A 31-year-old man who ‘died’ for over three minutes as a teenager has relived the haunting experience—describing what he saw and felt.
The unnamed man, posting on Reddit, said he had been declared clinically dead, meaning his heart had stopped and he wasn’t breathing, after developing meningitis when he was 15.
Meningitis is a serious bacterial infection which leads to potentially deadly inflammation of the membranes surrounding the brain and spinal cord.
The man said that after passing out at a party he was technically dead for a total of three minutes and 11 seconds.
Detailing what he remembers in a post that has been liked almost 2,500 times over the past four days, that he was presented with a peaceful scene.
‘I remember being on a beach sitting on a wharf with my feet in the water chatting to my older brother who was alive and well,’ he said.
‘Felt like forever we were doing this.’
He said the beach felt like his interpretation of a tropical paradise of a video game he had been playing called Final Fantasy X.
A 31-year-old man who died for over three minutes as a teenager has revealed the haunting experience of what he saw and felt
But he explained how this vision was suddenly ripped away when he felt real moisture hit his body.
‘I felt actual water on my feet and I woke from a long coma because somebody was in my hospital room and had spilt water over me,’ he said.
He said immediately after this he was struck by how ‘s*** and foul’ his mouth tasted as his senses started to come back.
The man didn’t detail exactly how long he had been in the coma after dying at the party.
Users who responded to his post said the scene sounded almost idyllic.
‘Sitting by the dock of the bay shooting the s*** with your brother in an endless summer afternoon sounds not too bad at all by coma dream standards,’ one wrote.
He isn’t the first person to recall a haunting experience after being clinically dead.
In another post a man who ‘died’ for six minutes detailed the haunting scenes he claims to have seen in heaven.
He said the beach felt like his interpretation of a tropical paradise of a video game he had been playing called Final Fantasy X. Pictured a screenshot from the game
On another Reddit thread which has garnered more than 12,000 likes, the unidentified user detailed how they were just 15 years old when, in 2003, they suddenly collapsed in the road.
Despite feeling ‘just fine all day’, the boy ‘broke out in a cold sweat’, became breathless and suffered ventricular fibrillation — a dangerous abnormal heart rhythm and the most frequent cause of sudden cardiac death.
After paramedics arrived, the individual claimed they discovered his heart had stopped beating and it was only after ‘working tirelessly to revive me’ in an ambulance that his heart began working again after six minutes.
The person claimed to have miraculously avoided any long-term damage, and said they are one of the handful of people to experience near-death experiences by temporarily ‘transcending our world’.
Recalling the experience the user said: ‘During my visit, I learned things about our universe that I wish I hadn’t.
‘It began with light. Blinding, white, pervasive. It bathed me, calmed me. It was everything they tell you about. Beatific, welcoming, the stuff of spiritual experiences.
‘I had the distinct feeling of ascent, like the light was lifting me skyward. I passed through several sets of gates, which my dizzied consciousness hardly registered.
‘I arrived in a place without dimension, a place beyond reality. It only made sense while I occupied it.’
Bacterial meningitis, which requires urgent hospital treatment, affects the membranes in the spinal cord and brain
But they also claimed they were faced with several ‘cold’ and ‘mocking’ creature-like figures that delivered ‘horrifying truths about existence’.
They added: ‘At first, because of my Christian upbringing, I believed them to be angels.
‘In my incorporeal form, I made the spiritually-equivalent gesture of opening my arms, anticipating their embrace.
‘Instead, I felt myself shackled by their powers, like a collared dog.
‘Humiliation and terror came over me. These were not the ethereal beings I’d been led to believe await us.
‘Six minutes in “heaven” felt like a lifetime.’
Once the minutes came to an abrupt end, they returned to their body ‘on Earth’.
Other people have previously told MailOnline of out-of-body experiences such as seeing bright lights at the end of a tunnel or meeting deceased relatives.
Experiences of seeing and hearing things while clinically dead do have some scientific basis.
For years studies have shown the human brain still functions normally for a very brief time after the heart stops, although it appears to have ceased activity on regular scans.
Research has also revealed that the brain can still experience sporadic bursts of activity even after an hour without oxygen, during resuscitation.
Such discoveries have led to some medics calling for an overhaul of the standard practice that rules people should be declared dead after three-to-five minutes of oxygen deprivation to the brain, as these patients could still in theory be resuscitated.
While evidence of what happens in brains after clinical death is still being explored, exactly why so many people have similar experiences remains an issue of contention among experts.
Some theorise these changes in the brain are the ‘brakes’ coming off the system and this opens our perception to incredibly lucid and vivid experiences of stored memories from our lives.
However, this is only a theory and other experts dispute this.
It should be noted that clinical death differs from brain death.
Brain death is when a person on an artificial life support machine no longer has any brain function, which means they will not regain consciousness.
Such patients have no chance of recovery because their bodies are unable to survive without artificial life support.
In the UK this means a person who has suffered brain death is legally dead.
This can be difficult to comprehend for families of the deceased as they can see their loved one’s chest rise and fall with every breath from the ventilator as well as their heart continuing to beat.
Brain death can be caused by both illness and injury when blood and/or oxygen supplies are cut off to the vital organ.
The condition is different from a vegetative state where a patient’s brain function remains.
