I remember everything about the time leading up to this event, during this event and after with absolute clarity. I do not doubt that this happened as I describe it here.
My Out of body experience.
Before this event, I had been pronounced dead on two separate occasions after my initial car accident. Once at the scene of my accident by the ambulance crew and again at Southampton General Hospital, where I was taken after the accident. As you can see, these stories of my death were grossly exaggerated. This event became the third time I had been officially pronounced dead.
At the time of this story, I was in a room with one bed directly opposite the nurses' station near ward d4 in the Queen Alexandra Hospital in Cosham, Portsmouth, England. I had been in this hospital for quite a while after being transferred from Southampton General Hospital after my road traffic accident in 1990. At the time, I was still very ill.
My friend was visiting me, and I remember being sat in bed talking to him when my nose started to bleed. I asked him to pass me a tissue but my nose kept bleeding and was getting worse. Things started to get worse very quickly. The alarms on the equipment I was plugged into all started going off, and nurses and a Doctor started rushing into the room, pushing my friend into a corner.
At that point, I remember being very calm, and nothing seemed strange as I found myself looking down at my body in the bed below me in the room. It was as if I was floating above it. I remember the Doctor pushing my friend out of the way and into the corner of the room as he started to move around me, and he and the nurses started to work on me to revive me. I remember the Doctor performing CPR on me for a while before moving backwards, checking the time on his watch and pronouncing that I was dead at whatever time it was. I had suffered a massive brain haemorrhage and been pronounced dead. The nurses then removed the equipment they were using to try and revive me, and they all went back out of the room to the nurse's station outside.
I then remember clearly continuing to float upwards while looking down at my body. I could see my dead body below me as I rose through the ceiling of the hospital and continued upwards. I soon became aware that I was surrounded by soft white clouds and could hear a voice speaking to me. It told me it was not my time yet and that I had to return. I replied that I was warm and comfortable and didn't want to return, but the voice told me I had to go back. I remember saying again that I didn't want to return before being told I had to.
The next thing I remember is being back in my body with my eyes open, looking at the ceiling in the hospital room that I had been floating above. I was gasping for breath, and the nurses and Doctor came rushing back in and started connecting me back up to the machines I was on previously. I must have then blacked out because my next memory is waking up the following morning in the hospital bed, connected up to all the hospital's machinery again. The door was open, and I could see the nurses talking at the nurse's station outside the room. They came in to see me and asked me how I was feeling, and I told them what had happened to me.
As I was lying there the Doctor that had been there the previous day came into the room with the hospital Chaplain. He introduced me to the Chaplain and asked if I would mind talking to him. He told me that the nurses had told him that I remembered being dead and having what I was calling an out-of-body experience. He asked everyone but the Chaplain to leave and closed the door behind them all. The Doctor then asked me to retell my story to him and the Chaplain. I retold my story to them, including details of who was in the room, where they stood, what everyone did, and everything else, including me looking at my body after he had pronounced me dead. I told him about my conversation with the voice through the clouds and then about returning to my body and finding myself breathing again.
The Doctor, by now was as white as a sheet and turned to the Chaplain and told him that everything I had said was 100% correct and that some of the details I had given him were impossible for me to have known as he had pronounced me dead before some of the things that I could remember happened. He also confirmed the position of everyone in the room and exactly what they had been doing to revive me, which he said I couldn't possibly be aware of.
The Chaplain asked me how I felt, and I told him I felt fine. He asked me if I was religious and believed in God. I told him that I was not religious and that although I believed in something, I didn't believe in God and Jesus as I was taught when I was at school. He asked me if I wanted to talk about God and what it meant, and I reiterated to him that I didn't believe in God as he did. I believed in something but not what I was taught at school. He told me to ask the nurses to get him, and he would return if I wanted to talk to him about anything. The Chaplain and the Doctor left together, and I was left alone.
Nurses, Doctors, Priests, family and friends have often asked me about this story and my memory of it has never dimmed or changed. My belief in God has not changed and nor will it. I still believe there is something that we as humans do not yet understand and that there is something or somewhere that our soul, spirit or ghost goes to after our bodies die.
This event has had a very big effect on my life. Apart from the obvious physical effects, I have become calmer and more accepting of things I can not control. I still do not believe in God as I was taught at school, but I often wonder who or what it was that I had a conversation with when my consciousness left my body. I think the human misunderstanding of whatever it was that I spoke to causes so many of humankind's problems, wars and troubles.
I believe the following article on Wikipedia may better explain some of the reasons why I don't believe in the single God and his son Jesus that I was taught about at school. It's worth a read. Whatever you believe and have faith in, I will always respect your belief. Faith is a very strong driver of mankind and brings much peace and contentment. I hope that one day we will all meet elsewhere and realise that our faiths were all faith in one thing that had many different names in many different languages.