The last thing I consciously remember is my arm getting stuck between a pipe and a wall in the basement where the rave was held. The next thing I was aware of, I was up near the ceiling, maybe ten or fifteen feet above the floor, in the corner of a different room from the one where I was “stuck.” I was looking down at myself lying on the ground. I wasn't frightened — I was just noticing. There was another young person kneeling beside me, worried, and someone I somehow knew was important, who was panicking.

Then I saw flashing lights through the window, and a paramedic rushed in — a girl, stocky, with her hair pulled back very tightly. She was kneeling over me. I could sense panic, but I was remarkably calm and completely unbothered.

Then, with no sense of being moved there, I was suddenly somewhere else entirely. I was on a gurney, being pushed feet-first through a very narrow tunnel lined with white subway tiles — and I was filled with absolute peace – almost like “ok, this is right.” This wasn't the basement anymore; it was another place altogether. I couldn't see them, but I knew there were three beings behind me pushing the gurney — one to my back left, one to my back right, and one directly behind me. They weren't “people”, though. I don't know how else to explain it. Ahead of me was a light. I've never been able to fully describe it. You could look right into it. It was the brightest and at the same time the warmest thing — it was everything, absolutely everything, and it was amazing. I felt like I wanted to be a part of it, like I WAS a part of it and that it was home.

Behind me, the techno music was slowly fading as the light drew closer. And a question was simply there in my mind: the light, or the music? The instant I thought "music," I woke up on the floor of the basement. Now I was frightened – not by the experience I just had, but by the fact that I was back in this dirty, way-too-physical world. As I got up to leave, the stocky female paramedic with the tightly pulled-back hair said, "No, no, no — you didn't have a heartbeat. You had no sign of life at all. I was about to call it." I just looked at her and bolted. In the commotion, no one took my information, so no report was ever filed.

For the next three months I took as much LSD as I could, trying to get back to it — because after that, the ordinary world felt fake, like I was in a play I hadn't signed up for. But every “trip” felt chaotic and dirty by comparison. Eventually I gave up and simply carried the memory with me. But I also could never shake the fact that I was participating in this life but not really living it – almost like there was a film or a screen door between me and everything else.

I was an atheist, so for decades I couldn't reconcile what had happened with anything beyond the body. I held both as true in a strange way, without resolving it. It was only after my son passed away, and after reading Dr. Bruce Greyson's After and Dr. Eben Alexander's Proof of Heaven, that I came to recognize and accept it as an authentic near-death experience, and to hold it as something meaningful.

When my son died in October 2024, I experienced him in ways no one else around me seemed to. I could feel him, see him, hear him, even smell him. I knew he was with us, and at times I knew what he was telling us more clearly than the people around me could.

I began recalling my NDE from over 30 years ago in detail. As I did, I came to believe that at 17 I had somehow “pierced the veil”, and that this is why I could see, hear, smell, and know that my boy was still with us. My NDE became instrumental in my grief. It helped me understand that he was still with us, just in a different way, and that death is not the end. We will see him again. I came to that understanding through my NDE first. I became a Christian about a year after his death, roughly six months after I began really diving into near-death research, and reconciling my NDE with my new faith came after that. The NDE is what opened the door.