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What is it like to be dead?
Main Post: What is it like to be dead?
Top Comment: What was it like for you before you were born? It will be EXACTLY like that.
How come we are not all ABSOLUTELY FREAKING OUT about death? Why do you think that would be the case?
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Hello, I can't include whag I wanted to include here because of character count limitations. You can see my comment to understand my question.
Top Comment: Do NOT get me wrong: life is so sweet, and I love so many things and people and just being here. But I am tired. So very very tired. Its hard to be sick all the time. It's exhausting to be in pain all the time. It's heartbreaking to lose people and be left alone. I'm tired. I'm not going to go looking for Mr. Death. But when he comes, I'm going to greet him like an old friend. He'll be taking away my pain, he'll be making room here on earth for my younger family, he'll be taking me to the Next Place. How is that not a kindness?
Those who have died before, what did it feel like and how did you die?
Main Post: Those who have died before, what did it feel like and how did you die?
Top Comment: Dirtbike accident where I was clotheslined by a rusty chain at about 25 mph. I was partially decapitated, arteries and windpipe broke apart. I was flown in a helicopter to a hospital and remember the guy on the helicopter continuously talking to me telling me not to fall asleep. I fought but did go to sleep/died. It really does just feel like you are going to sleep peacefully. I was revived a few minutes later at the hospital where I remember coming back and awake for maybe a few seconds before I was either put under or blacked out then woke up a day or so later on a bed with a tube down my throat in the ER. met the pilot and guy who kept talking to me a few weeks later in recovery. Owe them my life.
I died for six minutes in 2003. Heaven isn’t what we think it is.
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With apologies to the religious, I feel my story must be shared.
In 2003, when I was fifteen years old, my heart stopped for six minutes. It happened on an ordinary afternoon, at the point in my daily routine when I walked home from the bus stop. In the four blocks between the corner where I hopped off the bus and my front door, I started to feel nauseous.
It came on suddenly, without warning. I’d felt just fine all day, ate a lunch of bosco sticks and marinara sauce, something I’d eaten hundreds of times throughout high school. Before I had an opportunity to consider alternative causes, I broke out in a cold sweat.
Then I felt the curious flutter in my chest.
My heart slipped into what I later learned was an episode of ventricular fibrillation.
I became breathless and collapsed. What happened next has been told to me after the fact. I apparently sprawled in the road, where a woman driving a hatchback nearly crushed my skull beneath her tires. Instead, she screeched to a halt, tried to rouse me, then dialled emergency services when she failed to do so.
EMS arrived to discover my heart had stopped beating. I was dead, technically. They transported my body to the hospital, and somewhere along the way managed to shock my ticker back to life. Thus began a harrowing weeks-long journey through the American healthcare system that led eventually to an ablation, pacemaker, and mountains of debt my family’s still dealing with.
But my heart’s alright.
And thank f**k it is, because what I learned that day has taught me never to thank God for anything.
Because for those six minutes, as my lifeless body traveled across the city accompanied by two paramedics working tirelessly to revive me, my soul transcended our world to visit the hereafter. During my visit, I learned things about our universe that I wish I hadn’t. Perhaps in sharing my story, I might help our species prepare for what comes after we expire.
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. Upon reflection, I don’t believe they were physical in any sense, and yet I recall the feeling of admittance, as if they might’ve prevented me from rising had they remained closed.
In any event, I arrived in a place without dimension, a place beyond reality. It only made sense while I occupied it. I don’t believe a corporeal being can make sense of the astral plane, something about its intangible existence defies translation.
So what I came away with were more impressions than images. I was not alone. Several life forces enclosed me upon my arrival. 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. These were cruel, unsympathetic overlords by whom I was fettered.
Why? I thought, my soul wailing like a petulant child.
