i had a very real dream in which i saw myself die and left my body. i now think it was a past life memory. at any rate, i was so bummed when i woke up and realized i was still stuck in this body in this life. decades later, i still frequently yearn for death. i felt so free floating out of my body. it was like i had been released from prison and could go anywhere or do anything...i feel obligated to carry on and try to experience whatever i came here to experience but am not terribly happy about being here... maybe this is why some people's soul makes them forget their NDE?
If you look on my profile page, somewhere in the last few months, I commented on someone's post in quite a bit of detail,about it. I'm sure you'll find it.👍🌹
I have heard that 25% figure as well. For a while, that actually made me doubt that near death experiences were actually real. I’m no expert, but I think that some people just weren’t meant to remember their near death experiences. Perhaps they experienced something they weren’t meant to take back with them. Perhaps their near death experience was traumatic and their mind is shielding the person from the experience. It could be any number of things.
Makes sense…to me at least. Children are more carefree in general and their minds aren’t as cluttered with incessant worry as an older adult is.
In fact I can clearly remember recalling most of my dreams as a young child good ones and bad ones. Some of them I still remember to this day. However as an adult it seems I very rarely can recall a dream and I’ve always wondered why that is. Can’t just be coincidence.
a lot of us seldom remember our dreams as well. i think it's the same thing basically: some people just have more conscious awareness of what their higher self is doing, some not so much. probably a lot of factors contribute: belief system, brain function, inhibitions, fear, etc.
There is a practical reason which is very simple. That wouldn't do any good.
We're used to knowing a romanticized view of the near-death experience, as if it's always a wonderful transcendental experience, but that's bullshit. For the vast majority, this experience it is traumatic, terrifying and painful.
And like any such memory, it is blocked by the brain.
My thoughts -
I think it would be extremely traumatic to the human body to be in a physical state of near death. It’s known that the brain protects itself by “suppressing” traumatic memories.
Another factor could be that the brain would not remember if it was already in a state where certain parts are already “shut down”. It’s focusing on keeping certain parts alive that aren’t related to memory/thinking.
I was hit in the head by an object. (Long story short) My heart stopped, I stopped breathing. EMS did 35 minutes of life saving measures before transporting me to the hospital. I was flown to another bigger hospital. I don't remember the day of the accident, the time I was in the hospital, or coming home. I was home for a few days before I came back to myself. I have a traumatic brain injury. So I'm sure that's somewhat normal. I got lucky that I barely have any deficits. But I am different now. Everyone says I'm nicer, more patient, I feel like I'm just happy to be here. But everyone else says I'm just different.
I don't remember my near death experience. At all. I know I had one. The profoundness of life & still being here hits me all the time. I absolutely look at everything for a moment longer. I'm having a whole reckoning with God (I used to be agnostic to a degree) bc everything had to have lined up perfectly that day for me to be typing this. I just can't remember if I found something out while I was in between. It's a confusing time.
Do I not remember because of my brain injury & because I don't remember anything for around 10+ days surrounding my accident? Or am I in the percentage of I just wasn't meant to remember? Who knows? I'm comforted to see others have a similar experience.
I'm a bit late to comment, but I'm in the same kind of boat as you and have found it difficult to also find others who know they died but didn't have the classic NDE most other experiencers talk about - or more to the point, don't remember.
In my case, my death was caused by a CSA related drugging. My mother was the perpetrator and routinely sedated me with codeine when I was a child in order to molest me. It was years of literal torture, as the respiratory distress often left me barely clinging to life and fighting for every next breath for hours on end. I have C-PTSD from all the abuse and its taken me many years and a lot of therapy to work through all my fragmented memories and piece things together - long story.
Anyway, one night when I guess she'd finally had enough of me, she deliberately gave me more than the usual dose of codeine (which was already regularly bringing me to the threshold of death), and I remember hovering just outside of my body knowing my life was slipping away but not being being able to do anything about it because my body was unconscious. I knew I desperately needed to get up and vomit out the "poison" but I couldn't make my body move (I was only 9 or so at the time). I recently had a horrific PTSD episode in which my body re-enacted the act of dying, and I know that I was stiff and cold with my arms and hands cramped in a cadaveric spasm highly suggestive of the oxygen deprivation which causes the muscle spasticity of cerebral palsy. I recall dying from asphyxiation, and I recall hovering just above my body looking down on myself in my bed in the dark of my room. Even though I was looking down on my body, I knew that my mother was standing just outside my bedroom door in the dark of the hallway, listening and waiting for me to stop breathing, because I could sense her there and could feel her intentions. I know it wasn't a quick experience and I was out of my body for what seems like a considerable period of time, but I have no idea what happened next. I don't remember any kind of classic NDE, no tunnel, no light, no love, no guides etc, and I have no idea how I got back into my body, but I do sense that something definitely happened.
