. It was just unbelievable pain. I guess I had passed out from the pain at one point, but I remember seeing my body as if I was floating about ten to fifteen feet over myself.
I remember seeing them cutting my sneakers off my feet, and cutting my sweatpants off my body, and they exposed my leg, and when they got me onto the board I remember seeing my leg flop like a wet noodle. I looked like I was unconscious or dead when I was out of my body watching. But I knew I wasn’t dead because I was told it was going to be OK, and that I couldn’t stay there even though I didn’t want to come back.
Barry: Did you have any emotions while you were looking at this?
When I was looking down at them, when I saw my leg in the condition it was in, that’s when it felt like it took my breath away. I was so sad. I had been an athlete, you know? I had that emotion that I was sad but yet, I held on to what that being had told me; that I was going to be OK. I believed a hundred percent that I was not alone.
I saw the flickering lights, and then the state trooper showed up. It was pouring rain, and my window was down about three inches because I had been trying to keep the inside of the car from fogging up. The trooper put his hand into the window, and he was stroking my cheek and I looked at him out of the corner of my eye and he said, “Oh, Thank God.”
I was so endearing to that state trooper. He was trying to call my family, and he was talking to me. He asked, “Is there anything I can do for you?” And I was like, “Yeah.” And he asked, “What?” I said, “I hate those hats you guys wear. I can’t stand trooper hats.” And he goes, “What?” And I said, “I hate those hats you guys wear. Can you take that fucking hat off?” (laughs) And it’s pouring rain, he had that stupid raincoat thing on his hat, you know? I was just thinking, “Oh God, if that’s the last thing I’m going to see I don’t want to look at that!” And he said, “You know what -- you got it.” And he stood there in the rain for hours without his hat on.
Barry: When you were watching this scene below you, could you hear what was going on?
No, it was very quiet. I was just watching what was going on, but I knew it was me that I was seeing down there. I knew completely it was my body that I was observing. And I knew that the trooper was there. I knew the trooper because as I floated above the scene I remember seeing him standing there and he still didn’t have his hat on. I was just kind of observing the whole scene, but it was just so endearing to me to see that the trooper had kept his hat off for me the whole time.
Barry: How long do you think you were out observing this, and were you aware of going back in?
I wasn’t aware really of going back into my body that time, not like the first time. I remember seeing them put me in the ambulance, and then I remember waking up in the ambulance with my sister when we were on our way to the hospital.
It’s hard for me to say how long I was out of my body because I couldn’t really put any sense of time to it because there is no sense of time when you’re there. It’s just watching. I tried looking back through my reports because it was interesting to me. I wondered, “How long was it after the accident before the trooper got there? “How long was I gone?” But I can’t put it together.
Barry: Did you get a sense that your religion was part of the experience? Did you think of this being as God?
I was raised Protestant, but I’m not really religious. I’m very spiritual, but I’m not really religious. I do believe in angels, and for a while that’s kind of what I felt this was - a messenger from God, an angel. But it seems to have shifted over time because my spirituality seems to change and shift as my life goes on. So I believe that there is a God. I believe that there’s a higher power. At the time that this happened to me I felt like I was in the arms of an angel. But I look at it now as something that was much, much bigger than that.
Barry: So more like God than an angel.
So I guess it would be. Yeah, that it was more like God to me.
Barry: Did you learn anything about life after this experience?
What I discovered over time is that I came back like an empath on steroids! I can feel people’s emotions. I didn’t know what was happening to me in the beginning. I would walk into a supermarket and feel like I was being smacked all over the place, beaten up by people’s emotions. I couldn’t block it. So I was taking on all of these emotions -- this one’s pissed off at her husband; that one is laughing at her kid; that one feels really depressed. It was as though I was sponging all of these emotions in all at once, plus my own emotions, and I had such a hard time handling it.
Barry: Are you able to block it now?
I’m a lot better with it because I have to block it to protect myself and to keep myself sane. If somebody is really hurting, I feel that sadness and all I want to do is help them and try to reassure that that’s it’s going to be OK. You know, if somebody is really angry, it scares the hell out of me. But I am able to block it now.
Barry: Do you also know why they’re angry, or do you just feel the emotions? Do you get information as well?
I do get some information. A lot of people go through these intense emotions and what I learned is that it’s always based on fear. I get plenty of chance in the summer here, the supermarket, the Stop and Shop is so crowded! I can tell that this one is pissed off that they’re in the supermarket and they’re not going to the beach, and that one’s mad at her husband, and that one’s kid just misbehaved. I don’t have to see it. I just feel it. I know.
Barry: How has the experience changed your life besides the empathy feelings?
I’m not afraid, I’m not afraid to die. I have no fear of dying. In fact, I do elder care now. I became a licensed Certified Nursing Assistant when I moved. I’m with people who are on the last leg of their journey. I’ve been able to talk to some people about that when they were near death, or I when can see them fading and I know that it’s coming. I feel like I’ve been put there as a reassurance because these are people who have been afraid.
On May 1st of 2000 it started raining, and it didn’t stop raining for twenty days. There had been a lot of thick fog and the weather was just so unpredictable. My car was in the shop getting fixed and I was given a loaner car. The brakes were soft on the loaner car and I thought, “I’m just using it going back and forth to work. It’ll be fine.” I didn’t bring the car back and I choose to drive it.
It was around one in the afternoon, and it was incredibly dark, foggy and rainy. I was out running errands while my son was at a birthday party. I was on Highland Road when the brakes failed on the car. They just completely went out. It was so foggy that I couldn’t see five feet in front of me. I didn’t want to hurt anybody else, and I knew that I would have to crash the car but I couldn’t see anything. I knew that the local church was down the street and that there was a statue of the Virgin Mary out front, and I thought, “Well, I can always aim for that. If I get to the bottom of the hill I know that I can try to hit that and it’ll stop me rather than hitting one of the big oak trees that are there.”
I was picking up speed, and my car went over the double yellow line on the driver’s side. There were two kids in a Ford pickup coming around the corner towards me and they were over the yellow line as well and we hit head-on. The estimate of the combined speed of our cars was 90 to 110 miles per hour.
The weirdest thing was that the only thing I saw was headlights, and yet there was this really strange sensation that I looked direction into the driver’s eyes before we crashed. Even though I really couldn’t see him, it was as if our eyes met and I remember saying, “I am so sorry.” I was shaking my head and saying, “I’m so sorry” and I just gripped the wheel as tight as I could. I remember hearing the crash and the sound of metal crunching, but I didn’t feel any pain.
I remember feeling the wind being knocked out of me, but I didn’t feel any pain at all. And immediately I felt that I was floating, then all of a sudden I was in this bright, really white-hot intense light, and I knew that I was with a being. It felt as if I was being cradled like a baby in the arms of something much bigger than myself. I was just curled up, curled up in a ball the way you would hold a sleeping child, you know, with your arm under their knees. And I felt like I was sinking so comfortably into the chest of this being, and there was this telepathic communication between us. It didn’t speak to me in a man’s voice or a woman’s voice, it was pure communication -- a knowing, a dialog.
I said, “OK, OK. Now you’ve got me. Am I alive or am I dead? What are you going to do with me, am I alive or am I dead? Let’s get on with this,.” That’s very much the way I am. I don’t want grass growing under my feet, let’s get on with this, come on. It said, “I love to hold you, but you have to go back.” I said, “What if I don’t want to go back? I like it here.” And in kind of a … like it was thinking that I was funny, you know? Almost like “Silly girl. You need to go back.” I said, “But I really like it here and don’t want to. This feels so good.” And I felt no pain.
I felt completely relaxed, and I felt like I was absolutely surrounded by love. It was so full of love, and it was so comforting and so relaxing. It was a feeling of love like I have never, ever felt before in my life. More intense than the love that you feel for your parents, or like how much you love your children. So intense that I didn’t want to leave it.
Barry: Did you get the sense that there was more than one being there, or just the one?
Just the one being. It didn’t feel like there was anyone there waiting for me, like deceased relatives or anything like that. I didn’t go through a tunnel towards the light, just all of a sudden I was in this bright, bright, light. It was just as if I had been plucked from my body right before the point of impact; as if my soul was either thrown right out of my body, or something pulled my soul out of my body.
I felt no pain and I was still cradled there and I said, “I don’t want to go back.” And the message that I got from this being was, “You have to go back. You’re not finished yet.” And, I was not happy about it. I just remember I was NOT happy. It said, “You’re going to go back. I’m letting go of you.” And I felt like I was being like sucked through a vacuum, sucked through a vortex really, really quickly and I was saying, “Wait, wait. I don’t want to go.” And it said, “You have to go back, you’re not finished yet.” And it said, “I will be with you, don’t be afraid. I’ll always be with you, don’t be afraid.”
It was telling me to look for the lights and I’d be OK. And I’m saying, “Wait, what lights? What lights?” It said, “Look for the lights and you’ll be OK.” And then that’s when that bright light I was in started to get smaller and smaller and smaller.
Suddenly, I felt like I hit my body so hard, right in my sternum, right in my heart. I just felt this really sharp pain at that moment and my eyes opened and I gasped for air. I kept hearing it still, ”Look for the lights." There was just that knowing, that telepathic thing going on; and I felt as if something was sitting behind me, in the seat right behind me, and that a hand was on my shoulder that gave me a reassuring squeeze on my shoulder. And it said, “I’ll be with you. You’re going to be OK. I will always be with you. Look for the lights.”
I was trying to make sense of what was going on. The airbag was right up to where my nose was, so the only field of vision I had was as if I had sunglasses on, like just right around my eyes? The windshield was broken and the whole front of the car was pushed back into me. The glass was so close to my eyes that I felt that if I blinked I was going to flick the glass into my eyes because it was just so shattered, like spiderwebbed. And I was like, “OK, I don’t know what else is wrong with me but I know I have my eyes so I’m not going to blink.” And I could still feel this hand, like, this little squeeze on my shoulder and it started to get lighter and lighter, and then I started to see red flickering lights in the glass. Those were the lights that it told me to look for, that I would be OK, and it was the lights of the state trooper with the ambulance coming right behind it.
I believe that during the time that I was with that being, I believe in my gut that I was not alive. Even though there was no medical professional there to take my pulse or do anything, I believe I was dead. I believe that it caught me, stayed with me, and then said, “You’re going back.”
I didn’t see my body, I wasn’t looking down at myself, not then. But here’s what happened. It took them two and a half hours to extract me from the car. They didn’t know how they should do it because the dashboard was down on my leg and kind of holding my leg and stopping me from bleeding out. They weren’t really sure how they should do it without basically my leg being taken off my body because there was nothing there to hold my leg on my body except my skin. All of the bones were broken. So they were trying to save my leg, they were trying to save my life.
I remember when they were going to pull me out of the car and finally get me on a bodyboard, I was like an animal. I understand why animals chew their legs off to get out of a trap. It was just unbelievable pain. I guess I had passed out from the pain at one point, but I remember seeing my body as if I was floating about ten to fifteen feet over myself.
I remember seeing them cutting my sneakers off my feet, and cutting my sweatpants off my body, and they exposed my leg, and when they got me onto the board I remember seeing my leg flop like a wet noodle. I looked like I was unconscious or dead when I was out of my body watching. But I knew I wasn’t dead because I was told it was going to be OK, and that I couldn’t stay there even though I didn’t want to come back.
Barry: Did you have any emotions while you were looking at this?
When I was looking down at them, when I saw my leg in the condition it was in, that’s when it felt like it took my breath away. I was so sad. I had been an athlete, you know? I had that emotion that I was sad but yet, I held on to what that being had told me; that I was going to be OK. I believed a hundred percent that I was not alone.
I saw the flickering lights, and then the state trooper showed up. It was pouring rain, and my window was down about three inches because I had been trying to keep the inside of the car from fogging up. The trooper put his hand into the window, and he was stroking my cheek and I looked at him out of the corner of my eye and he said, “Oh, Thank God.”
I was so endearing to that state trooper. He was trying to call my family, and he was talking to me. He asked, “Is there anything I can do for you?” And I was like, “Yeah.” And he asked, “What?” I said, “I hate those hats you guys wear. I can’t stand trooper hats.” And he goes, “What?” And I said, “I hate those hats you guys wear. Can you take that fucking hat off?” (laughs) And it’s pouring rain, he had that stupid raincoat thing on his hat, you know? I was just thinking, “Oh God, if that’s the last thing I’m going to see I don’t want to look at that!” And he said, “You know what -- you got it.” And he stood there in the rain for hours without his hat on.
Barry: When you were watching this scene below you, could you hear what was going on?
No, it was very quiet. I was just watching what was going on, but I knew it was me that I was seeing down there. I knew completely it was my body that I was observing. And I knew that the trooper was there. I knew the trooper because as I floated above the scene I remember seeing him standing there and he still didn’t have his hat on. I was just kind of observing the whole scene, but it was just so endearing to me to see that the trooper had kept his hat off for me the whole time.
Barry: How long do you think you were out observing this, and were you aware of going back in?
I wasn’t aware really of going back into my body that time, not like the first time. I remember seeing them put me in the ambulance, and then I remember waking up in the ambulance with my sister when we were on our way to the hospital.
It’s hard for me to say how long I was out of my body because I couldn’t really put any sense of time to it because there is no sense of time when you’re there. It’s just watching. I tried looking back through my reports because it was interesting to me. I wondered, “How long was it after the accident before the trooper got there? “How long was I gone?” But I can’t put it together.
Barry: Did you get a sense that your religion was part of the experience? Did you think of this being as God?
I was raised Protestant, but I’m not really religious. I’m very spiritual, but I’m not really religious. I do believe in angels, and for a while that’s kind of what I felt this was - a messenger from God, an angel. But it seems to have shifted over time because my spirituality seems to change and shift as my life goes on. So I believe that there is a God. I believe that there’s a higher power. At the time that this happened to me I felt like I was in the arms of an angel. But I look at it now as something that was much, much bigger than that.
Barry: So more like God than an angel.
So I guess it would be. Yeah, that it was more like God to me.
Barry: Did you learn anything about life after this experience?
What I discovered over time is that I came back like an empath on steroids! I can feel people’s emotions. I didn’t know what was happening to me in the beginning. I would walk into a supermarket and feel like I was being smacked all over the place, beaten up by people’s emotions. I couldn’t block it. So I was taking on all of these emotions -- this one’s pissed off at her husband; that one is laughing at her kid; that one feels really depressed. It was as though I was sponging all of these emotions in all at once, plus my own emotions, and I had such a hard time handling it.
Barry: Are you able to block it now?
I’m a lot better with it because I have to block it to protect myself and to keep myself sane. If somebody is really hurting, I feel that sadness and all I want to do is help them and try to reassure that that’s it’s going to be OK. You know, if somebody is really angry, it scares the hell out of me. But I am able to block it now.
Barry: Do you also know why they’re angry, or do you just feel the emotions? Do you get information as well?
I do get some information. A lot of people go through these intense emotions and what I learned is that it’s always based on fear. I get plenty of chance in the summer here, the supermarket, the Stop and Shop is so crowded! I can tell that this one is pissed off that they’re in the supermarket and they’re not going to the beach, and that one’s mad at her husband, and that one’s kid just misbehaved. I don’t have to see it. I just feel it. I know.
Barry: How has the experience changed your life besides the empathy feelings?
I’m not afraid, I’m not afraid to die. I have no fear of dying. In fact, I do elder care now. I became a licensed Certified Nursing Assistant when I moved. I’m with people who are on the last leg of their journey. I’ve been able to talk to some people about that when they were near death, or I when can see them fading and I know that it’s coming. I feel like I’ve been put there as a reassurance because these are people who have been afraid.
The following interview comes from Patricia Bassette. I interviewed Patricia on a cold, snowy day in January of 2017 at her house in Carmel, New York. I will never forget sitting in Patricia's cozy living room, listening to her talk about her emotional, life-changing experience as the snow fell softly outside the windows. Patricia is an artist, Intuitive Medium, and Reiki Master. The artwork above, and at the end of the story is Patricia's.
Life From Above
We used to spend our summers as children on Fire Island. My parents would rent a house out there in mid-June, and we would literally stay there through the beginning of September. We wouldn’t leave the island until we went back to school, so we spent a lot of time by the ocean.
