I have never ever told anyone this before, but 30 years ago I did once have an experience where I thought that I had died and woke up in reality, but it wasn’t exactly like others I’ve heard.

It was very quick. I had been outside in the grass and I was feeling like nobody cared about me. I was quite upset.

I had passed out for quite a few hours, I think, outside in the dark and cold. I had taken a lot of something psychedelic, as I did a lot back then, maybe mushrooms I picked myself. I was about 21.

One minute I was melting towards the ground not feeling great, then I came to, in what felt like a room. It was completely dark but not like a normal darkness. I had a sense of a handful of people in there that loved me so much. I felt like they were my soul family. I felt them turn towards me with a calm sort of surprise, and one said, I guess telepathically, but it felt like they all said, “Not yet,” very gently and lovingly. They pushed me downwards firmly, but it wasn’t rough, it was very loving, and then I woke up in my body, stone cold sober.

I didn’t think intellectually that I could have died because people don’t die from mushrooms. I barely thought about it the last 30 years. I told myself that it was just a hallucination, and it didn’t make any sense with my world view at the time. But it felt more real than regular life and not like any hallucination I have ever experienced. And I still remember it vividly, even though it was only a couple of seconds long. If time even makes sense in the experience because it did all seem to happen in one instant.

Before the experience and for my whole life I had always known that I was not my body and that when I move, my body copies me. But after that experience I was 100% sure that this life was a kind of virtual reality and that somehow I had woken up for just one moment in the real world.

It felt very real and is still as vivid as it was 30 years ago, even though it was completely dark and I never saw anything and it only lasted a second.

I had never heard of NDEs until recently and have been watching a lot, which is how I heard of IANDS. As I listen to some of them, there is some sort of deep recognition in me that I know these places and states, more than even this world, even though I don’t know how. I know that these people are telling the truth (at least some of the ones that I have seen).

I also had another unusual event, when I was about 7. I was jumping on the bed with some cousins that were on the other bed. There was this sound like a loud waterfall and all of a sudden, the heavy plaster ceiling collapsed right above where I was. Somehow, I wasn’t there any more underneath it, even though I hadn’t moved and hadn’t understood the danger I was in. No one saw me move. My parents were very shaken, and I remember us all talking about it and being told it must have been an angel that moved me. As a teenager, I rationalised it away as I must have reacted on instinct without knowing what I was doing, but I’m not so sure about that now.