NDE-Like Accounts

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Teen leaves body during diving accident and feels no pain from impact

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In August of 1960, just prior to my 14th birthday, my brother and I took the public service bus down Elysian Fields Ave. to Pontchartrain Beach (New Orleans) where we liked to go swimming and diving in the beach pool. A couple weeks earlier someone had explained to me how to do a back flip off the diving board into the pool. At this point I had done maybe a total of 5 or 6 back flips during previous visits to the beach pool.

I did a few regular forward dives and then decided to do a back flip. I stood at the end of the board, back to the pool, and then began to do my back flip. As I reached the top of my dive and was about to descend, I realized that I had not leaned back enough when I started the dive and I was going to hit the board head first. Total terror overcame me. I felt like I was going to die. A funny feeling in my head occurred, almost like my head was filled with pressure, and I suddenly found myself underneath the diving board staring straight up at the bottom of the board.

The bottom of the board totally filled my view, sort of green and white, from about 6 inches away. I was motionless, shocked and confused at what was happening. I was just kind of "there." After what seemed like a few seconds, though it had to be more like several tenths of a second, I felt and heard my head hit the diving board. It seemed to be some distance away, like it was happening to someone else. I was so relieved that there was ZERO pain. Then I heard the board flutter several times (I was still under the board staring straight up at it). I think I heard a splash, but that memory is not as clear. I did not experience entering the water.

The next thing I experienced was finding myself almost to the edge of the pool facing people on the side staring at me. I was tapping my right hand on top of my head where I had hit the board and people were screaming at me, "Don't touch it!" A life guard and someone else lifted me from the edge of the pool and sort of walk/carried me away. People were staring aghast at me as I had blood pouring out of my head all over my body. They took me to a room where they wrapped my head like a mummy. My brother called home and my dad came and picked us up and then took me to the doctor. The doctor said he could see the skull but it did not appear to be fractured or broken. He put in 9 stitches, bandaged me up and sent me home to rest.

Afterwards, I spent some time talking to my brother about what happened and I just didn't understand how I could have been under the board staring upwards at it. We thought that maybe I hit the edge of the board from underneath but that still made no sense.

I talked to my mother about the event and my puzzlement at being underneath the diving board and she said something like, "I think you might have jumped out of your skin." I had no idea what that meant. After that I never thought about the incident at all until recently. Recently I've been thinking about childhood events and that one particularly came to mind. Over the past 50 years or so I've spent time reading about NDE's, OBE's, etc., and have talked to people who have experienced them and believe them to be factual accounts of what people have experienced.

In 1960 I had no idea what an out of body experience was, had never heard of any such thing. The idea that we are spiritual beings, wired into a human body through our head somehow, was totally foreign to me. But I think, now, that I fled my body through the top of my head due to the sheer terror of what was about to happen to me in the faulty back flip I was engaged in doing. I suspect that there is a spiritual escape mechanism in place when we are about to experience something horrific.