During the summer of 1972, when I was eighteen years old, I was at the beach with a friend. He said to me, “Look, Pat. See the waves breaking way out there? That’s a sign of a sandbar. How about we swim out there and stand on the sandbar.” I said, “Sure, OK.” So I literally walked into the ocean into my own Near Death Experience.
We got into the water and began to swim. We swam and swam and swam, but we never reached a sandbar. During that time, which was about 20 minutes, the waves continued to get bigger and closer and closer together. The only thing I could do to survive was each time a wave came, I would plummet down below the wave into the water so I wouldn’t get tossed around, and then come back up for air. I wasn’t thinking about getting to the sandbar any longer - I was just thinking about survival.
As my friend and I battled the waves I remember trying to cling on to him, and him begging me not to pull him under. But there was a time when I went down and I never came back up, and it was at that point that I left my body. I know that I went to the other side because I was now up in the sky looking down at the experience that was happening.
I didn’t know this at the time, but what was happening was there was a solar eclipse going on. As a result, the tides got very violent very quickly. As I looked down I could see helicopters on the beach rescuing people. There were many people that day who drowned or almost drowned and were taken away in helicopters. There were also lifeboats in the ocean rescuing people, and there were many people gathered on the beach. As all of this was going on I was about a half-mile up in the sky looking down at the experience. And then I was met by crowds of people.
They were gathered in groups, in layers up in the sky, and they were all standing in a light which was very bright. In the distance were more groups of people, majestic people floating together, all in different layers in the light. There were some over there, and there were some over here, and there were some here; and I gravitated toward a group that I felt were waiting for me. All this time there was a complete sense of peace, surrounded by love and support, and I had a sense that they were welcoming me.
While I was with this group of people I had the experience of seeing my whole life flash before me, from when I was a baby, to a toddler, to a pre-schooler -- every stage of my life. It was presented to me just like a film strip, like watching a filmstrip really quickly. These were not just random flashes of events from my life. It was my entire life shown to me linearly, in order. I wasn’t asked if I wanted see this -- I didn’t have a choice about it. I had to watch it.
Barry: Were you just being shown the things you did that hurt people? Or, were you also shown the good stuff?
I was shown everything, the good and the bad. I think it was seeing all of the good stuff, seeing the unbelievable love and the kind heart that I had which drove me to go back. That is what helped me to want to go back.
Barry: Did you also see how the things you did in life affected people?
Most definitely.
Barry: So, it wasn’t like you thought, “Oh look, I just gave that person in need some money.”
No. Because that’s the ego. This wasn’t about the ego. This was much more empathic. It was a much more expansive perspective. That’s what’s going to happen, you see? That’s what’s going to happen when you get to the other side. You’re going to get the expansiveness that you don’t have here.
Barry: Did you feel that the sense of love was coming from one being, or did you feel that the love was all around the place you were in?
The sense of love was everywhere. It was collective -- collectively given. But it was more like just a sense of an energy which conveyed the message, “It’s all good, all collective. We’re all here for you. There’s no fear. There’s no worry. There’s no danger. We’re all one.” There was no reason for one person to step forward over another. Everything that was communicated was collective.
Barry: Did you associate the experience you had with the religion you were raised?
Not at all. I was raised Presbyterian and baptized Catholic. But I didn’t come up with “God” while I was there. I didn’t feel that I was “one with God”. The experience has broadened my perspective on the force that’s there for us to draw on in order to help us on this path. I have a very omni-faith belief. I believe that the force that created us, the Buddha, the Divine, God -- I believe that it is within all of us to awaken and to tap into at any moment in time that we need to. It is not something that is outside of us, it is everywhere here. And it was everywhere on the other side, the collective universal energy force that created us.
Barry: So, you are there with these groups of beings and you are totally at peace, and yet you came back. Were you given a choice to stay or to come back?
I was definitely given a choice. There came a time when I was specifically asked, “Are you ready to stay, or do you want to go back?” I remember my answer was very explicit, “I have to go back. I have too much love to give. I’m not done. I have to go back.” So, I went. I came back! I didn’t want to come back, but I came back.
I was rather young, so there may have been some sense of guidance. But I was so absolutely certain that I had to come back, there were no if-ands-or-buts about it. As much as I wanted to stay I knew that I had love to give this world. A lot of love. That’s my mission here, to spread more light one person at a time, and I just knew that I had to do that. There was no question in my mind that I had to do it. I was rushing back to my assignment!
I came back to life in my body very quickly while it was still under the water, and everything had changed. I was now strong, and completely ready to fight the tides. I went forth with this adrenaline to swim as fast as I could, and I began to hear voices calling me in the distance. “Come on, you can do it. You can reach us. We’re here.” I couldn’t see them but I could hear them, and after a while I could see through the fog the vision of the boat. This big boat rocking in the ocean became visible to me and I swam towards it. I got to the boat and was pulled up onto the boat. My friend was already on that boat, and I remember feeling very nauseous. I was vomiting a lot, throwing up a lot of seawater, but I don’t remember any other physical pain.
When were brought back to shore my mother and father were waiting for me, but the way they greeted me was extremely violent and traumatic. They were just so angry at me. “Come on Patti. Come on. What the hell were you doing? Come now. Be quiet. Don’t talk. Just follow us. You’re not leaving our sight ever for a long time. Look what you did, you bad girl.” So, at that moment in time I think the whole experience completely suppressed into my subconscious. I went into a deep depression in my life. I was forbidden to go anywhere near the friend who I had had this experience with, so I had no one to share my experience with and it went deep into my subconsciousness for many, many many years.
I’m an artist, a photographer. As I looked back on all my pictures, I realize that everything in my art was about water. I had a total fascination with water that I didn’t understand at the time, and I even I wrote a book about water in it’s many forms. Shortly afterward I attended the School of Visual Arts, and much of my artwork was also very spiritual. It didn’t register at that time that so much of my artwork depicted a reaching up for the light -- reaching up for the light and prayer, and there was always a theme of this great light in the sky.
Just about the time that I decided to write the book about water, I became involved with a wonderful, wonderful man, Frank. He was a very supportive, very spiritual man. We used to go up to the Buddhist monastery in Kent. One day he and I were meditating there and suddenly the tears began to flow. I didn’t know what they were about, but I couldn’t stop them. I couldn’t stop the tears. I began to share with Frank this experience I had of drowning, of dying and moving into the light and how hard life really had become since then because I had chosen to come back. The tears just flowed and flowed until there was a big puddle on the floor; and because I was with this really supportive person it just all came out.
After that I began to do research and to write about my near death experience. I did everything I could to learn to document my experience in order to to validate how I felt. After doing the research I realized that what I had experienced was not just some craziness. It was real. It was scientifically real. I had left my body -- I had temporarily died, and I had visited the place where we will all eventually go. And I had chosen to come back, which isn’t easy because it’s a lot easier up there.
My journey has taken me to realize the gifts that I came back with after being exposed to this amazing energy, the source of where we were all created. I’m very empathic -- almost too empathic! But meditating has helped me to keep that under control. I am a certified intuitive medium, and I can easily tap into spirits from the other side. I’m a Reiki person, a yoga person, a meditator, and a hospice volunteer. My desire to become a hospice volunteer was to help people transition to the other side.
Am I afraid of dying? Not at all! I have absolutely no fear around death. My children know and understand that when it’s my time to go I don’t want them to try to keep me alive. They respect that because they know about my experience. I’ve done a lot of research and have read a lot about others who have had near death experiences. I would love to be able to connect with more people who have had these types of experiences. I can’t help but wonder if they also struggle with how difficult it really is to be here after having been in the presence of the force of the universe, and how there is this peace and this beauty outside of this physical being.
We used to spend our summers as children on Fire Island. My parents would rent a house out there in mid-June, and we would literally stay there through the beginning of September. We wouldn’t leave the island until we went back to school, so we spent a lot of time by the ocean.
During the summer of 1972, when I was eighteen years old, I was at the beach with a friend. He said to me, “Look, Pat. See the waves breaking way out there? That’s a sign of a sandbar. How about we swim out there and stand on the sandbar.” I said, “Sure, OK.” So I literally walked into the ocean into my own Near Death Experience.
We got into the water and began to swim. We swam and swam and swam, but we never reached a sandbar. During that time, which was about 20 minutes, the waves continued to get bigger and closer and closer together. The only thing I could do to survive was each time a wave came, I would plummet down below the wave into the water so I wouldn’t get tossed around, and then come back up for air. I wasn’t thinking about getting to the sandbar any longer - I was just thinking about survival.
As my friend and I battled the waves I remember trying to cling on to him, and him begging me not to pull him under. But there was a time when I went down and I never came back up, and it was at that point that I left my body. I know that I went to the other side because I was now up in the sky looking down at the experience that was happening.
I didn’t know this at the time, but what was happening was there was a solar eclipse going on. As a result, the tides got very violent very quickly. As I looked down I could see helicopters on the beach rescuing people. There were many people that day who drowned or almost drowned and were taken away in helicopters. There were also lifeboats in the ocean rescuing people, and there were many people gathered on the beach. As all of this was going on I was about a half-mile up in the sky looking down at the experience. And then I was met by crowds of people.
They were gathered in groups, in layers up in the sky, and they were all standing in a light which was very bright. In the distance were more groups of people, majestic people floating together, all in different layers in the light. There were some over there, and there were some over here, and there were some here; and I gravitated toward a group that I felt were waiting for me. All this time there was a complete sense of peace, surrounded by love and support, and I had a sense that they were welcoming me.
While I was with this group of people I had the experience of seeing my whole life flash before me, from when I was a baby, to a toddler, to a pre-schooler -- every stage of my life. It was presented to me just like a film strip, like watching a filmstrip really quickly. These were not just random flashes of events from my life. It was my entire life shown to me linearly, in order. I wasn’t asked if I wanted see this -- I didn’t have a choice about it. I had to watch it.
Barry: Were you just being shown the things you did that hurt people? Or, were you also shown the good stuff?
I was shown everything, the good and the bad. I think it was seeing all of the good stuff, seeing the unbelievable love and the kind heart that I had which drove me to go back. That is what helped me to want to go back.
Barry: Did you also see how the things you did in life affected people?
Most definitely.
Barry: So, it wasn’t like you thought, “Oh look, I just gave that person in need some money.”
No. Because that’s the ego. This wasn’t about the ego. This was much more empathic. It was a much more expansive perspective. That’s what’s going to happen, you see? That’s what’s going to happen when you get to the other side. You’re going to get the expansiveness that you don’t have here.
Barry: Did you feel that the sense of love was coming from one being, or did you feel that the love was all around the place you were in?
The sense of love was everywhere. It was collective -- collectively given. But it was more like just a sense of an energy which conveyed the message, “It’s all good, all collective. We’re all here for you. There’s no fear. There’s no worry. There’s no danger. We’re all one.” There was no reason for one person to step forward over another. Everything that was communicated was collective.
Barry: Did you associate the experience you had with the religion you were raised?
Not at all. I was raised Presbyterian and baptized Catholic. But I didn’t come up with “God” while I was there. I didn’t feel that I was “one with God”. The experience has broadened my perspective on the force that’s there for us to draw on in order to help us on this path. I have a very omni-faith belief. I believe that the force that created us, the Buddha, the Divine, God -- I believe that it is within all of us to awaken and to tap into at any moment in time that we need to. It is not something that is outside of us, it is everywhere here. And it was everywhere on the other side, the collective universal energy force that created us.
Barry: So, you are there with these groups of beings and you are totally at peace, and yet you came back. Were you given a choice to stay or to come back?
I was definitely given a choice. There came a time when I was specifically asked, “Are you ready to stay, or do you want to go back?” I remember my answer was very explicit, “I have to go back. I have too much love to give. I’m not done. I have to go back.” So, I went. I came back! I didn’t want to come back, but I came back.
I was rather young, so there may have been some sense of guidance. But I was so absolutely certain that I had to come back, there were no if-ands-or-buts about it. As much as I wanted to stay I knew that I had love to give this world. A lot of love. That’s my mission here, to spread more light one person at a time, and I just knew that I had to do that. There was no question in my mind that I had to do it. I was rushing back to my assignment!
I came back to life in my body very quickly while it was still under the water, and everything had changed. I was now strong, and completely ready to fight the tides. I went forth with this adrenaline to swim as fast as I could, and I began to hear voices calling me in the distance. “Come on, you can do it. You can reach us. We’re here.” I couldn’t see them but I could hear them, and after a while I could see through the fog the vision of the boat. This big boat rocking in the ocean became visible to me and I swam towards it. I got to the boat and was pulled up onto the boat. My friend was already on that boat, and I remember feeling very nauseous. I was vomiting a lot, throwing up a lot of seawater, but I don’t remember any other physical pain.
When were brought back to shore my mother and father were waiting for me, but the way they greeted me was extremely violent and traumatic. They were just so angry at me. “Come on Patti. Come on. What the hell were you doing? Come now. Be quiet. Don’t talk. Just follow us. You’re not leaving our sight ever for a long time. Look what you did, you bad girl.” So, at that moment in time I think the whole experience completely suppressed into my subconscious. I went into a deep depression in my life. I was forbidden to go anywhere near the friend who I had had this experience with, so I had no one to share my experience with and it went deep into my subconsciousness for many, many many years.
I’m an artist, a photographer. As I looked back on all my pictures, I realize that everything in my art was about water. I had a total fascination with water that I didn’t understand at the time, and I even I wrote a book about water in it’s many forms. Shortly afterward I attended the School of Visual Arts, and much of my artwork was also very spiritual. It didn’t register at that time that so much of my artwork depicted a reaching up for the light -- reaching up for the light and prayer, and there was always a theme of this great light in the sky.
Just about the time that I decided to write the book about water, I became involved with a wonderful, wonderful man, Frank. He was a very supportive, very spiritual man. We used to go up to the Buddhist monastery in Kent. One day he and I were meditating there and suddenly the tears began to flow. I didn’t know what they were about, but I couldn’t stop them. I couldn’t stop the tears. I began to share with Frank this experience I had of drowning, of dying and moving into the light and how hard life really had become since then because I had chosen to come back. The tears just flowed and flowed until there was a big puddle on the floor; and because I was with this really supportive person it just all came out.
After that I began to do research and to write about my near death experience. I did everything I could to learn to document my experience in order to to validate how I felt. After doing the research I realized that what I had experienced was not just some craziness. It was real. It was scientifically real. I had left my body -- I had temporarily died, and I had visited the place where we will all eventually go. And I had chosen to come back, which isn’t easy because it’s a lot easier up there.
My journey has taken me to realize the gifts that I came back with after being exposed to this amazing energy, the source of where we were all created. I’m very empathic -- almost too empathic! But meditating has helped me to keep that under control. I am a certified intuitive medium, and I can easily tap into spirits from the other side. I’m a Reiki person, a yoga person, a meditator, and a hospice volunteer. My desire to become a hospice volunteer was to help people transition to the other side.
Am I afraid of dying? Not at all! I have absolutely no fear around death. My children know and understand that when it’s my time to go I don’t want them to try to keep me alive. They respect that because they know about my experience. I’ve done a lot of research and have read a lot about others who have had near death experiences. I would love to be able to connect with more people who have had these types of experiences. I can’t help but wonder if they also struggle with how difficult it really is to be here after having been in the presence of the force of the universe, and how there is this peace and this beauty outside of this physical being.
In all of my travels as a paranormal investigator, without a doubt the most rewarding experience has been meeting and interviewing those who have had Near Death Experiences. Being in the presence of someone who has actually been to the other side and has come back to talk about it is a very special experience. Those who have had NDEs have a warmth and spiritual quality all their own, and I consider it an honor that I was given the opportunity to put down their experiences in their own words for others to read.
The following interview comes from Laurie Goldsmith Sperandio of Irvington, New York. Laurie taught me that some people don't just return from the other side because they are given a choice or because they are told that it's not their time yet -- Some return because they insist on coming back.
The following interview comes from Laurie Goldsmith Sperandio of Irvington, New York. Laurie taught me that some people don't just return from the other side because they are given a choice or because they are told that it's not their time yet -- Some return because they insist on coming back.
I Have To Go Back!
This happened back in 1978 when I was twenty-seven years old. Even though it happened all those years ago, I remember every second. I was up in the Catskill mountains with my boyfriend. We had been skiing all day, and then we went back to the house. It was night by the time we got back, and we were having some fun playing around in the snow before going inside. At one point my boyfriend picked me up over his head to throw me into a big fluffy snowbank, but he lost his footing and fell down. He was still holding me up over his head, and as he fell my head went straight down into solid ice. I remember everything going black and I absolutely knew, I had no doubt -- I was dead.