Something like laughter returned, but it was cold, mocking. Thoughts floated into my consciousness like birds winging in and out of sight. They delivered some horrifying truths about existence that I’ll do my best to relay to you now:
Our universe, like many others running parallel to it, contains a pittance of the total energy in existence. It is a farm, used to produce souls, which only arise in the precise conditions found in our cosmos. When you hear scientists talk about the improbability of the existence of our goldilocks universe, it’s because they don’t actually come into being spontaneously.
They’re designed. And the hands that craft them are not benevolent gods, but rapacious beings with little care for the creatures they create.
Our ultimate purpose, I learned in the custody of the spirits that shackled me, was to ripen until we were ready to serve them on their higher plane.
The Big Bang gave birth to the universe to give rise to life to eventuate in humanity, a sufficiently conscious organism that may be harvested for use as slaves on a higher plane, where time and space dissolve into an eternity we spend in servitude.
Six minutes in “heaven” felt like a lifetime, which I spent amusing what I perceived to be a childlike spirit with a penchant for psychologically distressing manipulation. It batted me around like a cat with a caught mouse, reveling in the pain it produced. Physical discomforts we imagine hell inflicting upon us pale in comparison to the torture of soul pain. Loss of a loved one comes closest, that piercing, emotional damage resulting from trauma.
When it became clear my time had not yet expired on Earth and I was to return, I was told not to reveal their existence to the rest of my kind. My reward, they communicated to me, would be a marginally improved station among the slave population. Alternatively, if I managed to convince others of their existence, new horrors would await me when I returned.
I can’t imagine anything worse than what I experienced, subsumed beneath an ineffable grief and torment.
For weeks, I tried to explain to anyone who would listen what I experienced. Everyone told me I’d suffered a very serious and traumatic experience for a young man, that the event left scars on my psyche as well as my heart.
I gave up trying to convince them.
I slowly began to convince myself that what they’d told me was true. I’d simply imagined it. A death dream, as it were. The mind reckoning with its own imminent demise, trying to make sense of the experience.
Then I met someone who claimed to have met God.
This was a few years later, when the author of a nonfiction book recounting their near death experience visited my hometown. (I won’t reveal the author’s name as I don’t want to invite a lawsuit, which I’m sure he’d launch against me if he read that I’d besmirched him.) I attended a reading and afterward confronted him about his tale.
I looked him in the eye and asked if he really met God – something I’m sure he’s dealt with hundreds of times. He smiled and nodded, assuring me that yes, God is real and is filled with love. On a lark, I decided to tell him that I knew the truth, that slavery awaits us all.
A flicker in his gaze betrayed his knowledge of the fact. He really had died and visited the afterlife, but lied about it in his book.
Because he knew.
He knew the truth of heaven, the horrible place our souls are bound for.
Top Comment: Maybe you didn’t go to heaven.
Do you think that death is actually not that bad? As we think
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Like do you think when we actually get there and it happens to us that we’d even be laughing at ourselves how much we dreaded it for our whole lives, and that it‘s not that bad or that big of a deal at all.
For instance like with surgery, a lot of us dread it and are scared of the sedation or general anaesthesia going under but then we actually say it wasn’t bad at all, was even a good nap. Of course the disturbing fact that we don’t wake up, EVER, and don’t get to live in this fascinating world again and witness it again is the biggest issue with death though. It’s incomprehensible we can’t understand infinite things
Top Comment: What scares me more is not the fact that i will not wake up but the process leadingbto it. The dying part, probably painful beforehand
For those that lost someone to a sudden, unexpected death- were there any signs leading up to it?
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My mom (50) was always sick my entire life. Just one thing after another. In her final 8 months i really started to have a feeling she wouldn’t be around for longer. I thought 5-10 years though. She was losing weight like crazy, tired, severe back pain, vomiting for the past 3 months pretty bad. She always went to the doctor and they never seemed concerned though.
