Have you ever had an NDE? Would you please describe what you saw, and where you (temporarily) went?

The closest I came was a really bad concusion. I was out for 6 days. I had really wild but vivid dreams of my family and places I loved to go. I had hallucinations that the mural on the hospital wall came to life, and the people in it talked to me. At one point, my father brought my dog in our boat into the hospital so I could see it. I think this is because just before I got injured, my father was bringing the boat to shore so I could go for a ride. I was not allowed in the water because I had a bladder infection.

The medicine I took for it made me sensitive to the sunlight. We didn’t know that, and I passed out and fell from the retaining wall on the beach. I fell about 15 feet head first and landed on the concrete footer on the bottom. They thought I was going to die because I didn’t fully come to until 6 days later. I only opened my eyes for a few seconds at a time before that.

This is going to sound like I’m kidding, but I’m not.

In college, I partook of some marijuana my friend found in his glovebox. We sat down to watch “Baghdad Café” and I started having a bad experience. My heart was racing, I was having a hard time breathing, tunnel vision set in. I saw myself from above and then saw a scene of green rolling hills and felt a sense of serenity. A face appeared in the clouds as a series of rotating masks and told me I was at a crossroads – I could get straight and have a good life or continue blowing it. Then the vision stopped and I was more panicked than ever. The movie was freaking me out – I lay on my side and had my friend flip through TV channels to find something soothing. And you know what worked?

“Golden Girls.”

“Golden Girls, Golden Girls,” I mumbled to myself, nodding, as Estelle Getty eased my troubled mind with her mediocre semi-comedy.

Dave, that ought to have done the trick! Did you quit?

Indeed I did.

Scamp and Dave, thanks for sharing.

I’m glad both of you survived, and are now OK.

September 3, 2008, 1:01 PM EDT

I can relay one that my mother had. She told me this story a few years ago:

When she was little, like maybe 11 or 12 I think she said, she was playing outside one late afternoon. She lived in Montreal, Quebec so it was very cold. She was already kind of sick or something and ended up staying out til after dark. My grandmother brought her in and put her to bed. The next morning, my mother was really sick, and ended up staying in bed for several days. At one point, she said, she was shaking uncontrollably, and was experiencing severe aching pain all over her body, and her mother was beside her.

Then, as she puts it, all the pain suddenly stopped. She said it was the clearest, most pure ecstasy she’d ever known, and she noticed that she was looking down at her self, motionless, from one of the corners of the ceiling. She said she felt as though she were being tugged upwards, almost like a strong current in a river or something. But she couldn’t stop looking at her mother, who was crying hysterically, of course. She said the strangest part of the whole thing was that as soon as she wished she could be with her mother again, she was immediately back in bed looking up at her mother, and all the pain returned to her.

She’s sure that she was dead for that experience, and that she experienced the beginning of the process of death. I don’t necesarily agree that she was dead for that time, I tend to go with the lack of oxygen to the brain theory that has been said to be responsible for several NDEs.