I saw my body raise, I saw my parents, I was saying goodbye to my parents. I saw friends, relatives, and there were other figures, but the clearest was so distinctly my parent’s’ faces. It wasn’t as if I was visiting them where they were. I didn’t see my mother in her kitchen or anything like that. It’s was as if I was visually seeing a memory. It was an image of her, but I knew it was her. I was floating in light, and I could see my mother’s face as I floated, my father’s face as I floated. My body was literally looking down at my parents below me, and my whole physical body was above.
B: Did you have a sense of your body, your ethereal body, your spirit body?
No, I just knew that I was floating above. That’s where I saw my parents. I was floating in this light and that’s the other thing -- there’s just nothing I have ever felt since that compares to this lovely, floating, warm light. Cuddling, coddling, happiness. It’s all in one. I still joke to this day, ‘Well I was definitely going to a bright, good place. I wasn’t going to something dark that felt bad!’
B: Were any people waiting for you on the other side?
No. Not at all. I was just floating in light, and the light was drawing me, and drawing me, and drawing me. It was powerful. I was going towards this light. But to simply call the light bright, there are just no words to describe it. It was so bright and so warm, and it drew you in so much that you didn’t want to go the other way. It was the most welcoming thing, and it kept getting brighter and brighter, and then I got to sort of an end of a tunnel. And I knew once I stepped over, I’m never coming back.
B: Did the light appear something that grew bigger and bigger, or did it just start to become light?
At first everything was just black. I knew I was dead. And then all of a sudden I was gone and going.
B: Can you describe the tunnel and the light you were in?
It’s hard to describe the tunnel. It was like this bright, kind of cylinder shaped thing that was drawing me along. A big, round cylinder. That’s why I guess people call it a tunnel. So, it wasn’t like a tunnel the way we think of it. It was cylinder shaped, bright, very warm drawing to the end where there was a huge archway. And I just knew that when I crossed over into the archway I’m never coming back.
Everything was just a brightness, brighter than anything you've ever seen. The brightest, bluest sunniest day doesn’t compare. But it’s warm, and it’s welcoming, and fabulous, and great. It’s everything you want to go to. And at the end the cylinder just became this huge arch, and I just knew that was the end.
I just was in the light. In trying to describe the light, it’s not like I can say, “Think of this painting, it was bright like that.” Maybe if I was an artist I could try to paint it. And I don’t even know if you can. I don’t know that we have the colors or the brightness to do it. There was the arch, and I just knew that if I crossed it, that’s it.
B: Did it look different on the other side of the archway than it did in the tunnel?
I didn’t see it. I never saw the other side of the archway. The arch was the end. I guess that’s the good news. I never had to pass and I never saw. I think if I passed it I wouldn’t be here.
B: Did you feel movement as you went through the tunnel?
I didn’t feel movement, but I was absolutely moving. I was getting closer and closer to the archway. I was moving. And I remember making the decision that I was not ready to go. I remember screaming and yelling and carrying on. “I’m not going. I’m not going!” I remember saying, “This is not the way I want to leave the earth -- that my boyfriend accidentally killed me. That is so not the way I’m OK about leaving with that legacy and hurt of somebody. I don’t want to leave my best friend with the consequence of having accidentally killed me. That’s why I got like screaming and yelling because I felt it pulling me and I didn’t want to go through the archway. But at the same time it felt so phenomenal that part of you did want to go through. And I got real close. I was there when I started to carry on, saying “This is not the way I want to leave the earth. I’m not leaving this way. Not this way.” I knew so strongly that I didn’t want to leave the earth this way. That was not going to work for me.
B: So it wasn’t like you were given a choice to either stay or go back.
I didn’t get a feeling that any being or light or anything was saying, “No, you have to go back.” It felt as if the light wanted me, but I wasn’t choosing the light. This choice of mine not to choose the light was completely based on just not wanting leave the earth this way. There was nothing about the light that was not good. So, I was fighting the light. I was fighting hard. You know … that was the feeling. Fighting hard. I think that if I had the same type of accident skiing by myself, the odds are good that I would have just went with the light. It was just so hard to fight it.
B: Did you get a sense that God was communicating to you?
I’m Jewish by belief, but I didn’t get a sense of a superior being or anything. It wasn’t a particularly religious experience. There were no angels, no supreme being. I saw nothing like that. It was just all a feeling, a feeling and a knowing.There was an overwhelming sense of love. Incredible love, incredible warmth; and like I said, it’s very hard to resist going. Like why would you ever NOT go? The love was something like you have never felt. Incredible love. The best love you can know. And nothing living here on earth can compare, even the birth of my daughter. It was such a different love, so completely that there’s nothing on this earth that goes with it. Nothing at all. Was it peaceful? It was so beyond peaceful, so beyond loving, so beyond warm and good and fabulous and great. There are just no words in our language to describe it. There are no words.
B: I imagine that your boyfriend was frantic while you were laying there.
My boyfriend said that he had carried me into the house and put me on the couch. He had worked in a lot of emergency rooms, but he couldn’t get a pulse, he couldn’t get a heartbeat. He was on the phone calling 911 when I suddenly opened my eyes. He said it was really strange. I just said to him, “I had died, so don’t let me go to sleep again. I don’t know that I can fight it a second time. You have to keep me awake.” And then I started taking control. I said, “We can’t wait for 911. We have to get in your car and get to the hospital, and I’m going to keep snow on my face to stay awake.” Which is what we did.
B: How long did he say you were actually out until you opened your eyes.
He said less than 5 minutes, and you know it could have been a minute because he was so hysterical having thought he had just killed me. When we got the hospital they said that I had a cerebral concussion, and that it was amazing I was even alive. My blood pressure which is normally very low because I’m an athlete, was that of somebody who should have been dead. It was so high it should have killed me.
A doctor came in and said, “What we’re going to do is keep you up through the night.” He said that one of the reason he was afraid to let me fall asleep was where my blood pressure was at. He was afraid that I wasn’t going to wake up from blood pressure that was that high. So they kept me up until the next morning and I was completely fine.
When I was discharged from the hospital the doctors told me that I was going to have memory loss, bad dreams. But the only thing I had, which I didn’t realize it at first, is that I couldn’t remember anybody’s name. For weeks I kept thinking, “Why am I forgetting everybody’s name”. And then it hit me after a couple of weeks. That’s my brain injury! To this day I can’t remember names. It’s such a way of life now that I hardly notice it because as soon as I know I’m going to meet somebody I have a system to remember their name. Like meeting you today, I’ll do something with your name like. “Barry. OK my next door neighbor growing up in the Bronx was Barry.” So that’s how I can kind of remember names.
B: Has NDE experienced changed your view of religion?
I feel there is some kind of supreme “something” out there that probably has nothing to do with all of our organized religions. I feel very strongly that I believe in God and I pray all the time. I just know there’s something. If I was Christian, could I say it’s Jesus? No, I didn’t see Jesus Christ when I was there. I just know that there’s something powerful. I believe strongly that there’s something really powerful listening to us when we pray.
I can't remember if I was afraid to die before, but now except for desperately not wanting to leave my daughter, I am not afraid. I have no doubt there is an afterlife. This "here-and-now" is not all there is. Something much more powerful than us is with us every day.
This happened back in 1978 when I was twenty-seven years old. Even though it happened all those years ago, I remember every second. I was up in the Catskill mountains with my boyfriend. We had been skiing all day, and then we went back to the house. It was night by the time we got back, and we were having some fun playing around in the snow before going inside. At one point my boyfriend picked me up over his head to throw me into a big fluffy snowbank, but he lost his footing and fell down. He was still holding me up over his head, and as he fell my head went straight down into solid ice. I remember everything going black and I absolutely knew, I had no doubt -- I was dead.
I saw my body raise, I saw my parents, I was saying goodbye to my parents. I saw friends, relatives, and there were other figures, but the clearest was so distinctly my parent’s’ faces. It wasn’t as if I was visiting them where they were. I didn’t see my mother in her kitchen or anything like that. It’s was as if I was visually seeing a memory. It was an image of her, but I knew it was her. I was floating in light, and I could see my mother’s face as I floated, my father’s face as I floated. My body was literally looking down at my parents below me, and my whole physical body was above.
B: Did you have a sense of your body, your ethereal body, your spirit body?
No, I just knew that I was floating above. That’s where I saw my parents. I was floating in this light and that’s the other thing -- there’s just nothing I have ever felt since that compares to this lovely, floating, warm light. Cuddling, coddling, happiness. It’s all in one. I still joke to this day, ‘Well I was definitely going to a bright, good place. I wasn’t going to something dark that felt bad!’
B: Were any people waiting for you on the other side?
No. Not at all. I was just floating in light, and the light was drawing me, and drawing me, and drawing me. It was powerful. I was going towards this light. But to simply call the light bright, there are just no words to describe it. It was so bright and so warm, and it drew you in so much that you didn’t want to go the other way. It was the most welcoming thing, and it kept getting brighter and brighter, and then I got to sort of an end of a tunnel. And I knew once I stepped over, I’m never coming back.
B: Did the light appear something that grew bigger and bigger, or did it just start to become light?
At first everything was just black. I knew I was dead. And then all of a sudden I was gone and going.
B: Can you describe the tunnel and the light you were in?
It’s hard to describe the tunnel. It was like this bright, kind of cylinder shaped thing that was drawing me along. A big, round cylinder. That’s why I guess people call it a tunnel. So, it wasn’t like a tunnel the way we think of it. It was cylinder shaped, bright, very warm drawing to the end where there was a huge archway. And I just knew that when I crossed over into the archway I’m never coming back.
Everything was just a brightness, brighter than anything you've ever seen. The brightest, bluest sunniest day doesn’t compare. But it’s warm, and it’s welcoming, and fabulous, and great. It’s everything you want to go to. And at the end the cylinder just became this huge arch, and I just knew that was the end.
I just was in the light. In trying to describe the light, it’s not like I can say, “Think of this painting, it was bright like that.” Maybe if I was an artist I could try to paint it. And I don’t even know if you can. I don’t know that we have the colors or the brightness to do it. There was the arch, and I just knew that if I crossed it, that’s it.
B: Did it look different on the other side of the archway than it did in the tunnel?
I didn’t see it. I never saw the other side of the archway. The arch was the end. I guess that’s the good news. I never had to pass and I never saw. I think if I passed it I wouldn’t be here.
B: Did you feel movement as you went through the tunnel?
I didn’t feel movement, but I was absolutely moving. I was getting closer and closer to the archway. I was moving. And I remember making the decision that I was not ready to go. I remember screaming and yelling and carrying on. “I’m not going. I’m not going!” I remember saying, “This is not the way I want to leave the earth -- that my boyfriend accidentally killed me. That is so not the way I’m OK about leaving with that legacy and hurt of somebody. I don’t want to leave my best friend with the consequence of having accidentally killed me. That’s why I got like screaming and yelling because I felt it pulling me and I didn’t want to go through the archway. But at the same time it felt so phenomenal that part of you did want to go through. And I got real close. I was there when I started to carry on, saying “This is not the way I want to leave the earth. I’m not leaving this way. Not this way.” I knew so strongly that I didn’t want to leave the earth this way. That was not going to work for me.
B: So it wasn’t like you were given a choice to either stay or go back.
I didn’t get a feeling that any being or light or anything was saying, “No, you have to go back.” It felt as if the light wanted me, but I wasn’t choosing the light. This choice of mine not to choose the light was completely based on just not wanting leave the earth this way. There was nothing about the light that was not good. So, I was fighting the light. I was fighting hard. You know … that was the feeling. Fighting hard. I think that if I had the same type of accident skiing by myself, the odds are good that I would have just went with the light. It was just so hard to fight it.
B: Did you get a sense that God was communicating to you?
I’m Jewish by belief, but I didn’t get a sense of a superior being or anything. It wasn’t a particularly religious experience. There were no angels, no supreme being. I saw nothing like that. It was just all a feeling, a feeling and a knowing.There was an overwhelming sense of love. Incredible love, incredible warmth; and like I said, it’s very hard to resist going. Like why would you ever NOT go? The love was something like you have never felt. Incredible love. The best love you can know. And nothing living here on earth can compare, even the birth of my daughter. It was such a different love, so completely that there’s nothing on this earth that goes with it. Nothing at all. Was it peaceful? It was so beyond peaceful, so beyond loving, so beyond warm and good and fabulous and great. There are just no words in our language to describe it. There are no words.
B: I imagine that your boyfriend was frantic while you were laying there.
My boyfriend said that he had carried me into the house and put me on the couch. He had worked in a lot of emergency rooms, but he couldn’t get a pulse, he couldn’t get a heartbeat. He was on the phone calling 911 when I suddenly opened my eyes. He said it was really strange. I just said to him, “I had died, so don’t let me go to sleep again. I don’t know that I can fight it a second time. You have to keep me awake.” And then I started taking control. I said, “We can’t wait for 911. We have to get in your car and get to the hospital, and I’m going to keep snow on my face to stay awake.” Which is what we did.
B: How long did he say you were actually out until you opened your eyes.
He said less than 5 minutes, and you know it could have been a minute because he was so hysterical having thought he had just killed me. When we got the hospital they said that I had a cerebral concussion, and that it was amazing I was even alive. My blood pressure which is normally very low because I’m an athlete, was that of somebody who should have been dead. It was so high it should have killed me.
A doctor came in and said, “What we’re going to do is keep you up through the night.” He said that one of the reason he was afraid to let me fall asleep was where my blood pressure was at. He was afraid that I wasn’t going to wake up from blood pressure that was that high. So they kept me up until the next morning and I was completely fine.
When I was discharged from the hospital the doctors told me that I was going to have memory loss, bad dreams. But the only thing I had, which I didn’t realize it at first, is that I couldn’t remember anybody’s name. For weeks I kept thinking, “Why am I forgetting everybody’s name”. And then it hit me after a couple of weeks. That’s my brain injury! To this day I can’t remember names. It’s such a way of life now that I hardly notice it because as soon as I know I’m going to meet somebody I have a system to remember their name. Like meeting you today, I’ll do something with your name like. “Barry. OK my next door neighbor growing up in the Bronx was Barry.” So that’s how I can kind of remember names.
B: Has NDE experienced changed your view of religion?
I feel there is some kind of supreme “something” out there that probably has nothing to do with all of our organized religions. I feel very strongly that I believe in God and I pray all the time. I just know there’s something. If I was Christian, could I say it’s Jesus? No, I didn’t see Jesus Christ when I was there. I just know that there’s something powerful. I believe strongly that there’s something really powerful listening to us when we pray.
I can't remember if I was afraid to die before, but now except for desperately not wanting to leave my daughter, I am not afraid. I have no doubt there is an afterlife. This "here-and-now" is not all there is. Something much more powerful than us is with us every day.
Out-of-Body experiences (OBEs) involve the ability for the astral or spirit bodies to leave the physical body. People who have had OBEs report that while in this state, they are often able to travel to different locations both on the physical and astral planes. OBEs can happen either spontaneously, or they can be entered at will.
While I was researching NDEs and OBEs, a woman named Donna from Connecticut contacted me, anxious to tell her story. Her OBE is unusual because it was verified by a family member immediately afterward. After telling me about her OBE, Donna went on to tell a number of heartwarming stories about her little dog "Fluffy" who communicated with her after he died, and he continues to do so to this day. Thank you, Donna, for your amazing and inspiring stories. The photos below are from Donna. They show Fluffy and two mysterious artifacts related to her story.
While I was researching NDEs and OBEs, a woman named Donna from Connecticut contacted me, anxious to tell her story. Her OBE is unusual because it was verified by a family member immediately afterward. After telling me about her OBE, Donna went on to tell a number of heartwarming stories about her little dog "Fluffy" who communicated with her after he died, and he continues to do so to this day. Thank you, Donna, for your amazing and inspiring stories. The photos below are from Donna. They show Fluffy and two mysterious artifacts related to her story.
Out of Body Eyewitness
When I was nineteen years old, I read a book about a teenage boy who would leave his body and travel to different places. I don’t remember the title of the book, but it was fiction and somewhat of a horror story because the boy couldn’t get back into his body. So, after reading it I thought, “That sounds cool. I wonder if I can do it.”