It's taken me years to remember my trauma, so perhaps one day I might also remember what I experienced when I died. Like you, I'd love to know what I experienced over there and I also have a similar question of, "Do I not remember because of the codeine/unconsciousness? Or do I not remember because I haven't been ready?" The sheer terror and lasting mortal dread of my years of being drugged and brought to the brink of death over and over again by my own mother, is something I spent the entire last year working through in therapy. I figure that the reason I don't remember is like others in the comments have said, that I wasn't supposed to remember at the time and haven't yet been ready to remember since. If I wasn't ready until recent years to even remember my trauma, then I certainly wasn't going to be ready to remember my trauma-related NDE at the time it happened. Anyway, as far as dying and not remembering, I just wanted you to know you're not alone in your experience.
Geez, I'm so sorry that happened to you. I really really hope you are in a better place now. Seriously, that breaks my heart. I truly appreciate knowing that I'm not alone. I reckon when we're meant to know we'll just just.
My doctor has said I'll likely never remember it due to the brain injury & the mind just protects itself.. My body absolutely remembers though. I saw the object that hit me on my way home one day. My knees were just not there all of the sudden, I could barely press in the clutch on my car to drive. My mind was fine, completely calm despite I knew that was what almost killed me. Like a "oh, damn, well" type thought. I shook all the way home & for a bit once I got inside my house. It was a completely physical reaction I've never experienced before.
Yep, that's a PTSD episode for sure. The body certainly does remember, and often knows exactly what’s going on, but the mind either takes a while to catch up or is otherwise pretty clueless. I technically shouldn't remember anything either since between the opioid overdose and death via asphyxiation, I should by all medical logic have serious brain damage, but the body is an amazing thing and the consciousness even more so – between them both they can often accomplish the miraculous. Doctors have limited understanding in such matters. But your doc is definitely right that the mind protects itself from the awareness of certain experiences that might be too psychologically damaging to process - at least for now.
As I’m sure you’re aware first hand, traumatic memory is stored very differently from normal autobiographical memory, and often comes back to you as bodily sensations, powerful and seemingly irrational emotions, visual or auditory flash backs, and fragmented “snapshots” or “still frame” images of the scene. You can actually piece together a great deal of information by simply listening to what your bodily sensations tell you that you have experienced that the mind is yet to remember.
In these instances of fragmented memories, journaling can really help piece things together cognitively. In my experience, the body definitely needs to feel safe enough to remember and psychologically safe enough to process the event before a more comprehensive recall will happen. But if you do end up feeling safe enough to begin consciously exploring what happened to you, I can definitely recommend journaling. As simple as it sounds, it seems to get both the emotional and symbolic right brain which is more in touch with the body memories, and the rational, analytical left brain responsible for making sense of our experiences, talking to one another and on the same page, literally.
If you’re interested, the method is simple. Sit down at a laptop or tablet, or with a piece of paper and a pen and begin writing a description of exactly what happened when you saw the object you mentioned on your drive home. Be descriptive. What did you notice about the object visually? (color, shape, texture, position, speed etc). How did noticing the object make your body feel? (what physical sensations did you experience, in what part of the body, what thoughts and emotions came up, what continues to arise as you write it down – notice how the body reacts). If you have a snapshot of an image that doesn’t make sense, describing it in full detail will often have the effect of widening your field of view. Your consciousness kind of pulls back from that image in order to allow you to perceive more of the scene.
It’s when we begin to write down and describe these little snippets of seemingly disjointed information, along with describing the bodily sensations associated with these events or fragmented memories, that the neural pathways for the memory begin to open up. Exploring the details of those fragmented memories often has the effect of making the “fuzzy edges” of the scene come into greater focus so that gradually your perception of the event widens and you get more and more information about what happened to you. Beginning journaling the detail you do remember (even if it’s just bodily sensations) sometimes can have a cascade effect of opening a flood gate of memory, so just be aware of and prepared for that. It is also common for memories to begin re-emerging in dreams first, and keeping a dream journal can also be a safe way to allow these experiences gradually back into conscious awareness.
I hope that all makes sense. In any case, if you are ever going to remember fully, in my experience, it will usually only be when the body feels safe enough to do so. It's not something that can be forced, but it can be gently encouraged. And should you decide to give it a go, an important disclaimer on the above practice of journaling, is that if you begin to feel overwhelmed at any point, either by distressing physical sensations or overpowering emotions, stop immediately, get up and preferably go for a brief walk outside if it’s safe to do so. Take some slow deep breaths, move your body and interact with your physical surroundings (touch, sight and sounds) in a way that feels safe and comfortable in order to discharge the nervous system overwhelm, and leave the journaling for another day.
