Don D NDE

Experience Description

I had an after-life experience at age 5.

At the time, I believed people only died when they were old and God wanted them to.

I believed that heaven was in the clouds, surrounded by a large fence with a gate and St. Peter sitting behind a desk checking to see if you came in or not. And that you probably received a notice by mail telling you it was time to pack your suitcase to come to heaven, at which point you might report to an escalator for the ride up.

I had been hospitalized and was in intensive care. They could not figure out what exactly was wrong with me, but vital signs were critical. Upon leaving my body, I rose high above the earth – to maybe about 50-60,000 feet (higher than I’ve since flown in a plane). It was high enough to see the curvature of the earth clearly. And I could see lights from cities across the Atlantic. I was physically there, but not cold and felt no wind. Immediately, I understood that all those people in all those many places were connected; we were one regardless of language and nationality. I could see the blue of the atmosphere as the sun passed through it. At the time, I do not believe I had ever seen any pictures of anything like this in the past.

Next thing I know, I am inside a tunnel. The tunnel is pitch black; I can see nothing. It is cold. It is full of extremely threatening, evil people that hated me, taunted me, and wished to do me serious harm. I got the feeling that they were there forever…without warmth, without any life, just an existence of being surrounded by other evil, bitter people with no purpose or hope….shut out and extremely jealous and malevolent. Someone took my hand, a man, and he said “Don’t worry, they can’t hurt you as long as you are with me” to reassure me. Although I was a little wary of them still, I completely trusted what he said. We progressed upward and forward through the tunnel – not walking, simply floating along in the pitch dark.

Suddenly, we came out of the tunnel into the light, and turning around, you could see the entrance to the tunnel. It was in the face of a rocky hillside or mountain, not unlike earth (though I had never seen a mountain before – I had that experience later). I knew I was not on earth, and that we had travelled a great distance - and I wondered where I was. Immediately, I know that this is another place in the universe, just like earth is a planet in space, this is another place in space. This fact simply enters my mind. It comes from the man next to me. But I do not believe that he spoke. He simply put that knowledge into my mind.

I look around, and down a hill I see a valley with a city in it. I am immediately completely happy and full of peace, and I know I belong here and want nothing more than to go there and stay there forever. The city glows with the most beautiful light.

I want to go there. Then I realize that I have been separated from my family, and wonder about them. Instantly I understand that they are OK – that we know exactly where they are at, and that they will be coming to join me later in only a fairly short time and we will all be together again. I immediately understand and totally accept that, and being separated from my mother does not bother me in the least, despite still being a young child.

The man with me is very tall and thin. Looking straight ahead, I am looking at his legs just above the knees. I had a brother who was very tall and thin. Initially, I thought this man was my brother.

I wondered what was in the beautiful city below, and if there were any trees there like on earth. Without moving, suddenly I could see a street level view from within the city. Not only were there many trees, but they were sublimely beautiful. They were extremely colorful….in a palette of colors that does not exist on earth. I was immediately struck by how beautiful these colors were….and how odd it was that they were almost intense in the sense that neon colors were, yet somehow struck you as being as mild as pastel and perfectly coordinated. I marveled at how very much more beautiful the color palette was there than it was on earth.

I started to move toward the city. I do not think I was walking, I think I simply floated in response to wanting to be there. Then the man next to me put his hand on my shoulder, and informs me ‘you have to go back.’ I was not at all happy about this, and I looked up at him – and discovered it was not my brother, but another man I had never seen - who was very tall and thin, and looked somewhat like my brother but was someone else.

Before I could protest, I was back in the hospital. And the next morning, the problem I was hospitalized for had, according to the doctors, miraculously gone away.

The next morning, I told my parents that I had gone to heaven that night, that I had seen the earth from above. I was extremely excited about it. My mother said I must have dreamed, and I was insistent that it was no dream – I had actually physically gone there. I was so excited about it, I talked of little else for the coming weeks. The day afterwards, my parents brought me a stuffed dog as a present….and I immediately named him “Erfy” (earthy) to mark my wonder at having seen the earth from space and understood its size and that it was covered with a great many peoples that were really all one separated by the insignificant difference of language. I couldn’t help noticing how very drab all the colors on earth were.

That is all I remember…..and it has been so long ago, at this point I simply remember second hand what I clearly remembered for many years after this incident.

Since that time, I have had some very minor and occasional but nonetheless seemingly recurrent occasional psychic abilities.

For instance, pulling over the car on the commute home during a rainstorm because I knew I was about to receive a phone call telling me that my father had died, even though at the time he was supposedly fine and we were told he could live for another 10 years. The call came two minutes later. Running down the mountain trail in Yosemite park to call home and ask about our childhood dog right after he had passed away. Cancelling a weekend getaway to New York scheduled a couple of days before 9/11 due to having had an extremely upsetting nightmare about descending steps in the Statue of Liberty in the pitch dark while planes attacked it and Manhattan (shooting), and the statue collapsed before everyone got out. Feeling the need to call home immediately to see if everything was OK when I was in another city, just as a tornado topped a hill a mile from the family house. Stopping to dig for no reason in the outdoors and unearthing a key and horseshoe that must have been dropped and been buried 100+ years before. And stopping my car at a rest stop on the freeway to tell my stock broker to sell everything only a day or two before the last market collapse.

In every one of these cases, I wasn’t trying to figure this info out. Suddenly, it just entered my head as an incontrovertible fact – I simply realized or ‘knew’ each of these facts and had no doubt whatsoever about them. These revelations are not frequent, and are not available on demand. Occasionally, it just happens. Maybe once every year or two. When it happens, there is immediately no doubt in my mind concerning the fact that has just entered it. I’ve always felt that this was somehow an ‘artifact’ of the after death experience.

I know this experience varies from other experiences I've seen documented. But have never doubted this in the least. I've never been overtly religious and had no information that would have biased me toward dreaming this. It absolutely flew in the face of everything that I was taught to believe about heaven and death up to that time.