Now, just a little background. My grandmother had had a stroke and couldn’t walk very well, so she was staying with us. Her bedroom was on the first floor of our raised ranch. She and I were super, super close. I was very connected to my grandmother.
One night I was in my bedroom upstairs and I thought, ”Let me try it. Let me try leaving my body like that boy in the book.” So I imagined myself floating up and out of my body, floating down the hall, and going down the stairs. It seemed so real, but at the same time it was almost like a meditation. I floated down the stairs and I went into my grandmother’s bedroom. I looked in on her, I watched her, and I made sure she was OK. Then, I just imagined going back upstairs and going back into my body, and then I went to sleep.
I didn’t really think anything of it, but the next morning when I went downstairs I was very, very surprised when my grandmother looked at me and said, “I saw you last night!”
“Where?” I asked.
"Floating on the ceiling, watching me,” she said!
It just floored me! I was so taken aback. It totally shocked me. Even though part of me thought, “Oh that’s really cool”, it also scared me so much that I never did it again. My grandmother had never said anything like that before or after, just that one time. So, I’m sure it really was me that she saw, and that I really had left my body and visited her that night.
I’ve had a lot of very weird things in my life, and I’ve had a lot of “close calls”. As a matter of fact I went to a psychic once who said, “Boy, you’ve had a lot of close calls in your life!” She was right. Now, I don’t know that you’d call it a near death experience, but I was in a coma for almost four days. I don’t remember any of it, but I came out of it and I was fine. After that I was suddenly more sensitive and more intuitive. It was like a switch had been flipped.
One day something happened that convinced me that there was more to my coma than I had imagined. I’m a professional Tarot card reader, and I got started by working at a psychic fair. During one of the breaks I went to this amazing woman, Lois. She was just so amazing. She always had a long line of people waiting to see her. As I sat down at her table, she said the most incredible thing.
“Oh, you’ve had a very close call,” she said. “You were briefly on the other side!”
“I don’t remember,” I said.
“Oh, I know you don’t,” she said, “but your grandmother sent you back. It wasn’t your time.”
I never told her I was in a coma. I never told her I had a close call, or that I was super, super close to my grandmother. She just saw all of that intuitively. Although I can’t remember anything that happened during the time I was in the coma, I could definitely see my grandmother doing something like that; telling me that I had to go back because it wasn’t my time.
When I was nineteen years old, I read a book about a teenage boy who would leave his body and travel to different places. I don’t remember the title of the book, but it was fiction and somewhat of a horror story because the boy couldn’t get back into his body. So, after reading it I thought, “That sounds cool. I wonder if I can do it.”
Now, just a little background. My grandmother had had a stroke and couldn’t walk very well, so she was staying with us. Her bedroom was on the first floor of our raised ranch. She and I were super, super close. I was very connected to my grandmother.
One night I was in my bedroom upstairs and I thought, ”Let me try it. Let me try leaving my body like that boy in the book.” So I imagined myself floating up and out of my body, floating down the hall, and going down the stairs. It seemed so real, but at the same time it was almost like a meditation. I floated down the stairs and I went into my grandmother’s bedroom. I looked in on her, I watched her, and I made sure she was OK. Then, I just imagined going back upstairs and going back into my body, and then I went to sleep.
I didn’t really think anything of it, but the next morning when I went downstairs I was very, very surprised when my grandmother looked at me and said, “I saw you last night!”
“Where?” I asked.
"Floating on the ceiling, watching me,” she said!
It just floored me! I was so taken aback. It totally shocked me. Even though part of me thought, “Oh that’s really cool”, it also scared me so much that I never did it again. My grandmother had never said anything like that before or after, just that one time. So, I’m sure it really was me that she saw, and that I really had left my body and visited her that night.
I’ve had a lot of very weird things in my life, and I’ve had a lot of “close calls”. As a matter of fact I went to a psychic once who said, “Boy, you’ve had a lot of close calls in your life!” She was right. Now, I don’t know that you’d call it a near death experience, but I was in a coma for almost four days. I don’t remember any of it, but I came out of it and I was fine. After that I was suddenly more sensitive and more intuitive. It was like a switch had been flipped.
One day something happened that convinced me that there was more to my coma than I had imagined. I’m a professional Tarot card reader, and I got started by working at a psychic fair. During one of the breaks I went to this amazing woman, Lois. She was just so amazing. She always had a long line of people waiting to see her. As I sat down at her table, she said the most incredible thing.
“Oh, you’ve had a very close call,” she said. “You were briefly on the other side!”
“I don’t remember,” I said.
“Oh, I know you don’t,” she said, “but your grandmother sent you back. It wasn’t your time.”
I never told her I was in a coma. I never told her I had a close call, or that I was super, super close to my grandmother. She just saw all of that intuitively. Although I can’t remember anything that happened during the time I was in the coma, I could definitely see my grandmother doing something like that; telling me that I had to go back because it wasn’t my time.
My Soulmate - "Fluffy"
Like I said, I’ve had a lot of weird experiences in my life, but I have to tell you the most amazing thing that happened. I had this dog that I was so connected to. His name was Fluffy, and he was just the best thing that ever happened to me in my life. He was a Pomeranian, so happy and beautiful and good, and special in so many ways. The day I brought him home I took a picture of my sister holding him, and there was a perfect infinity symbol over his head. He was just a magical, magical little dog. When he was older I brought him to the vet, and there was a new girl who worked there named Mallory. She said, “He’s special.”
I knew he was special, I’ve had a lot of pets and he was different, but I asked, “What do you mean?”
“You know,” she said, “he’s got a perfect aura. He has a pure white aura. I’ve only seen it one other time in my life.”
There were so many things that happened with Fluffy, but he ended up, I believe, saving my life. Something happened that I won’t go into, but he saved my life, and then after that he passed away. The doctor told me he had heart trouble and he’d probably only live for two months, but he lived for a year. I really believe that he waited until he saved my life before going.
There were lots of incidents that showed me that he was a very special little dog. One night I let him outside and it was pitch dark, there was no light at all. I had no lights working in my yard, and I had a fenced in backyard. I wanted to look out the window and check on him but thought, “I’m not able to see him, I’m going to go outside.” So I walked into the backyard and I kid you not, he was glowing! He was like a little angel glowing in the dark. It almost looked like the moon was inside of him, inside of his little body. It was just like a bright light was all around him, and I couldn’t help but think of what that girl Mallory had said; that he had a perfect white aura.
There were two really amazing things that happened. I had five dogs at the time, Fluffy being one of them, and in the morning, my favorite time of day, I had concrete steps in my backyard, and I would sit on them and have my coffee with the dogs. I would feed them treats and throw the ball for them, but for the most part I’d sit on the third or fourth step down and Fluffy would be right by my side. The other dogs would be playing and he’d be right there with me.
The day I lost him, when I had to put him to sleep, I was devastated. I mean, just devastated. The next morning when I went outside with my coffee, I just dreaded it. But the most amazing thing happened. I kid you not, I walked outside and I sat down on the step and a perfect paw print had formed in the concrete overnight, the very night he died. There was an indentation of a paw print in the concrete.
There’s another thing that happened. Fluffy died on November 16th -- 11/16. Before he died, that number started appearing everywhere. He died on that day and ever since then, my sister and I have both Verizon cell phones -- ever since he died, at exactly 11:16 our phones light up at that time like we're getting a call or a message, but no one is there. It’s just incredible. At 11:16 every night now since he died in 2007, our phones light up. We’ve gotten new phones many, many, many times since then and it still shows up on the new phones. I mean, it’s weird!
But the last thing I want to tell you about is this. I had some tumors and I was waiting for the biopsy results. I was nervous, as I think most people would be, and I was thinking of Fluffy and of my grandmother. And I just said, “I wish I could have a sign, just to know either way.” I wanted to know if I was going to be OK. The morning that I wished for a sign I went outside and sat on the concrete step that I used to sit on with Fluffy. He had died more than 5 years before, but as I sat down on the step I found a ball he used to have. It was a blue ball that had these little colors on it.
At first I thought, it couldn’t be his ball because I know that I threw it out long ago. The reason I threw it out is because it was made of rubber, and he had chewed a hole in it. Because there was a hole in it, the ball would get moldy and mossy. So I didn’t keep that toy, but I kept a lot of other things of his. I definitely threw that ball out because it had a moldy smell to it. So, I mean 5 years after he died I ask for a sign, and I step outside and there's his little ball!
I was logical about it. My neighbor has a dog, and at first I thought that he probably threw it and it landed over the fence in my yard. So I took a picture and sent it to my neighbor and I said, “Mike, is this Jake’s ball?” And he said, “No way. It’s way too small for Jake. Jakes's a German shepherd, he’d choke on it.”
So I picked it up. I remember picking it up really slowly because I knew it was the same ball. It had the exact same hole in it. If it didn’t have the hole, it would just have been a ball that someone had thrown into my yard. But it had that exact same hole in it. It was Fluffy’s ball. That was my sign that I was going to be OK. And I was! The biopsy results came back, and they showed that I had no cancer. The tumor was benign.
Barry: Was there anything unusual about when you bought him or got him?
Yes! Yes there is! I had lost a dog tragically to an accident and I was feeling really sad and depressed. I’ve had a lot of pets in my life, but this was the only time that I lost a dog. It was a freak accident. I wanted another pet, and I wanted another Pomeranian, but I just couldn’t find one that was right.
I actually went to a tea-leaf reader who is really really good, and I told her what happened. I also told her that I wanted the new dog to be a reincarnation of the dog who died. I know some people don’t believe in reincarnation, but I do. She said, “You’re going to find another dog. It’s not going to be a reincarnation, but he’s going to be very, very special and he’s going to make you feel better.”
All this while I’d been looking and looking and looking for a dog and one night my sister had a dream. She told me she dreamt about a beautiful, perfect little white dog, and he was in a cage. In the dream he was in his cage and he turned and looked at us, and we knew right away that he was going to be ours.
I’m an adopter now, but at the time I bought him. He was the last dog that I ever bought. So I said to my sister, “Well, let’s go look today because of your dream.” We went to the cage and my sister said that it was just like her dream. She saw him from behind, he was turned away from us, and when he turned around and looked at us it was like the exact same face as the dog in her dream.
Barry: Was that the reason you bought him?
No, not exactly. Just the second I saw him I felt this connection. Like, that one of a kind feeling you get? If you believe in soul mates … well, I had a husband and everything (laughs), but this dog was my soul mate! The first time I held that dog I felt he was my best friend, and was just meant to be, you know?
Like I said, I’ve had a lot of weird experiences in my life, but I have to tell you the most amazing thing that happened. I had this dog that I was so connected to. His name was Fluffy, and he was just the best thing that ever happened to me in my life. He was a Pomeranian, so happy and beautiful and good, and special in so many ways. The day I brought him home I took a picture of my sister holding him, and there was a perfect infinity symbol over his head. He was just a magical, magical little dog. When he was older I brought him to the vet, and there was a new girl who worked there named Mallory. She said, “He’s special.”
I knew he was special, I’ve had a lot of pets and he was different, but I asked, “What do you mean?”
“You know,” she said, “he’s got a perfect aura. He has a pure white aura. I’ve only seen it one other time in my life.”
There were so many things that happened with Fluffy, but he ended up, I believe, saving my life. Something happened that I won’t go into, but he saved my life, and then after that he passed away. The doctor told me he had heart trouble and he’d probably only live for two months, but he lived for a year. I really believe that he waited until he saved my life before going.
There were lots of incidents that showed me that he was a very special little dog. One night I let him outside and it was pitch dark, there was no light at all. I had no lights working in my yard, and I had a fenced in backyard. I wanted to look out the window and check on him but thought, “I’m not able to see him, I’m going to go outside.” So I walked into the backyard and I kid you not, he was glowing! He was like a little angel glowing in the dark. It almost looked like the moon was inside of him, inside of his little body. It was just like a bright light was all around him, and I couldn’t help but think of what that girl Mallory had said; that he had a perfect white aura.
There were two really amazing things that happened. I had five dogs at the time, Fluffy being one of them, and in the morning, my favorite time of day, I had concrete steps in my backyard, and I would sit on them and have my coffee with the dogs. I would feed them treats and throw the ball for them, but for the most part I’d sit on the third or fourth step down and Fluffy would be right by my side. The other dogs would be playing and he’d be right there with me.
The day I lost him, when I had to put him to sleep, I was devastated. I mean, just devastated. The next morning when I went outside with my coffee, I just dreaded it. But the most amazing thing happened. I kid you not, I walked outside and I sat down on the step and a perfect paw print had formed in the concrete overnight, the very night he died. There was an indentation of a paw print in the concrete.
There’s another thing that happened. Fluffy died on November 16th -- 11/16. Before he died, that number started appearing everywhere. He died on that day and ever since then, my sister and I have both Verizon cell phones -- ever since he died, at exactly 11:16 our phones light up at that time like we're getting a call or a message, but no one is there. It’s just incredible. At 11:16 every night now since he died in 2007, our phones light up. We’ve gotten new phones many, many, many times since then and it still shows up on the new phones. I mean, it’s weird!
But the last thing I want to tell you about is this. I had some tumors and I was waiting for the biopsy results. I was nervous, as I think most people would be, and I was thinking of Fluffy and of my grandmother. And I just said, “I wish I could have a sign, just to know either way.” I wanted to know if I was going to be OK. The morning that I wished for a sign I went outside and sat on the concrete step that I used to sit on with Fluffy. He had died more than 5 years before, but as I sat down on the step I found a ball he used to have. It was a blue ball that had these little colors on it.
At first I thought, it couldn’t be his ball because I know that I threw it out long ago. The reason I threw it out is because it was made of rubber, and he had chewed a hole in it. Because there was a hole in it, the ball would get moldy and mossy. So I didn’t keep that toy, but I kept a lot of other things of his. I definitely threw that ball out because it had a moldy smell to it. So, I mean 5 years after he died I ask for a sign, and I step outside and there's his little ball!
I was logical about it. My neighbor has a dog, and at first I thought that he probably threw it and it landed over the fence in my yard. So I took a picture and sent it to my neighbor and I said, “Mike, is this Jake’s ball?” And he said, “No way. It’s way too small for Jake. Jakes's a German shepherd, he’d choke on it.”
So I picked it up. I remember picking it up really slowly because I knew it was the same ball. It had the exact same hole in it. If it didn’t have the hole, it would just have been a ball that someone had thrown into my yard. But it had that exact same hole in it. It was Fluffy’s ball. That was my sign that I was going to be OK. And I was! The biopsy results came back, and they showed that I had no cancer. The tumor was benign.
Barry: Was there anything unusual about when you bought him or got him?
Yes! Yes there is! I had lost a dog tragically to an accident and I was feeling really sad and depressed. I’ve had a lot of pets in my life, but this was the only time that I lost a dog. It was a freak accident. I wanted another pet, and I wanted another Pomeranian, but I just couldn’t find one that was right.
I actually went to a tea-leaf reader who is really really good, and I told her what happened. I also told her that I wanted the new dog to be a reincarnation of the dog who died. I know some people don’t believe in reincarnation, but I do. She said, “You’re going to find another dog. It’s not going to be a reincarnation, but he’s going to be very, very special and he’s going to make you feel better.”
All this while I’d been looking and looking and looking for a dog and one night my sister had a dream. She told me she dreamt about a beautiful, perfect little white dog, and he was in a cage. In the dream he was in his cage and he turned and looked at us, and we knew right away that he was going to be ours.
I’m an adopter now, but at the time I bought him. He was the last dog that I ever bought. So I said to my sister, “Well, let’s go look today because of your dream.” We went to the cage and my sister said that it was just like her dream. She saw him from behind, he was turned away from us, and when he turned around and looked at us it was like the exact same face as the dog in her dream.
Barry: Was that the reason you bought him?
No, not exactly. Just the second I saw him I felt this connection. Like, that one of a kind feeling you get? If you believe in soul mates … well, I had a husband and everything (laughs), but this dog was my soul mate! The first time I held that dog I felt he was my best friend, and was just meant to be, you know?
We've all heard the expression "All roads lead to Rome". Most of us think that the subject of that short phrase is the destination - Rome. But the saying is really about the multitude of roads we have to choose from in order to get to our destinations, and all of the things that happen along the way.
Out-of-body experiences are highly personal events that can be entered in either by will or unintentionally. Whichever road takes us there, the experience is uniquely our own.