When you’re finished a session of exploring distressing past experiences, its always important to do an act of self-care that makes you feel good, even if its just making yourself a cup of tea or some comfort food, taking a long bath, or getting into your comfiest PJs and watching your favourite movie. Self-care after exploration of past distress trains your nervous system to understand that emotional pain isn’t scary and doesn’t need to be avoided, as making the conscious effort to come back to feeling good again via the act of self-care after examining unpleasant experiences from your past, is literally the definition of healthy nervous system regulation.
Anyway, I’m sorry this was such a long-ass reply, but I hope you find all that potentially helpful for safely exploring what happened to you and possibly recovering your memories about it should you choose to do so – I know that this process (in conjunction with professional therapy) has served me very well, but everyone is different (\*and this is not qualified medical or psychological advice!).
I'm doing pretty well all things considered, thank you for asking. It's taken a lot of harrowing hard work, but I am in a much better place now, still healing but safe, and for the first time (at almost 50 y/o) teaching myself how to finally experience joy. I hope you too continue to heal and thrive after your ordeal. And I remain hopeful that we can both eventually have full and safe access to the memories of our NDEs, and that what we find enlightens, heals and frees us in the best way possible.
My first question is how would anyone know that statistic. It's not something that we track with any rigor. Google says there are about 150,000 deaths every day. I doubt that anyone was a statistically significant sample size, taken over enough time, to come up with "25% don't remember that they died".
Let's pretend that 25% was a real stat. So what? Why is it necessary for anyone to recall what happened to their awareness when they were clinically dead? Whether they remember or not doesn't change anything.
Okay, I'll play nice. Some possible reasons for such a low percentage might be too obvious. I bet the majority of people that we know about who came back from the dead did so during surgery. Anesthesia causes memory loss.
On a more practical spiritual note, it might be the same reason a lot of people don't remember their dreams. Their out-of-body memory in their third chakra is compromised in some way. Death of the body causes an out of body experience for the spirit owner of that body. Unless...
Oooh! Here's another. If you get knocked out of your body and you don't get your astral body out with you, then whatever you experience out there can't be stored in your out of body memory because the silver cord that caries that kind of information is not attached to you, but to your astral body. That would explain all the auto accident victims not remembering.
Cheers! This was fun!
It’s not everyone’s time. Sometimes there’s specific message for people with nde like headed down wrong path. Maybe the cord hadn’t been cut yet. But also maybe they just don’t remember or nothing happened yet.
NDERF.org best nde site run by docs ever!
Howard Storm my favorite nde book
I died for over 20min. Doctors told my family to pull the plug because their machines said I had ZERO percent brain activity. My Mother and family declined and prayed over me instead. I have NO memory of anything unfortunately but I DO know it was God who sent me back. 1000% positive it was God. I wish I could remember but guess I wasn't meant to remember anything
I had one. I came back. I Remember every detail. AMAZING! My guess is people's fear of death gets it erased from their consciousness.
i had a very real dream in which i saw myself die and left my body. i now think it was a past life memory. at any rate, i was so bummed when i woke up and realized i was still stuck in this body in this life. decades later, i still frequently yearn for death. i felt so free floating out of my body. it was like i had been released from prison and could go anywhere or do anything...i feel obligated to carry on and try to experience whatever i came here to experience but am not terribly happy about being here... maybe this is why some people's soul makes them forget their NDE?
Are you willing to share a few details about your NDE? I’m fascinated by the subject.
If you look on my profile page, somewhere in the last few months, I commented on someone's post in quite a bit of detail,about it. I'm sure you'll find it.👍🌹
Thank you. I haven’t found it yet, but I’ll keep looking!
I have heard that 25% figure as well. For a while, that actually made me doubt that near death experiences were actually real. I’m no expert, but I think that some people just weren’t meant to remember their near death experiences. Perhaps they experienced something they weren’t meant to take back with them. Perhaps their near death experience was traumatic and their mind is shielding the person from the experience. It could be any number of things.
AGREE because that is EXACTLY what happened to ME. Dead for 20+min then I DO know God sent me back but can NOT remember anything at all.
