A man who claims to have been clinically dead for seven minutes has shared a very different version of what happens when you die, insisting that the famous “ white light ” is nothing more than the brain telling itself a soothing story.
The man, who described himself as a PhD academic with more than 40 years’ experience in astrophysics, wrote on social media site Reddit that he was rushed to hospital after suddenly struggling with his breath, with doctors diagnosing him with a lung haemorrhage on arrival.
While at the hospital, his condition began to deteriorate rapidly, leading to a serious heart-attack which left him without a pulse.
“It took the doctors seven minutes to get my heart started again,” he wrote on Reddit. “During that time, I had a stroke due to the lack of oxygen in my brain.”
When he eventually woke up, he felt as though he was drifting in and out of consciousness for two long days.
“I asked, ‘What happened?’” he said. “It’s hard to correlate inner time to what was happening outside, but I can make some sense of it.”
Despite what he went through, the experience left him with no fear of death at all.
“I’m not scared of dying, not in the least,” he wrote. “Afraid of what comes before, sure, but nature makes dying easy.”
During the seven minutes that his heart had stopped beating, he wrote that he didn’t see a tunnel, angels or anything like that. Instead, what he saw was far more abstract.
“I saw a series of three oval ellipses, one at a time, just suspended in a black space,” he said.
Each shape appeared separately, he claimed, with the first was filled with landscapes.
“On the inner and outer surfaces of the first ellipse I saw mountains, streams, forests and clouds,” he wrote. “They were beautiful at first, but then they began to sour as their colours took on a yellow tinge.”
That image faded and was replaced by something far more unsettling.
“It was a hot ring of iron, so hot that pieces of iron were slowly crumbling from it,” he said.
He also describes remembering a perculiar metallic smell, which he later realised could have been connected to blood and injury as his body shut down.
The final image came just as his heart was restarted.
“The scene brightened to reveal the third ellipse that was covered with beautiful clouds that were light pink and blue, like the most beautiful sunrise or sunset,” he wrote. “That, I believe, is when my heart started beating again.”
What is interesting is that his conclusion was not something based in the mystic or the unknown, but instead tat the shapes he saw were influenced by what his brain had been focused on shortly before he collapsed.
At the time, he had been apparently studying the work of German astronomer Johannes Kepler and was deeply absorbed in understanding why planetary orbits are elliptical rather than circular.
“When I was told days later about my cardiac arrest and stroke, it all began to make sense,” he said. “I think dying reflects what happens to be most accessible in your mind during that time. Your mind tells you a story about it.”
He was clear about what he didn’t experience.
“That’s all I saw,” he wrote. “No tunnel of light or happy deceased family members welcoming me. I think that’s dreaming.”
Throughout the ordeal, he said he never felt fear.
“I was just a dispassionate observer,” he explained.