The following out-of-body interview comes from Carolyn from New York. In it, she describes an amazing, spontaneous journey she took into the void and how it forever changed her view of life.
Out-of-body experiences are highly personal events that can be entered in either by will or unintentionally. Whichever road takes us there, the experience is uniquely our own.
The following out-of-body interview comes from Carolyn from New York. In it, she describes an amazing, spontaneous journey she took into the void and how it forever changed her view of life.
In The Void
When I was just a little kid, around 6 years old, sometimes when I was laying on the sofa in the living room I would find myself in a very meditative state, and it would feel as if my consciousness was floating just underneath the inside layer of my skin. While this was happening I would also feel myself vibrating just underneath my skin. This happened to me a few times, so I was kind of used to it. But after a while things started to change. The experience would start out the same, but then all of a sudden I would start to become aware of my breathing around the top of my head, around my forehead, and around my nasal area, and I would begin going deep inside of myself into this tiny little point of consciousness. It’s a very hard feeling to describe, but I would feel myself go down so far that the top of my skin would feel like it was a mile away from me. I felt so deep, and so huge at the same time. It was a feeling of being very small and very huge at the same time. Since that time I’ve read that people who get those really deep feelings are ready to “go out” of their bodies, but that is something I never did as a child. Back then I just had the “deep” feeling, and the vibrations.
I had a pretty normal childhood, but I was also an extremely anxious child. I was also sick a lot as a kid, maybe a little bit more than most kids. But I was a perfect student -- a perfect this, a perfect that; so I was living with all this high anxiety.
Fast-forward to the end of my senior year in high school when I took a yoga class. This was a new experience for me, and at the end of the class I did a final relaxation exercise. For the first time ever, I relaxed. That afternoon I took the public bus home, and as I sat on the bus I was really relaxed. When I got home, I actually tasted the food for the first time! Imagine, I had been so anxious it actually dulled my sense of taste! I still remember the mashed potatoes my mother made that day. So, I was very tense and very anxious, and yoga was the catalyst that finally began to relax me.
My out of body experience happened when I was a freshman in college living away from home. It was around October, just the most perfect time of year; gorgeous colors everywhere. There was a yoga session being offered on campus, so I went to the class and had a nice time. Afterward, I went back to my dorm and thought, “That was great. I’m just going to lay down for a bit.” My roommate was on her bed in the corner reading a book, and I lay down on my bed. As I lay there, I began to get that feeling that I hadn’t felt in years. I was feeling the vibration, and I was getting really deep inside of my face, all the way down.
I said to my roommate, “Alice, something’s happening to me.” So good old Alice, she didn’t know what to do so she began reading out loud to me! I began to hear her voice as if from a distance and then really close, almost inside my left ear. Her voice actually began to focus me even more and I started to sink deeper and deeper inside of myself. While I was in this state, all the way in the distance I started getting all of these weird perceptions. Then all of a sudden, I was looking at the ceiling! I was about two inches away from the ceiling and then -- I was out! I was in outer space. Now, this is not outer space as we would know it, this is a vacuum or a void. I would describe it as dark and filled with emptiness, so it was really a vacuum.
So I’m standing in this void, and then I see a relative of mine standing there. I’ve always had a bad feeling about this man. He was always someone that I was afraid of. But although this person in the void looked like him, it wasn’t quite him. It was more like something trying to look like him.
He was standing by a large tunnel, and as I looked at him I saw that his eyes were red and I didn’t like them. But even though there’s this scary relative waiting for me by the tunnel, I’m moving towards the tunnel because part of me is very curious, and I feel myself moving rapidly towards it.
Then suddenly from the upper left corner of my vision I saw a light. It was actually a candle that I owned; one that I loved and recognized. This candle zoomed out of nowhere, just out of nowhere. The candle was lit by a brilliant white light, and it caught my attention. It was as if a voice was saying to me, “Don’t go there. Don’t go there. Follow me”, just the way someone would talk to a small child. So I followed the candle and it took me back to my body. I opened my eyes and I was back in my dorm room with Alice still sitting on her bed. For days after I was terrified to fall asleep. Terrified. I didn’t want to go back out there.
Barry: Did you get any sense of an intelligence with this candle? What did you feel from it?
Carolyn: There was no voice, but it was bright, it was friendly. But I’m not going to say like “petting a dog friendly”. It was kind of like a Nanny; an almost commandingly friendly voice I was hearing, as if it had the attitude of, “Very nice. Step away from that tunnel. Come with me now.”
Barry: Did you have a male or female sense of it?
Carolyn: I’m going to go with an androgynous male, and the color blue comes to mind. But the candle, the candle was important because this was a candle that I had at home and I would only burn it on certain nights, because it was such a cool candle. It had chunks of red and blue wax in it, and I just … I loved this candle. So for whatever reason to catch my attention, it had to be something I liked, and it was warm and good. I associated this candle with home, and it truly was pulling me back. I had never done any readings on near death or out of body experiences before. So the tunnel and the white light, that was all brand new to me.
Barry: Was the relative you saw deceased?
Carolyn: No, he was alive. Since then I’ve wondered if he might have had something attached to him, like a negative spirit attachment. Because he was just one of those people who had a bad feeling around him.
Barry: Tell me about the tunnel. What did the tunnel look like?
Carolyn: The best way I can describe it is that it was like a large vortex; a large vortex that got smaller inside, like a funnel. There was no light in the tunnel, the tunnel itself was dark. But even though I was in this void, it must have been lighter than the tunnel. There was at least some lightness in the void, because I could see the darkness of the tunnel in the void.
Barry: So, this strange relative is standing next to the tunnel. How big would you say the tunnel was relative to the man’s size?
Carolyn: I would say that the tunnel was maybe 8 or 9 feet in the front. He was standing next to the tunnel, and the tunnel rose up next to him.
Barry: While you were in this void, did you have any feelings while you were there?
Carolyn: No, not at all. I had no feelings, I was just standing there.
Barry: Did you have any other similar experiences after this?
Carolyn: After I graduated, I was living on the west side of Manhattan for about three years. And in that time I took up the serious study of yoga and became a yoga teacher by night, but never giving up my day job. I traveled to ashrams, met interesting intense people, and had some very strange experiences on this side of the astral plane! I learned that when groups of people raise energy through meditation and conscious development, out-of-the- ordinary things can happen. But it wasn't always an easy time because I was connecting to this internal awareness that I had tried to push away, actively seeking it and actively pushing it away. For awhile I was afraid to go to sleep because I was starting to leave my body again. I was having those same sort of feelings that I had before I left my body the first time, and I really didn’t want to go. I would pace the floor just to stay in my body. It was that crazy. That crazy. In fact, I’m still in touch with the roommate I had at the time. She recently said to me, “You know, you did a lot of pacing back then!” And I said, “Yeah, that was me all right. That was me pacing.” But I guess the pacing worked because I haven’t had any other out of body experiences since that time in college.
Barry: Do you think you learned anything from having had this experience?
Carolyn: The big thing I learned was that I finally understood that my consciousness is not simply my physical body or my mind. The experience made me realize that there is something much bigger and totally different than what we think of as our mind or our consciousness. I've also learned over the years that any teacher who leads a group in energy work must do so responsibly - I've been to one or two public workshops in the last ten years where the teacher raises so much energy that sometimes someone in the audience has a difficult time. Consciousness is so precious and we need to develop it with care, even when we have a burst forward through a surprising experience.
When I was just a little kid, around 6 years old, sometimes when I was laying on the sofa in the living room I would find myself in a very meditative state, and it would feel as if my consciousness was floating just underneath the inside layer of my skin. While this was happening I would also feel myself vibrating just underneath my skin. This happened to me a few times, so I was kind of used to it. But after a while things started to change. The experience would start out the same, but then all of a sudden I would start to become aware of my breathing around the top of my head, around my forehead, and around my nasal area, and I would begin going deep inside of myself into this tiny little point of consciousness. It’s a very hard feeling to describe, but I would feel myself go down so far that the top of my skin would feel like it was a mile away from me. I felt so deep, and so huge at the same time. It was a feeling of being very small and very huge at the same time. Since that time I’ve read that people who get those really deep feelings are ready to “go out” of their bodies, but that is something I never did as a child. Back then I just had the “deep” feeling, and the vibrations.
I had a pretty normal childhood, but I was also an extremely anxious child. I was also sick a lot as a kid, maybe a little bit more than most kids. But I was a perfect student -- a perfect this, a perfect that; so I was living with all this high anxiety.
Fast-forward to the end of my senior year in high school when I took a yoga class. This was a new experience for me, and at the end of the class I did a final relaxation exercise. For the first time ever, I relaxed. That afternoon I took the public bus home, and as I sat on the bus I was really relaxed. When I got home, I actually tasted the food for the first time! Imagine, I had been so anxious it actually dulled my sense of taste! I still remember the mashed potatoes my mother made that day. So, I was very tense and very anxious, and yoga was the catalyst that finally began to relax me.
My out of body experience happened when I was a freshman in college living away from home. It was around October, just the most perfect time of year; gorgeous colors everywhere. There was a yoga session being offered on campus, so I went to the class and had a nice time. Afterward, I went back to my dorm and thought, “That was great. I’m just going to lay down for a bit.” My roommate was on her bed in the corner reading a book, and I lay down on my bed. As I lay there, I began to get that feeling that I hadn’t felt in years. I was feeling the vibration, and I was getting really deep inside of my face, all the way down.
I said to my roommate, “Alice, something’s happening to me.” So good old Alice, she didn’t know what to do so she began reading out loud to me! I began to hear her voice as if from a distance and then really close, almost inside my left ear. Her voice actually began to focus me even more and I started to sink deeper and deeper inside of myself. While I was in this state, all the way in the distance I started getting all of these weird perceptions. Then all of a sudden, I was looking at the ceiling! I was about two inches away from the ceiling and then -- I was out! I was in outer space. Now, this is not outer space as we would know it, this is a vacuum or a void. I would describe it as dark and filled with emptiness, so it was really a vacuum.
So I’m standing in this void, and then I see a relative of mine standing there. I’ve always had a bad feeling about this man. He was always someone that I was afraid of. But although this person in the void looked like him, it wasn’t quite him. It was more like something trying to look like him.
He was standing by a large tunnel, and as I looked at him I saw that his eyes were red and I didn’t like them. But even though there’s this scary relative waiting for me by the tunnel, I’m moving towards the tunnel because part of me is very curious, and I feel myself moving rapidly towards it.
Then suddenly from the upper left corner of my vision I saw a light. It was actually a candle that I owned; one that I loved and recognized. This candle zoomed out of nowhere, just out of nowhere. The candle was lit by a brilliant white light, and it caught my attention. It was as if a voice was saying to me, “Don’t go there. Don’t go there. Follow me”, just the way someone would talk to a small child. So I followed the candle and it took me back to my body. I opened my eyes and I was back in my dorm room with Alice still sitting on her bed. For days after I was terrified to fall asleep. Terrified. I didn’t want to go back out there.
Barry: Did you get any sense of an intelligence with this candle? What did you feel from it?
Carolyn: There was no voice, but it was bright, it was friendly. But I’m not going to say like “petting a dog friendly”. It was kind of like a Nanny; an almost commandingly friendly voice I was hearing, as if it had the attitude of, “Very nice. Step away from that tunnel. Come with me now.”
Barry: Did you have a male or female sense of it?
Carolyn: I’m going to go with an androgynous male, and the color blue comes to mind. But the candle, the candle was important because this was a candle that I had at home and I would only burn it on certain nights, because it was such a cool candle. It had chunks of red and blue wax in it, and I just … I loved this candle. So for whatever reason to catch my attention, it had to be something I liked, and it was warm and good. I associated this candle with home, and it truly was pulling me back. I had never done any readings on near death or out of body experiences before. So the tunnel and the white light, that was all brand new to me.
Barry: Was the relative you saw deceased?
Carolyn: No, he was alive. Since then I’ve wondered if he might have had something attached to him, like a negative spirit attachment. Because he was just one of those people who had a bad feeling around him.
Barry: Tell me about the tunnel. What did the tunnel look like?
Carolyn: The best way I can describe it is that it was like a large vortex; a large vortex that got smaller inside, like a funnel. There was no light in the tunnel, the tunnel itself was dark. But even though I was in this void, it must have been lighter than the tunnel. There was at least some lightness in the void, because I could see the darkness of the tunnel in the void.
Barry: So, this strange relative is standing next to the tunnel. How big would you say the tunnel was relative to the man’s size?
Carolyn: I would say that the tunnel was maybe 8 or 9 feet in the front. He was standing next to the tunnel, and the tunnel rose up next to him.
Barry: While you were in this void, did you have any feelings while you were there?
Carolyn: No, not at all. I had no feelings, I was just standing there.
Barry: Did you have any other similar experiences after this?
Carolyn: After I graduated, I was living on the west side of Manhattan for about three years. And in that time I took up the serious study of yoga and became a yoga teacher by night, but never giving up my day job. I traveled to ashrams, met interesting intense people, and had some very strange experiences on this side of the astral plane! I learned that when groups of people raise energy through meditation and conscious development, out-of-the- ordinary things can happen. But it wasn't always an easy time because I was connecting to this internal awareness that I had tried to push away, actively seeking it and actively pushing it away. For awhile I was afraid to go to sleep because I was starting to leave my body again. I was having those same sort of feelings that I had before I left my body the first time, and I really didn’t want to go. I would pace the floor just to stay in my body. It was that crazy. That crazy. In fact, I’m still in touch with the roommate I had at the time. She recently said to me, “You know, you did a lot of pacing back then!” And I said, “Yeah, that was me all right. That was me pacing.” But I guess the pacing worked because I haven’t had any other out of body experiences since that time in college.
Barry: Do you think you learned anything from having had this experience?
Carolyn: The big thing I learned was that I finally understood that my consciousness is not simply my physical body or my mind. The experience made me realize that there is something much bigger and totally different than what we think of as our mind or our consciousness. I've also learned over the years that any teacher who leads a group in energy work must do so responsibly - I've been to one or two public workshops in the last ten years where the teacher raises so much energy that sometimes someone in the audience has a difficult time. Consciousness is so precious and we need to develop it with care, even when we have a burst forward through a surprising experience.
IMPOSSIBLE DIMENSIONS
The following out-of-body experience occurred when I was 11 years old. Although I was very young at the time, I have absolutely no doubt that what I experienced was real, and that it was a genuine OBE. Decades later, I read Robert Monroe’s groundbreaking book, “Journeys Out of the Body” and recognized many similarities between his experiences and mine, the most striking of which was a loud humming sound I heard.
Because my OBE was so frightening, I have always been reluctant to try to ‘lift out’ of my body at will. Although many people are able to do this with no ill effect, the thought of being trapped in the strange place that I found myself in when I was a boy still haunts me. I don’t think I’ll be attempting a ‘lift-off’ any time soon!
I was born in Yonkers, New York and lived there until I was 11 years old. I had happy childhood and never had any unusual experiences, so what happened to me was totally unexpected. It was an experience that had a profound effect on me. It was the beginning of my journey into the world of the paranormal.
One night, I was laying in my bed waiting for sleep to come when I suddenly found myself floating up at the ceiling. I didn’t feel myself leave my body, I was just there all of a sudden. The space I was in seemed to be confined. It’s very hard to describe, but it was as if I was stuck up at the ceiling in a space about four feet high from the ceiling downward. I did not see my body laying in bed below me but I knew it was down there. I also knew that my ‘astral body’ was up at the ceiling, and that I had left my body. My astral body seemed to be in the shape of my physical body, but made out of energy rather than matter. While some people report a ‘silver thread’ connecting their physical body to their astral body, I did not see or feel any such thing.
As I lay suspended in this empty space I could hear a very low, undulating electronic sounding hum all around me. The waves of this strange sound were very slow, and I could feel their vibrations in my astral body. I lay in this space for some time, then began to become very frightened. I realized that nothing was happening, that I was simply stuck in this place. Suddenly, I began to panic. I imagined the possibility of myself being stuck in this place forever, that I may never get back into my body.
