Check out the Law of One for some funky spiritual stuff. There might be something in there that makes sense of this reality for you.
I don’t want to discuss the incident in detail because it was very traumatic, but long story short, I had a near-drowning incident when I was 12 (technically not a drowning because I survived). I was technically dead for several minutes.
I saw nothing. total blank. I remember flashes of struggling to get to the side of the pool one moment, and flashes of waking up in an ambulance the next. then it cuts out again, and then I woke up in a hospital room with tubes in all my holes (plus some tubes in new holes) and surrounded by my mom and brothers.
I suffered a traumatic brain injury as a pedestrian who didn't look both ways. My answer isn't very fun but I technically qualify as I had to be resuscitated on scene.
I was in a coma for a few days and then--despite being conscious and over time regaining awareness, then vocalization, then even conversational speech--I wasn't writing any new long term memories for a couple of months. My experience of that dark period, to the extent that it isn't nothing, is pretty vague. The memories of months preceding injury are pretty blurry until the injury which I don't remember and then the next I remember is being tied to a hospital bed and chewing on the Posey mitts. I remember some hallucinating in that period, one instance is an ordinary piece of a day interacting with nurses and therapists but perceiving everything as if drawn in the Family Guy cartoon. I post-hoc interpret that memory as a vague basically dream state that got mashed in with a Family Guy memory.
So no, no afterlife experience or memories of the other side.
FYI, there is a community, !nde@lemmy.world, if anyone here is interested in this kind of thing.
I don't know if this counts. I had a stroke while I was sleeping. I had very vivid nightmares that night, almost the worst nightmares I've ever had. It's made me terrified of dying in my sleep. If my final experiences are going to be like that I absolutely do not want to go out in my sleep.
"He died peacefully his sleep" is something people only say for catharsis.
I would not really compare it to dying, but having had seizures, you can appear dead and then wake up really disoriented and scared. Your brain basically shuts off for a moment.
I used to work with adults who had seizures and it was terrifying to watch but we did what we had to do for them. But I was always curious what it was like for the person experiencing the seizure. Like, what exactly do you remember? If you don’t mind going into detail, if not, I’m sorry I asked.
Do you remember falling to the ground and then your consciousness jumps to waking up and there’s nothing between?
I didn't feel it coming on, the first thing I remember is someone helping me. They thought I was dead. I was unconscious on the ground with eyes open, hit my head on the floor and bit through my tongue so I was bleeding from the mouth. When I woke up I had no idea where I was or what happened so I was very agitated. At least for the type of seizures I have, its like an on-off switch. There are other types though.
I witnessed this once years ago during the start of a class I was attending. Girl from the back gets up and starts walking towards the door, mumbling. She seemed off, so I stood up and asked if she was okay. She fell straight back and I tried to catch her but failed. She foamed at the mouth and started turning blue. I had no idea what to do. Medics show up and the class clears out, but I stayed because she basically half fallen on me. When she woke up she looked straight at me and said "hi."
Don't forget to make sure you're buried with your alarm clock, most people oversleep after they die.
Not sure that atheism excludes belief in life after death, tbh. We're all alive right now with no god, after all.
Same. I am between believing in souls or not, so this is a topic worth pondering.
This is exactly why I always wonder. I recall reading every single comment on a Reddit's thread (at least 2000 comments)
Some fat, white old dude that wears all red and rides a sled in the sky stole my birthday.
Can you define "death" in the context of your question? I feel you might have referred to some forms of reversible coma.
They are. People colloquially refer to a stopped heart as "coming back from the dead." Obviously you cannot truly come back from the dead if its your brain that's dead.
There's just a gap in my memory like going to sleep and not dreaming. The waking up was brutal though. I had zero context of anything around me but my brain was still fully functioning. It was weird. For context I was dead for half an hour and in a medical coma for a week or so.
I imagine that's how the first true ai will feel. It still will "know" information, how to speak, etc, but it will have no idea wtf is going on
Edit: apparently people haven't heard of CPR and doubt my claims.
Here's your evidence
https://abcnews.go.com/amp/US/hero-teacher-helps-save-teens-struck-lightning/story?id=11829631
Oh, I can assure you with the utmost confidence that you were not dead for half a hour. If you’re going to make something up, at least do a little googling beforehand.
I've been very lucky and haven't come close to death (yet), but I have had some dream experiences that resembled NDEs.
I tried three times to control what I dreamed about. The dreams weren't like dreams, is the best way I can put it - they were very short, very vivid, and clearly linked to the "intention" I'd requested. The second dream featured a pair of strangers trying to tell me something.
The last one, I went down a long tunnel (like a storm drain) and ran into people who, indeed, drove me out and told me I shouldn't be there. After that, I wasn't able to do it again.
Unsure if just weird dreams or if I actually got too close to something. The thing that makes me think there might be something in NDEs, tbh, is the stories palliative care nurses seem to have.
My dad did. He's never fully went into every detail, but he has talked about it in bits in pieces over the years and he said quite a bit as I was struggling with the passing of my mother. From what I know he had a major heart attack and there was a point where the chest pain just... stopped and one second he was there and the next second he just wasn't. He described it as like, leaving his body in some way and being surrounded by light, warmth and peace. He apparently met and was hugged by family members and relatives he hadn't seen in years. He's always been pretty limited beyond that, but from what I gather it felt like they were there to greet him briefly but didn't have the expectation for him to stay with them. Kind of like "hey, we're here but it's not time yet" in the way he's talked about it.
There's been claims in the family he has always been hesitant to talk about but apparently he saw relatives there that died long before he was even born and was able to recognize these dead relatives in extremely old family photos. I don't know how true that is, but whenever anyone in the family tries to discuss it he actively avoids the conversation.
I lost my mom this year. She lost her mom as a child and was the last of her siblings to go. I hope they were there to greet her. She was really looking forward to that.