Edit: Just writing this to vent. I wanted to include this last night when i posted but i’m exhausted from this loss and my pregnancy. Ever since my mom learned she would be a grandmother she started planning the baby shower. I was 4 weeks pregnant when she booked the venue. She booked it for when i was 25 weeks which is REALLT early for a baby shower. She died 8 days after the shower. She wrote my unborn son a card, gave him & me lots of sentimental gifts. She even got him a bunch of clothes for when he’s a toddler. My parents are divorced so this shower was the first time in my entire life that ALL my family was together in the same room. I’m a Christian and i got her into faith and she even went out and bought a bible after my baptism in January.
She had 2 bookmarks in this bible. The first was in Genesis about the creation of life, the second was in Acts about heaven. This is giving me the biggest relief and comfort. Me and my mom always had a rocky relationship but since I the day i told her i was pregnant, she had been my best best friend. We spoke daily. I even got close to my sister that i had been estranged from. My mom always wanted me and my sister to get along and we finally did. The 3 of us were in a group chat together that we used daily.
Top Comment: Yeah, my child 15M asked me what I'd do if something happened to him the night before his death. He even asked to stay from school.. He died the next day in a horrific car crash on his school lunch break.
How are not everyone absolutely freaking out about death?
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So how are not more people absolutely terrified about the thought of death and existence? We have no idea what consciousness is, and what happens when we die. No matter how I try to think about this, I get this gut wrenching feeling in my stomach and I feel my body itching. I am not religious, but the thought of there being nothing is just as terryfing for me as the thought of heaven and hell. I hear many say «The thought of there being nothing soothes me, and therefor Im at peace with death», but this angle also just make me panic. How is not everyone, constantly worried about this?
Top Comment: What good would worrying about it do?
How is everybody so chill about the fact that we’re all gonna die?
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I don’t know why, but I’ve been plagued a lot recently by thoughts of death, what comes afterwards, what’s it like. I’ve always had an awareness of death and that we’re all going to have to face it eventually. I grew up in the Catholic Church and had an innocent idea as a child that we all go to heaven afterwards. I guess as I reached my preteens, I figured that wasn’t actually the case. I’m 21 and an atheist now. I’ve been researching ideas of consciousness and the afterlife, and I am pretty confident in the conclusion that death is just the termination of consciousness, and not any different than what it was like before we were born.
But I can’t help but still think about the horrible possibilities, that some of us might go to hell or that we all may never lose awareness and that we spend eternity being cognizant but unmoving. Or that maybe we do lose consciousness when we die, which is really best case scenario, but I think that there’s still a very sad philosophical implication in the futility and fruitlessness of life if all our lives end in the same bleak oblivion that we experienced before we were born. Is there any purpose in anything we do if it means nothing in the end?
Whatever the case, death is the most universal thing there is. Every life eventually dies. All the hundreds of billions of humans who came before me, all the trillions of animals that have ever been born, even the sun will lose all its energy ultimately and die. It’s the most inevitable thing in existence, permeating and omnipresent in everyone’s lives. It’s going to come for us all eventually. Yet everybody just seems so....chill about it? Is it because of religion? I’m sure a lot of people in the world are atheists these days, but even they don’t seem bothered by the nothingness that awaits them any minute now.
I’m just perplexed. How are people able to avoid freaking out thinking about this? I almost find it odd how ubiquitous it is yet how unspoken about death can be. I assume it’s because this isn’t something people generally enjoy vocalizing about. I certainly haven’t told anybody of the anxiety creeping in my mind. Is this something most people eventually accept or is it because it’s something so frightening that most people would rather not even think about it until it happens? I’m sure plenty of people before me have had the same thought process as I do now: were they able to get over their fear eventually? Does anybody?
Maybe I’m just not getting it. I don’t know. How do you all feel about dying? Is it actually that big of a deal? What explains people’s nonchalant attitude about death?
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How do you deal with death?
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I turned 30 not long time ago, and after I turned 30. I lost my little sister. From 2019-2024 I’ve lost my dad, little sister, an aunt &uncles. How do you deal with constant news “somebody passed away?”
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