As soon as fear set in the hum increased in both pitch and volume, and the waves of this new, high pitched sound became very rapid. At the same time, my astral body s-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-d out like it was made of elastic. It felt like my body had stretched out to about 30 feet long. I was exactly as if I was being pulled from my head and my feet, and that my body had become very thin just the way a piece of rubber would get thin if stretched very far. There seemed to be a limit to the length to which my body could be stretched. I didn't get the sense that my body was BEING stretched by something. It was more like my fear was the thing that was making it stretch out. As I was in this state I was absolutely terrified, and the loud electronic hum that had become a shrieking, high pitched shriek roared in my head.
The worst part of the experience was the fear, and the feeling of being stretched out. There was no pain associated with this. It didn't hurt to stretch out. I was just panicking which caused the stretching to happen. The sound increasing in pitch was also bad. As you might imagine, when the electronic sound went up in pitch to a very loud, shrieking sound -- the sound itself made me even more afraid. So, here I am stretched out to an impossible length, and there is a loud, high pitched sound all around me -- Absolutely terrifying to say the least!
Suddenly, through the din I heard a very soft and soothing female voice. Although she spoke very softly, her words cut through the loud electronic sounding shriek. I got a distinct feeling that this woman was very kind and very gentle, and that she was trying to calm me down. I don't recall the exact words she said to me, but the message was clear -- 'It's alright. You're going to be alright. You are safe. I'm here. Everything is going to be fine." The voice calmed me down, and my astral body began to shrink back down to it's original size and shape. The high pitched sound became lower and lower as my body retracted, and the undulations became slower and slower.
Once I was back to my original size and shape, the sound returned to the very low hum with the slow undulating waves. I was still in the space up near the ceiling, and I waited for something to happen that would allow me to get back to my body. When it was apparent that I was not going back into my body any time soon I began to get frightened again. Immediately, the hum rose to a high, shrieking pitch and my astral body once again stretched out the way it had before. The female voice came back again, this time more quickly, and I eventually calmed down which had the same effect as before. My astral body slowly shrank down, the sound lowered in pitch in relation to the size of my body, and the waves of the sound slowed down.
I don't have any memory at all of re-entering my body. I just remember waking up and remembering the experience. By the way, this lack of “re-entry” memory is common in many Near-Death Experiences.
That same year my family moved from our house in Yonkers to a new home in Tarrytown, New York. Although I occasionally thought about the strange experience, I tried to put it behind me. I didn’t really understand what had happened to me, and I was too excited about our new home to give it much thought -- that was, until it happened again.
One night I was laying in bed, waiting for sleep to come when I had the exact same experience as before. Everything about it was the same -- the size of the space I was in, the sound, the stretching out when I became afraid, and the alarming pitch of the sound as it rose and the waves increased in tempo. The woman's voice was also the same, and she had the same message. Her words had the same effect of calming me down which allowed my astral body to shrink back down to its original size. Thankfully, to this day I have not had a similar experience.
Although these two events happened more than 40 years ago, I still remember them as if they happened yesterday. They had a profound personal effect on me, and I am certain that they are responsible for my interest in things having to do with spirituality and the paranormal.
The following out-of-body experience occurred when I was 11 years old. Although I was very young at the time, I have absolutely no doubt that what I experienced was real, and that it was a genuine OBE. Decades later, I read Robert Monroe’s groundbreaking book, “Journeys Out of the Body” and recognized many similarities between his experiences and mine, the most striking of which was a loud humming sound I heard.
Because my OBE was so frightening, I have always been reluctant to try to ‘lift out’ of my body at will. Although many people are able to do this with no ill effect, the thought of being trapped in the strange place that I found myself in when I was a boy still haunts me. I don’t think I’ll be attempting a ‘lift-off’ any time soon!
I was born in Yonkers, New York and lived there until I was 11 years old. I had happy childhood and never had any unusual experiences, so what happened to me was totally unexpected. It was an experience that had a profound effect on me. It was the beginning of my journey into the world of the paranormal.
One night, I was laying in my bed waiting for sleep to come when I suddenly found myself floating up at the ceiling. I didn’t feel myself leave my body, I was just there all of a sudden. The space I was in seemed to be confined. It’s very hard to describe, but it was as if I was stuck up at the ceiling in a space about four feet high from the ceiling downward. I did not see my body laying in bed below me but I knew it was down there. I also knew that my ‘astral body’ was up at the ceiling, and that I had left my body. My astral body seemed to be in the shape of my physical body, but made out of energy rather than matter. While some people report a ‘silver thread’ connecting their physical body to their astral body, I did not see or feel any such thing.
As I lay suspended in this empty space I could hear a very low, undulating electronic sounding hum all around me. The waves of this strange sound were very slow, and I could feel their vibrations in my astral body. I lay in this space for some time, then began to become very frightened. I realized that nothing was happening, that I was simply stuck in this place. Suddenly, I began to panic. I imagined the possibility of myself being stuck in this place forever, that I may never get back into my body.
As soon as fear set in the hum increased in both pitch and volume, and the waves of this new, high pitched sound became very rapid. At the same time, my astral body s-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-d out like it was made of elastic. It felt like my body had stretched out to about 30 feet long. I was exactly as if I was being pulled from my head and my feet, and that my body had become very thin just the way a piece of rubber would get thin if stretched very far. There seemed to be a limit to the length to which my body could be stretched. I didn't get the sense that my body was BEING stretched by something. It was more like my fear was the thing that was making it stretch out. As I was in this state I was absolutely terrified, and the loud electronic hum that had become a shrieking, high pitched shriek roared in my head.
The worst part of the experience was the fear, and the feeling of being stretched out. There was no pain associated with this. It didn't hurt to stretch out. I was just panicking which caused the stretching to happen. The sound increasing in pitch was also bad. As you might imagine, when the electronic sound went up in pitch to a very loud, shrieking sound -- the sound itself made me even more afraid. So, here I am stretched out to an impossible length, and there is a loud, high pitched sound all around me -- Absolutely terrifying to say the least!
Suddenly, through the din I heard a very soft and soothing female voice. Although she spoke very softly, her words cut through the loud electronic sounding shriek. I got a distinct feeling that this woman was very kind and very gentle, and that she was trying to calm me down. I don't recall the exact words she said to me, but the message was clear -- 'It's alright. You're going to be alright. You are safe. I'm here. Everything is going to be fine." The voice calmed me down, and my astral body began to shrink back down to it's original size and shape. The high pitched sound became lower and lower as my body retracted, and the undulations became slower and slower.
Once I was back to my original size and shape, the sound returned to the very low hum with the slow undulating waves. I was still in the space up near the ceiling, and I waited for something to happen that would allow me to get back to my body. When it was apparent that I was not going back into my body any time soon I began to get frightened again. Immediately, the hum rose to a high, shrieking pitch and my astral body once again stretched out the way it had before. The female voice came back again, this time more quickly, and I eventually calmed down which had the same effect as before. My astral body slowly shrank down, the sound lowered in pitch in relation to the size of my body, and the waves of the sound slowed down.
I don't have any memory at all of re-entering my body. I just remember waking up and remembering the experience. By the way, this lack of “re-entry” memory is common in many Near-Death Experiences.
That same year my family moved from our house in Yonkers to a new home in Tarrytown, New York. Although I occasionally thought about the strange experience, I tried to put it behind me. I didn’t really understand what had happened to me, and I was too excited about our new home to give it much thought -- that was, until it happened again.
One night I was laying in bed, waiting for sleep to come when I had the exact same experience as before. Everything about it was the same -- the size of the space I was in, the sound, the stretching out when I became afraid, and the alarming pitch of the sound as it rose and the waves increased in tempo. The woman's voice was also the same, and she had the same message. Her words had the same effect of calming me down which allowed my astral body to shrink back down to its original size. Thankfully, to this day I have not had a similar experience.
Although these two events happened more than 40 years ago, I still remember them as if they happened yesterday. They had a profound personal effect on me, and I am certain that they are responsible for my interest in things having to do with spirituality and the paranormal.
Love: The Fabric of Life
Near Death Experiences are life altering events. It's not simply that someone who has a NDE has a new appreciation for life; they return with knowledge about life itself that changes the entire way they view the world. I conducted the following interview in August of 2017 with a woman from Westchester County, New York. It is a profoundly uplifting interview with a message that all of us need to listen to and act upon.
Barry: I want to thank you in advance for this interview. I really appreciate your taking the time to tell your story, and I know that it’s going to touch a lot of people’s lives. What were the events that lead to your near-death experience?
In 2015 I went to an outpatient clinic to have a chemotherapy-like infusion treatment. The treatment is a mixture of drugs that is supposed to drip very slowly into your system over a period of five hours. The drip line attached to my arm got kinked when my sleeve was pulled down, and it was kinked for almost an hour so nothing was going through for an hour. Prior to the procedure they had given me a shot that made me very drowsy, so I didn’t notice that the drip had stopped. Also, I had never had this treatment before so I wasn’t exactly sure what it was supposed to be like. The nurse came by and looked at me and said, “Oh honey, you can’t have your sleeve down,” and when she pulled my sleeve back up, all of the material that had backed up for the last hour came shooting into my system all at once. I immediately went into tachycardia. My heart was beating so fast that I was only able to say to the nurse, “My heart, my heart”. And then I flatlined for three minutes and forty-five seconds. That information is actually on my medial chart. When my heart stopped, I flew up out of my body -- my consciousness flew up out of my body.
At first it wasn’t registering that I didn’t have my body attached, but I could definitely see everything that was going on. I was up above the ceiling looking down. I could see the room I was in, and I could also see over by where the nurse’s desk was. I could even see through the ceiling. I could see that there was an operating room right next to where my infusion bed was, and I watched two doctors giving a woman an epidural in that room. I saw my nurse running into the room to get them. She was frantic. She ran into the room and pulled the two doctors away from their patient to come and get something out of a cabinet. As I was watching them doing this I could see and hear that they were having an argument. The nurse was throwing things out of the cabinet and arguing with the doctors about whether they should put this needle directly into my heart, or put it in my drip line.
Barry: Could you actually hear what they were saying?
Yes, I could hear and see everything. All of this stuff was happening and I could see everybody. There was a physician's assistant, and she was crying, totally freaked out. I could see the lady that was cleaning the place peering into the operating room, She was listening to what was going on, and the doctors knew that the shit was hitting the fan with me in the other room. This was an outpatient clinic that does small procedures, small surgical procedures. It’s down the street from a hospital so they were arguing about what to do next.
Now, I need to point out that the treatment I was receiving was just an outpatient procedure, and what happened was a fluke. It was just a fluke. The nurse didn’t do very much wrong because I was the one who pulled my sleeve down because I was cold. The material that had gone into my arm when she first turned the drip on was so cold that it made my arm frozen, and I absentmindedly pulled my sleeve down. The nurse didn’t catch it for about an hour, but it wasn’t her fault.
Barry: When you were up at the ceiling, you said that you not only saw your room, you could see the room next door as well. Tell me about that.
Yes, it was like I could see through the floor. I was on the next level up or something and I could see everything. It didn’t quite make sense, but I could see into the operating room next door and into my room.
Barry: What was your state of mind at this point?
I was surprised! All of a sudden I was up there and I was like, ‘This is weird’. I was curious at first. But then when I saw what was happening, and my consciousness was directed at the monitor that showed that there was no heartbeat and the alarms were going off I thought, ‘Oh shit, I’m dying!’ That’s when I totally panicked and I tried to dive back into my body, but my body wasn’t there. Instead, I found myself flying backwards through this tunnel at what felt like trillions of miles an hour. There is no speed I’ve ever experienced like that. It makes traveling down a runway before you fly like nothing, like a snail’s pace. It was a feeling of motion.
It felt as if I had fallen into this immense tunnel going the speed of light or something, and it was very scary at first. Then all of a sudden I started to relax somehow, and I wanted to look at where I was. I was like, ‘What is this place?’ Then as I was getting closer to end of the tunnel I started looking at the tunnel itself and saw that it was made up of colors that I had never seen before. The frequencies and vibrations of these colors was nothing like I had ever seen on earth. I’m an artist, so I’m trained to look at color and deconstruct color. But I had never seen colors like this before. That was the fabric of this tunnel -- it was made up of trillions of these amazing, indescribable colors.
Barry: While you were traveling through the tunnel did you feel like you were in a huge space or an enclosed space?
At first it felt fairly enclosed. It didn’t feel very expansive until I was close to leaving the tunnel. That was the point where I became very inquisitive about the tunnel and really started looking at it closely. I’m a wildly inquisitive person. So I started studying the fabric of it the way a scientist would, thinking ‘What is this tunnel made out of?’
Barry: Do you think you were in a black tunnel and that you could see the colors because you were getting near the end where it was brighter? Or, did you think the tunnel was made up of these colors and you just hadn't noticed them?
I believe that the tunnel was made out of the trillions of colors, but I was going so fast through it that I couldn’t see them. They all just registered as black. I’m just assuming this because I didn’t have a chance to study anything because I was going so fast through the damn thing. As I neared the end of the tunnel, my assumption was that it was made of trillions of color vibrations. It was as if I could see color as vibrations of energy. I had the sense that everything is the vibration of energy, everything. I still believe that.
And then all of a sudden I’m out of the tunnel. At the end of the tunnel was a whole universe, an expanse, another world. So, it wasn’t a ‘white light” like I have heard people talk about. It was trillions and trillions of colors in a vast, limitless expanse. The colors of the tunnel were like pure colors and the end of the tunnel was an incredible expanse of space filled with color. To my right was something like a large cube with no edges, like a glass that looked into the world of the living.
In this heavenly dimension I was surrounded by all of these souls; souls of people who didn’t have a human form, but somehow I still recognized them. I knew exactly who they were. One was my great-uncle Steve, my grandmother's cousin, who I had always been really connected with and who had died twenty years earlier. I recognized him even though he wasn’t in a human form. Like all of the other spirits there, he was a pink, misty shape roughly the size of a human being.
In this dimension there was no pain, just complete love. It was the most wonderful place, and I was surrounded by these spirits, or whatever you want to call them. Some were people that I had known. Others were people I recognized, yet I didn’t really know how I recognized them except they were like a soul family.
And then I saw the spirits of people that are alive. They were there on the other side of this filament; they were back in the first dimension I originally found myself in, but I could still see them from where I was. These were the people on earth who were praying for me. My grandmother, my mother and my sister; they were all praying for me but they were in a different location. It was like they were right outside the bubble of where the earth was and where my body was. They were on the other side of this bubble.
Barry: So, these spirits were kind of hovering near your body in the room at the treatment center, is that correct?
Yeah. They were by the operating room suite through the wall. Even from the second dimension, I could still see the operating room suite. It was like I could see through walls. The spirits of the people praying for me were in that space.
Barry: Just to clarify, even though you were in this new dimension, you can still see what was happening to your body back in the “real world”?
Yes. When I first flew out of my body I was still in the same dimension that my body was in. After the trip through the tunnel I was in a totally different heavenly dimension looking at the situation back in the world that my body was in. It was like looking at a fishbowl, not a round one. Like I said, it was like looking at a cube through glass. I was in a higher dimension observing the situation back where my body was. I was watching my body and watching people trying to revive me. When it first happened I was in that dimension, in that world, and my consciousness was there in that dimension. But after going through the tunnel I was looking back at it from this heavenly place, which is the only way I can describe it.
Barry: I want to ask you about the people who were praying for you. Had they been aware that you were ill, and that’s why they were praying for you?
They knew that I was getting a potentially dangerous treatment and that there are often problems with really high blood pressure. It was also dangerous because I was sick when I went in for the treatment. I was quite ill. I was in severe pain from an accident I had a few years earlier. The doctors had told me that my organs weren’t working right, so I was already in really bad shape. My family and friends knew that there were risks. My mother didn’t want me to do the procedure, but my grandmother told me I should do it because she thought it would be OK. I had been texting with my sister right before, so she knew that I was there as well.
Barry: Did the people praying for you have different spirit bodies than the spirits of people who were no longer living? Was each one distinct looking?
They were made up of the same spirit-stuff as the non-living ‘people’, this misty pink and shining gold. Picture the palest yellow, like that beautiful color of the sun at the end of the day. And this yellow was surrounding the pink misty looking shapes. They seemed to be approximately human shaped, but -- this going to sound strange -- they seemed more like music. I recognized them as individuals the way you would recognize an individual piece of music. I saw no defining features, but some were brighter than others, and they weren’t all the same height.
I actually drew a picture of it. I’ll send it to you. Each one did seem distinct. They were definitely distinct. It was like they were vibrations of energy. It was like seeing music as an object. So, each person was a unique song, and that part of the experience has profoundly affected me. It was like I saw the core essence of what a spirit is, and it’s totally recognizable.
Barry: Did you get a sense that all of these spirits were somehow connected?
I’m glad you asked that because this is how I now fully believe in God. What I’m about to tell you is expansive and heady, but I’m going to try and describe it to you as best I can. While I was there I felt the love of God, of whatever you want to call God, and everybody calls God all different things. I felt that everything and all of these people were formed into existence out of great, great love and that the really bright spirits are the ones that realize that love. There is only love in this place -- there ain’t no hate! It’s just pure, unabiding, absolutely magical, beautiful love.
While I was there I received what I’ll call an ‘information download’. It was as if I received an instant download of information about what life is about, and this information was a gift to me.
For about six months after that experience I could almost access that information, like that head-space of when I was there. I felt a really deep connection to that experience afterwards. I felt like I could meditate my way to that realm. I wrote a ton about it when I came home. I’m so glad I wrote about it right after it happened because it was a deeply profound experience. When I re-read what I wrote I’m reminded of it and, in a sense, put back there.
The following months after I went home from the experience, there was a definite recognition that I was given the gift of life. When I arrived back home I kept saying to myself, ‘This is a gift. I can’t believe I’m back here.I thought I’d be dead. This is a gift.’
It wasn't until I went back to my doctor a few weeks later that he told me that I had been clinically dead for three minutes and forty-five seconds. I was stunned! I mean, I was absolutely aware that I had had this amazing experience, but I didn't know that I had actually flat-lined for that amount of time. After I told my doctor what I experienced, he wrote "NDE" on my medical chart.
Barry: Many people who have had NDEs say that they saw their life flash before them in an instant. Did anything like that happen to you?
Well, this was the most exciting part. I know that some people say that their life passes before their eyes, or that they have a ‘life review’. I never had that experience. What I experienced was this -- I saw everyone else's life pass before my eyes.
I fully knew my doctor, I saw his whole life like a movie playing all at once. I knew that he had been dealing with prostate cancer, that he had late stage prostate cancer, and yet he was still working and doing all this stuff to help people. I knew that this other guy, the receptionist, had hepatitis B, and that his dad was dying, and that his uncle was dying of AIDS. I knew that the lady who was cleaning the floors was living with six people in her house.
Not only did I see all of their life struggles and who they are, it was like I was inside their heads and I knew the love that they have for themselves, and the hate that they have for themselves. I saw the love that they have for their husbands and wives and family. I saw their fears. And most overwhelmingly, I felt the incredible, unbelieveable, rock-solid, mountain rock-solid love that God has for every single one of these people. Everybody. Everyone. Fully loved. The stories of those people’s lives are absolutely precious. Your story, your life story is absolute music-preciousness, and the big thing, the big information I got loud and clear is that our lives are deeply important to the existence of God himself. I say himself, but it’s not a him or her, it’s way beyond that. I didn’t see the face of God, nothing like that.
I felt love as an action. Love as a force of energy, of creation. Everything is born out of love. Everything that is created is born out of love energy. That is why it was like the crescendo of some huge, beautiful piece of music. We are here to express love, to find love, especially in the most difficult things. To love your enemy, to love the person you feel you hate. If you can find a pathway to love, then you are proving the existence and the power of God, and there is a lot at stake. There was this idea that when we love something with a pure heart, we are somehow actually creating matter.
Barry: Did you get a sense that you knew things that these people didn’t know. For example, did the doctor know that he had prostate cancer?
Yes, he knew that he had it. When I came back into my body, the first thing I did was I grabbed his hand. I said, “Don’t let me go, don’t let me go.” And he was crying. This man is the most loving man. This man dedicated his whole life to help human beings. My doctor is like an angel. I know this because I saw who he truly is. He was resonating like a real energy-healing-power-house. When I saw that I said, “Why aren’t you treating your cancer?” He said, “What? How in the hell did you find all this stuff out?”
And then I ended up going to each person and saying, “Are you treating your illness?” I went to the kid who was in the other room and I said, “Is your uncle OK?” And he was like, “How are do you know all these things?”
The lady that worked in the MRI unit in the front of the building, I had only said hello to her in the hallway a few times. Now I know all about her. I went and I started chatting with her and I just verified things on my own. She was like, “Hey! Who are you talking to about me? How do you know all this?”
Barry: What was the last thing you saw before you came back?
Right before I went back into my body, I was pulled away from observing my body and I went out of the outpatient building. I was up above and I saw a homeless man on the street, and I saw his whole life. I saw how he worked on Wall Street at one point, had family, started taking cocaine, felt horrible about himself, got a venereal disease, gave it to his wife, then he lost his house. I saw his whole life story. And despite all of this horrible stuff this man went through, and all of these bad things that he did, he is still loved. His is still loved by God but he doesn’t know he’s loved. The homeless man is loved, and the homeless man is important even though he did all this bad stuff in his life. That was the last thing that I saw, the homeless man. He was the last thing that I saw before I went back into my body.
Barry: Did you get a sense of there being a reason for people's lives being the way they are? Or doesn’t it matter what you did to your life because you are still loved?
It matters a huge amount, the sense that I got is that our spirits agreed to come here and to do what I call this ‘love-engine’ business. It’s not supposed to be easy here at all. It’s supposed to be very challenging, and we’re intentionally supposed to forget why we’re here because we're supposed to discover love, like an archaeologist discovering the people that were here before us and putting together a picture. But the sense was that it’s very hard, and that throughout our lives there will be thousands of other things that we think are more important, but it always comes down to love.
That is the job that we’re all supposed to be here for. We are all here to find love, and it’s supposed to be hard. Our particular ‘music’ that we make when we get the love creates universes in the world. When we fully love another person, or try to help people in a loving way, it actually creates matter. And it creates a kind of music that’s heard all through these other dimensions. We can be actually healing many dimensions through our love, and I got the sense that there are trillions of other dimensions. That’s the nature of the color-fabric of the tunnel. It had something to do with all of these trillions of different dimensions. But there’s just one force of energy -- God, love. I felt so sad that people forget all of this and don’t know how important they are.
During the information download, I had asked about religion, and why there are all these different religions. The answer was that all of the different religions, when they’re appealed to through love, are exactly the same resonating energy. When prayer is based out of love, they are exactly the same, and they are all just as real. Hinduism is praying to God, the same as Judaism is praying to God, the same as Christianity is praying to God -- as long as it’s based in love and not in fear.
There was this heavenly kind of conversation that I was having right when I first got there. It’s such a blissful place. You’re in a place where there’s the energy of laughter, and love, and just lightness. It’s not a heaviness or a seriousness. It’s very light, and it’s the core of happiness, this kind of love. I’m not talking about the ‘romantic’ idea of love the way we think of love sometimes. The love of God, the love that was the fabric of the place I was in was very transcendent.
Barry: You said, “There was this heavenly kind of conversation when I first got there.” Was that during the second part of the experience after the tunnel?
Yes, after the tunnel. I didn’t feel that love thing when I first left my body. I felt fear when I flew out of my body and realized I was dying. And I was terrified when I first started going through the tunnel because I wanted to be back in my body. I didn’t want to go through no damn tunnel! (laughs)
Barry: You said that we agree to coming into this life. Do you think that you chose the life you did because you knew that you would learn something, or that you would have more opportunities to love?
I don’t know the answer to that question. That still remains a question for me, and I’d love to know the answer. I wonder if anyone else who had a NDE had ever gotten the answer to that question. I know that what I learned during that experience was that we knew it was going to be hard, but I don’t know how much we knew about the life that we were headed for. I don’t know if there were certain key events that would definitely happen versus some that we would have a choice over. That’s fascinating to me. I only know that we agreed that it was going to be tough. And it’s going to be tough in different ways. Each person has their own challenging thing -- one main thing. One myth that was dispelled for me was thinking that if you have money and nice things you won’t have pain, which is total bullcrap. Money doesn’t free you from pain.
The main thing I learned is that we are here to love, to find love. Our motivations matter -- why we do something matters. If we do something out of a pure seeking of truth and with a loving heart, then we are accumulating divine wealth. When they are based in love, or actions transcend this dimension. In our lives we can get very distracted pursuing goals which are not based on loving. These distractions do not build our ‘eternal currency’. The energy created out of loving -- truly, purely motivated to find love in every situation -- creates matter in a multiplicity of dimensions.
Barry: I know that you saw the homeless man last before going back, but did you see other people?
Yes. I saw other people who were just walking on the street on the upper East side, and I could see that all of them are loved. But I was directed to the homeless man.
Barry: Do you think he was pointed out to you?
Yes, I definitely feel that he was pointed out to me. I saw that he lived in New Jersey, and he had a mansion before, and he had a beautiful wife, and he had three children and one of his kids died of a drug overdose. I mean, all of this, his whole life was there like a little package. And I felt heartbroken that he hates himself and that he feels worthless. He’s not worthless at all because if he can love, he is contributing to the world.
It’s fascinating because what I learned there has really helped me in my life. I decided to come back and to be an advocate for people, especially for disabled people and people with chronic pain. These people are being discriminated against all the time and they think that society sees them as worthless, but I learned that nobody is worthless at all.
Barry: Were you given a message that you have to go back, that it’s not your time to die yet?
I definitely was sent back, and I’m pretty mad because I don’t know exactly what I was sent back for! (laughs). It was like, ‘You have work to do’, but I can’t remember what that is! The closest I can come to it is to say that it was to discover love again, like a newborn baby.
Barry: Maybe your job is simply to put everything you learned into practice. Did you feel that you had any new ‘abilities’ after you came back?
To answer that I want to mention something that happened right after I came back. After I came back into my body I was really scared. I was scared that I was going to die again right away. At the same time I was mystified because I realized that I seriously loved my life.
When I came back to life I grabbed my phone and I felt my sister, her spirit, was right there next to me. As I was laying there she texted me, and the text that she sent showed up at the exact moment that the physician assistant came into the room. The text said, “You OK?” with a thumbs up emoji, and as I read the text the physician assistant said, “You OK?” and he put his thumb up. The two messages arrived at the exact same moment. So, it was almost like a kind of verification. Then I asked him a couple of questions about how his uncle was feeling he said, “How did you know my uncle was sick?”
Over the next six months after my NDE I felt very raw, like a little newborn baby again. I was very different by then. I felt like an empath. People that I would see, perfect strangers, would come in and I felt very deeply attached to them like I never had before. It felt like I knew them more. Months after my NDE I was in a store, and I said to the checkout lady, “What kind of pain do you have honey?” She looked at me like I was some sort of an alien or something. I said, “Oh I have pain too and I just noticed on your face.” She said, “I don’t want anyone to know about it”. I said, “I know. I know how you feel. I hope you take some time for yourself.” And she was like, “My God!”
It started to freak me out quite a bit honestly, and I think I’ve intentionally built up walls against these intense feeling of empathy. It’s one thing to feel people’s pain and know their problems, but I could also feel a person’s anger really palpably, to the point where I wanted to stay way away from them.
I also had some very strange experiences where I got into this headspace where I basically imagined myself from my belly up in the heaven realm that I visited, and while doing this information was given to me. These are just some of the things that it had changed for me. I became deeply connected to other people, and highly empathetic.
Barry: You said that the homeless man was the last thing you saw before coming back and that he was, essentially, the last message given to you. Did you travel back through the tunnel, or did you just find yourself back in your body?
Yes, the homeless man was the last thing I saw. I didn't travel back through the tunnel, but went directly from the homeless man where I found myself back in my body.
I felt like I was definitely being shown all these people’s lives for a reason, and the homeless man in particular, but it’s weird how I didn’t get to see my own life.
Barry: Well, maybe not. Maybe NDEs aren’t always about showing things about your life specifically, but about life itself specifically.
I really appreciate being able to talk to you about this, and I appreciate your enthusiasm about asking the questions. I think you're a great resource for other people to get excited about asking these existential questions.
For me, I feel like the motivation behind doing this interview is to share this idea about love that I was given. There is so much fear in this world, and people hating each other and thinking that they have all these reasons to hate each other. It’s so sad because we’re not fulfilling our purpose if we capitulate to that. We are here to love. It’s as simple as that. That’s what I feel now about it, after having that experience. So it would be neat to get that message out for sure.
In 2015 I went to an outpatient clinic to have a chemotherapy-like infusion treatment. The treatment is a mixture of drugs that is supposed to drip very slowly into your system over a period of five hours. The drip line attached to my arm got kinked when my sleeve was pulled down, and it was kinked for almost an hour so nothing was going through for an hour. Prior to the procedure they had given me a shot that made me very drowsy, so I didn’t notice that the drip had stopped. Also, I had never had this treatment before so I wasn’t exactly sure what it was supposed to be like. The nurse came by and looked at me and said, “Oh honey, you can’t have your sleeve down,” and when she pulled my sleeve back up, all of the material that had backed up for the last hour came shooting into my system all at once. I immediately went into tachycardia. My heart was beating so fast that I was only able to say to the nurse, “My heart, my heart”. And then I flatlined for three minutes and forty-five seconds. That information is actually on my medial chart. When my heart stopped, I flew up out of my body -- my consciousness flew up out of my body.
At first it wasn’t registering that I didn’t have my body attached, but I could definitely see everything that was going on. I was up above the ceiling looking down. I could see the room I was in, and I could also see over by where the nurse’s desk was. I could even see through the ceiling. I could see that there was an operating room right next to where my infusion bed was, and I watched two doctors giving a woman an epidural in that room. I saw my nurse running into the room to get them. She was frantic. She ran into the room and pulled the two doctors away from their patient to come and get something out of a cabinet. As I was watching them doing this I could see and hear that they were having an argument. The nurse was throwing things out of the cabinet and arguing with the doctors about whether they should put this needle directly into my heart, or put it in my drip line.
Barry: Could you actually hear what they were saying?
Yes, I could hear and see everything. All of this stuff was happening and I could see everybody. There was a physician's assistant, and she was crying, totally freaked out. I could see the lady that was cleaning the place peering into the operating room, She was listening to what was going on, and the doctors knew that the shit was hitting the fan with me in the other room. This was an outpatient clinic that does small procedures, small surgical procedures. It’s down the street from a hospital so they were arguing about what to do next.
Now, I need to point out that the treatment I was receiving was just an outpatient procedure, and what happened was a fluke. It was just a fluke. The nurse didn’t do very much wrong because I was the one who pulled my sleeve down because I was cold. The material that had gone into my arm when she first turned the drip on was so cold that it made my arm frozen, and I absentmindedly pulled my sleeve down. The nurse didn’t catch it for about an hour, but it wasn’t her fault.
Barry: When you were up at the ceiling, you said that you not only saw your room, you could see the room next door as well. Tell me about that.
Yes, it was like I could see through the floor. I was on the next level up or something and I could see everything. It didn’t quite make sense, but I could see into the operating room next door and into my room.
Barry: What was your state of mind at this point?
I was surprised! All of a sudden I was up there and I was like, ‘This is weird’. I was curious at first. But then when I saw what was happening, and my consciousness was directed at the monitor that showed that there was no heartbeat and the alarms were going off I thought, ‘Oh shit, I’m dying!’ That’s when I totally panicked and I tried to dive back into my body, but my body wasn’t there. Instead, I found myself flying backwards through this tunnel at what felt like trillions of miles an hour. There is no speed I’ve ever experienced like that. It makes traveling down a runway before you fly like nothing, like a snail’s pace. It was a feeling of motion.
It felt as if I had fallen into this immense tunnel going the speed of light or something, and it was very scary at first. Then all of a sudden I started to relax somehow, and I wanted to look at where I was. I was like, ‘What is this place?’ Then as I was getting closer to end of the tunnel I started looking at the tunnel itself and saw that it was made up of colors that I had never seen before. The frequencies and vibrations of these colors was nothing like I had ever seen on earth. I’m an artist, so I’m trained to look at color and deconstruct color. But I had never seen colors like this before. That was the fabric of this tunnel -- it was made up of trillions of these amazing, indescribable colors.
Barry: While you were traveling through the tunnel did you feel like you were in a huge space or an enclosed space?
At first it felt fairly enclosed. It didn’t feel very expansive until I was close to leaving the tunnel. That was the point where I became very inquisitive about the tunnel and really started looking at it closely. I’m a wildly inquisitive person. So I started studying the fabric of it the way a scientist would, thinking ‘What is this tunnel made out of?’
Barry: Do you think you were in a black tunnel and that you could see the colors because you were getting near the end where it was brighter? Or, did you think the tunnel was made up of these colors and you just hadn't noticed them?
I believe that the tunnel was made out of the trillions of colors, but I was going so fast through it that I couldn’t see them. They all just registered as black. I’m just assuming this because I didn’t have a chance to study anything because I was going so fast through the damn thing. As I neared the end of the tunnel, my assumption was that it was made of trillions of color vibrations. It was as if I could see color as vibrations of energy. I had the sense that everything is the vibration of energy, everything. I still believe that.
And then all of a sudden I’m out of the tunnel. At the end of the tunnel was a whole universe, an expanse, another world. So, it wasn’t a ‘white light” like I have heard people talk about. It was trillions and trillions of colors in a vast, limitless expanse. The colors of the tunnel were like pure colors and the end of the tunnel was an incredible expanse of space filled with color. To my right was something like a large cube with no edges, like a glass that looked into the world of the living.
In this heavenly dimension I was surrounded by all of these souls; souls of people who didn’t have a human form, but somehow I still recognized them. I knew exactly who they were. One was my great-uncle Steve, my grandmother's cousin, who I had always been really connected with and who had died twenty years earlier. I recognized him even though he wasn’t in a human form. Like all of the other spirits there, he was a pink, misty shape roughly the size of a human being.
In this dimension there was no pain, just complete love. It was the most wonderful place, and I was surrounded by these spirits, or whatever you want to call them. Some were people that I had known. Others were people I recognized, yet I didn’t really know how I recognized them except they were like a soul family.
And then I saw the spirits of people that are alive. They were there on the other side of this filament; they were back in the first dimension I originally found myself in, but I could still see them from where I was. These were the people on earth who were praying for me. My grandmother, my mother and my sister; they were all praying for me but they were in a different location. It was like they were right outside the bubble of where the earth was and where my body was. They were on the other side of this bubble.
Barry: So, these spirits were kind of hovering near your body in the room at the treatment center, is that correct?
Yeah. They were by the operating room suite through the wall. Even from the second dimension, I could still see the operating room suite. It was like I could see through walls. The spirits of the people praying for me were in that space.
Barry: Just to clarify, even though you were in this new dimension, you can still see what was happening to your body back in the “real world”?
Yes. When I first flew out of my body I was still in the same dimension that my body was in. After the trip through the tunnel I was in a totally different heavenly dimension looking at the situation back in the world that my body was in. It was like looking at a fishbowl, not a round one. Like I said, it was like looking at a cube through glass. I was in a higher dimension observing the situation back where my body was. I was watching my body and watching people trying to revive me. When it first happened I was in that dimension, in that world, and my consciousness was there in that dimension. But after going through the tunnel I was looking back at it from this heavenly place, which is the only way I can describe it.
Barry: I want to ask you about the people who were praying for you. Had they been aware that you were ill, and that’s why they were praying for you?
They knew that I was getting a potentially dangerous treatment and that there are often problems with really high blood pressure. It was also dangerous because I was sick when I went in for the treatment. I was quite ill. I was in severe pain from an accident I had a few years earlier. The doctors had told me that my organs weren’t working right, so I was already in really bad shape. My family and friends knew that there were risks. My mother didn’t want me to do the procedure, but my grandmother told me I should do it because she thought it would be OK. I had been texting with my sister right before, so she knew that I was there as well.
Barry: Did the people praying for you have different spirit bodies than the spirits of people who were no longer living? Was each one distinct looking?
They were made up of the same spirit-stuff as the non-living ‘people’, this misty pink and shining gold. Picture the palest yellow, like that beautiful color of the sun at the end of the day. And this yellow was surrounding the pink misty looking shapes. They seemed to be approximately human shaped, but -- this going to sound strange -- they seemed more like music. I recognized them as individuals the way you would recognize an individual piece of music. I saw no defining features, but some were brighter than others, and they weren’t all the same height.
I actually drew a picture of it. I’ll send it to you. Each one did seem distinct. They were definitely distinct. It was like they were vibrations of energy. It was like seeing music as an object. So, each person was a unique song, and that part of the experience has profoundly affected me. It was like I saw the core essence of what a spirit is, and it’s totally recognizable.
Barry: Did you get a sense that all of these spirits were somehow connected?
I’m glad you asked that because this is how I now fully believe in God. What I’m about to tell you is expansive and heady, but I’m going to try and describe it to you as best I can. While I was there I felt the love of God, of whatever you want to call God, and everybody calls God all different things. I felt that everything and all of these people were formed into existence out of great, great love and that the really bright spirits are the ones that realize that love. There is only love in this place -- there ain’t no hate! It’s just pure, unabiding, absolutely magical, beautiful love.
While I was there I received what I’ll call an ‘information download’. It was as if I received an instant download of information about what life is about, and this information was a gift to me.
For about six months after that experience I could almost access that information, like that head-space of when I was there. I felt a really deep connection to that experience afterwards. I felt like I could meditate my way to that realm. I wrote a ton about it when I came home. I’m so glad I wrote about it right after it happened because it was a deeply profound experience. When I re-read what I wrote I’m reminded of it and, in a sense, put back there.
The following months after I went home from the experience, there was a definite recognition that I was given the gift of life. When I arrived back home I kept saying to myself, ‘This is a gift. I can’t believe I’m back here.I thought I’d be dead. This is a gift.’
It wasn't until I went back to my doctor a few weeks later that he told me that I had been clinically dead for three minutes and forty-five seconds. I was stunned! I mean, I was absolutely aware that I had had this amazing experience, but I didn't know that I had actually flat-lined for that amount of time. After I told my doctor what I experienced, he wrote "NDE" on my medical chart.
Barry: Many people who have had NDEs say that they saw their life flash before them in an instant. Did anything like that happen to you?
Well, this was the most exciting part. I know that some people say that their life passes before their eyes, or that they have a ‘life review’. I never had that experience. What I experienced was this -- I saw everyone else's life pass before my eyes.
I fully knew my doctor, I saw his whole life like a movie playing all at once. I knew that he had been dealing with prostate cancer, that he had late stage prostate cancer, and yet he was still working and doing all this stuff to help people. I knew that this other guy, the receptionist, had hepatitis B, and that his dad was dying, and that his uncle was dying of AIDS. I knew that the lady who was cleaning the floors was living with six people in her house.
Not only did I see all of their life struggles and who they are, it was like I was inside their heads and I knew the love that they have for themselves, and the hate that they have for themselves. I saw the love that they have for their husbands and wives and family. I saw their fears. And most overwhelmingly, I felt the incredible, unbelieveable, rock-solid, mountain rock-solid love that God has for every single one of these people. Everybody. Everyone. Fully loved. The stories of those people’s lives are absolutely precious. Your story, your life story is absolute music-preciousness, and the big thing, the big information I got loud and clear is that our lives are deeply important to the existence of God himself. I say himself, but it’s not a him or her, it’s way beyond that. I didn’t see the face of God, nothing like that.
I felt love as an action. Love as a force of energy, of creation. Everything is born out of love. Everything that is created is born out of love energy. That is why it was like the crescendo of some huge, beautiful piece of music. We are here to express love, to find love, especially in the most difficult things. To love your enemy, to love the person you feel you hate. If you can find a pathway to love, then you are proving the existence and the power of God, and there is a lot at stake. There was this idea that when we love something with a pure heart, we are somehow actually creating matter.
Barry: Did you get a sense that you knew things that these people didn’t know. For example, did the doctor know that he had prostate cancer?
Yes, he knew that he had it. When I came back into my body, the first thing I did was I grabbed his hand. I said, “Don’t let me go, don’t let me go.” And he was crying. This man is the most loving man. This man dedicated his whole life to help human beings. My doctor is like an angel. I know this because I saw who he truly is. He was resonating like a real energy-healing-power-house. When I saw that I said, “Why aren’t you treating your cancer?” He said, “What? How in the hell did you find all this stuff out?”
And then I ended up going to each person and saying, “Are you treating your illness?” I went to the kid who was in the other room and I said, “Is your uncle OK?” And he was like, “How are do you know all these things?”
The lady that worked in the MRI unit in the front of the building, I had only said hello to her in the hallway a few times. Now I know all about her. I went and I started chatting with her and I just verified things on my own. She was like, “Hey! Who are you talking to about me? How do you know all this?”
Barry: What was the last thing you saw before you came back?
Right before I went back into my body, I was pulled away from observing my body and I went out of the outpatient building. I was up above and I saw a homeless man on the street, and I saw his whole life. I saw how he worked on Wall Street at one point, had family, started taking cocaine, felt horrible about himself, got a venereal disease, gave it to his wife, then he lost his house. I saw his whole life story. And despite all of this horrible stuff this man went through, and all of these bad things that he did, he is still loved. His is still loved by God but he doesn’t know he’s loved. The homeless man is loved, and the homeless man is important even though he did all this bad stuff in his life. That was the last thing that I saw, the homeless man. He was the last thing that I saw before I went back into my body.
Barry: Did you get a sense of there being a reason for people's lives being the way they are? Or doesn’t it matter what you did to your life because you are still loved?
It matters a huge amount, the sense that I got is that our spirits agreed to come here and to do what I call this ‘love-engine’ business. It’s not supposed to be easy here at all. It’s supposed to be very challenging, and we’re intentionally supposed to forget why we’re here because we're supposed to discover love, like an archaeologist discovering the people that were here before us and putting together a picture. But the sense was that it’s very hard, and that throughout our lives there will be thousands of other things that we think are more important, but it always comes down to love.
That is the job that we’re all supposed to be here for. We are all here to find love, and it’s supposed to be hard. Our particular ‘music’ that we make when we get the love creates universes in the world. When we fully love another person, or try to help people in a loving way, it actually creates matter. And it creates a kind of music that’s heard all through these other dimensions. We can be actually healing many dimensions through our love, and I got the sense that there are trillions of other dimensions. That’s the nature of the color-fabric of the tunnel. It had something to do with all of these trillions of different dimensions. But there’s just one force of energy -- God, love. I felt so sad that people forget all of this and don’t know how important they are.
During the information download, I had asked about religion, and why there are all these different religions. The answer was that all of the different religions, when they’re appealed to through love, are exactly the same resonating energy. When prayer is based out of love, they are exactly the same, and they are all just as real. Hinduism is praying to God, the same as Judaism is praying to God, the same as Christianity is praying to God -- as long as it’s based in love and not in fear.
There was this heavenly kind of conversation that I was having right when I first got there. It’s such a blissful place. You’re in a place where there’s the energy of laughter, and love, and just lightness. It’s not a heaviness or a seriousness. It’s very light, and it’s the core of happiness, this kind of love. I’m not talking about the ‘romantic’ idea of love the way we think of love sometimes. The love of God, the love that was the fabric of the place I was in was very transcendent.
Barry: You said, “There was this heavenly kind of conversation when I first got there.” Was that during the second part of the experience after the tunnel?
Yes, after the tunnel. I didn’t feel that love thing when I first left my body. I felt fear when I flew out of my body and realized I was dying. And I was terrified when I first started going through the tunnel because I wanted to be back in my body. I didn’t want to go through no damn tunnel! (laughs)
Barry: You said that we agree to coming into this life. Do you think that you chose the life you did because you knew that you would learn something, or that you would have more opportunities to love?
I don’t know the answer to that question. That still remains a question for me, and I’d love to know the answer. I wonder if anyone else who had a NDE had ever gotten the answer to that question. I know that what I learned during that experience was that we knew it was going to be hard, but I don’t know how much we knew about the life that we were headed for. I don’t know if there were certain key events that would definitely happen versus some that we would have a choice over. That’s fascinating to me. I only know that we agreed that it was going to be tough. And it’s going to be tough in different ways. Each person has their own challenging thing -- one main thing. One myth that was dispelled for me was thinking that if you have money and nice things you won’t have pain, which is total bullcrap. Money doesn’t free you from pain.
The main thing I learned is that we are here to love, to find love. Our motivations matter -- why we do something matters. If we do something out of a pure seeking of truth and with a loving heart, then we are accumulating divine wealth. When they are based in love, or actions transcend this dimension. In our lives we can get very distracted pursuing goals which are not based on loving. These distractions do not build our ‘eternal currency’. The energy created out of loving -- truly, purely motivated to find love in every situation -- creates matter in a multiplicity of dimensions.
Barry: I know that you saw the homeless man last before going back, but did you see other people?
Yes. I saw other people who were just walking on the street on the upper East side, and I could see that all of them are loved. But I was directed to the homeless man.
Barry: Do you think he was pointed out to you?
Yes, I definitely feel that he was pointed out to me. I saw that he lived in New Jersey, and he had a mansion before, and he had a beautiful wife, and he had three children and one of his kids died of a drug overdose. I mean, all of this, his whole life was there like a little package. And I felt heartbroken that he hates himself and that he feels worthless. He’s not worthless at all because if he can love, he is contributing to the world.
It’s fascinating because what I learned there has really helped me in my life. I decided to come back and to be an advocate for people, especially for disabled people and people with chronic pain. These people are being discriminated against all the time and they think that society sees them as worthless, but I learned that nobody is worthless at all.
Barry: Were you given a message that you have to go back, that it’s not your time to die yet?
I definitely was sent back, and I’m pretty mad because I don’t know exactly what I was sent back for! (laughs). It was like, ‘You have work to do’, but I can’t remember what that is! The closest I can come to it is to say that it was to discover love again, like a newborn baby.
Barry: Maybe your job is simply to put everything you learned into practice. Did you feel that you had any new ‘abilities’ after you came back?
To answer that I want to mention something that happened right after I came back. After I came back into my body I was really scared. I was scared that I was going to die again right away. At the same time I was mystified because I realized that I seriously loved my life.
When I came back to life I grabbed my phone and I felt my sister, her spirit, was right there next to me. As I was laying there she texted me, and the text that she sent showed up at the exact moment that the physician assistant came into the room. The text said, “You OK?” with a thumbs up emoji, and as I read the text the physician assistant said, “You OK?” and he put his thumb up. The two messages arrived at the exact same moment. So, it was almost like a kind of verification. Then I asked him a couple of questions about how his uncle was feeling he said, “How did you know my uncle was sick?”
Over the next six months after my NDE I felt very raw, like a little newborn baby again. I was very different by then. I felt like an empath. People that I would see, perfect strangers, would come in and I felt very deeply attached to them like I never had before. It felt like I knew them more. Months after my NDE I was in a store, and I said to the checkout lady, “What kind of pain do you have honey?” She looked at me like I was some sort of an alien or something. I said, “Oh I have pain too and I just noticed on your face.” She said, “I don’t want anyone to know about it”. I said, “I know. I know how you feel. I hope you take some time for yourself.” And she was like, “My God!”
It started to freak me out quite a bit honestly, and I think I’ve intentionally built up walls against these intense feeling of empathy. It’s one thing to feel people’s pain and know their problems, but I could also feel a person’s anger really palpably, to the point where I wanted to stay way away from them.
I also had some very strange experiences where I got into this headspace where I basically imagined myself from my belly up in the heaven realm that I visited, and while doing this information was given to me. These are just some of the things that it had changed for me. I became deeply connected to other people, and highly empathetic.
Barry: You said that the homeless man was the last thing you saw before coming back and that he was, essentially, the last message given to you. Did you travel back through the tunnel, or did you just find yourself back in your body?
Yes, the homeless man was the last thing I saw. I didn't travel back through the tunnel, but went directly from the homeless man where I found myself back in my body.
I felt like I was definitely being shown all these people’s lives for a reason, and the homeless man in particular, but it’s weird how I didn’t get to see my own life.
Barry: Well, maybe not. Maybe NDEs aren’t always about showing things about your life specifically, but about life itself specifically.
I really appreciate being able to talk to you about this, and I appreciate your enthusiasm about asking the questions. I think you're a great resource for other people to get excited about asking these existential questions.
For me, I feel like the motivation behind doing this interview is to share this idea about love that I was given. There is so much fear in this world, and people hating each other and thinking that they have all these reasons to hate each other. It’s so sad because we’re not fulfilling our purpose if we capitulate to that. We are here to love. It’s as simple as that. That’s what I feel now about it, after having that experience. So it would be neat to get that message out for sure.