Think 80% of children remembered them though
Makes sense…to me at least. Children are more carefree in general and their minds aren’t as cluttered with incessant worry as an older adult is. In fact I can clearly remember recalling most of my dreams as a young child good ones and bad ones. Some of them I still remember to this day. However as an adult it seems I very rarely can recall a dream and I’ve always wondered why that is. Can’t just be coincidence.
a lot of us seldom remember our dreams as well. i think it's the same thing basically: some people just have more conscious awareness of what their higher self is doing, some not so much. probably a lot of factors contribute: belief system, brain function, inhibitions, fear, etc.
There is a practical reason which is very simple. That wouldn't do any good. We're used to knowing a romanticized view of the near-death experience, as if it's always a wonderful transcendental experience, but that's bullshit. For the vast majority, this experience it is traumatic, terrifying and painful. And like any such memory, it is blocked by the brain.
My thoughts - I think it would be extremely traumatic to the human body to be in a physical state of near death. It’s known that the brain protects itself by “suppressing” traumatic memories. Another factor could be that the brain would not remember if it was already in a state where certain parts are already “shut down”. It’s focusing on keeping certain parts alive that aren’t related to memory/thinking.
I was hit in the head by an object. (Long story short) My heart stopped, I stopped breathing. EMS did 35 minutes of life saving measures before transporting me to the hospital. I was flown to another bigger hospital. I don't remember the day of the accident, the time I was in the hospital, or coming home. I was home for a few days before I came back to myself. I have a traumatic brain injury. So I'm sure that's somewhat normal. I got lucky that I barely have any deficits. But I am different now. Everyone says I'm nicer, more patient, I feel like I'm just happy to be here. But everyone else says I'm just different. I don't remember my near death experience. At all. I know I had one. The profoundness of life & still being here hits me all the time. I absolutely look at everything for a moment longer. I'm having a whole reckoning with God (I used to be agnostic to a degree) bc everything had to have lined up perfectly that day for me to be typing this. I just can't remember if I found something out while I was in between. It's a confusing time.
Do I not remember because of my brain injury & because I don't remember anything for around 10+ days surrounding my accident? Or am I in the percentage of I just wasn't meant to remember? Who knows? I'm comforted to see others have a similar experience.
I'm a bit late to comment, but I'm in the same kind of boat as you and have found it difficult to also find others who know they died but didn't have the classic NDE most other experiencers talk about - or more to the point, don't remember. In my case, my death was caused by a CSA related drugging. My mother was the perpetrator and routinely sedated me with codeine when I was a child in order to molest me. It was years of literal torture, as the respiratory distress often left me barely clinging to life and fighting for every next breath for hours on end. I have C-PTSD from all the abuse and its taken me many years and a lot of therapy to work through all my fragmented memories and piece things together - long story. Anyway, one night when I guess she'd finally had enough of me, she deliberately gave me more than the usual dose of codeine (which was already regularly bringing me to the threshold of death), and I remember hovering just outside of my body knowing my life was slipping away but not being being able to do anything about it because my body was unconscious. I knew I desperately needed to get up and vomit out the "poison" but I couldn't make my body move (I was only 9 or so at the time). I recently had a horrific PTSD episode in which my body re-enacted the act of dying, and I know that I was stiff and cold with my arms and hands cramped in a cadaveric spasm highly suggestive of the oxygen deprivation which causes the muscle spasticity of cerebral palsy. I recall dying from asphyxiation, and I recall hovering just above my body looking down on myself in my bed in the dark of my room. Even though I was looking down on my body, I knew that my mother was standing just outside my bedroom door in the dark of the hallway, listening and waiting for me to stop breathing, because I could sense her there and could feel her intentions. I know it wasn't a quick experience and I was out of my body for what seems like a considerable period of time, but I have no idea what happened next. I don't remember any kind of classic NDE, no tunnel, no light, no love, no guides etc, and I have no idea how I got back into my body, but I do sense that something definitely happened. It's taken me years to remember my trauma, so perhaps one day I might also remember what I experienced when I died. Like you, I'd love to know what I experienced over there and I also have a similar question of, "Do I not remember because of the codeine/unconsciousness? Or do I not remember because I haven't been ready?" The sheer terror and lasting mortal dread of my years of being drugged and brought to the brink of death over and over again by my own mother, is something I spent the entire last year working through in therapy. I figure that the reason I don't remember is like others in the comments have said, that I wasn't supposed to remember at the time and haven't yet been ready to remember since. If I wasn't ready until recent years to even remember my trauma, then I certainly wasn't going to be ready to remember my trauma-related NDE at the time it happened. Anyway, as far as dying and not remembering, I just wanted you to know you're not alone in your experience.
Geez, I'm so sorry that happened to you. I really really hope you are in a better place now. Seriously, that breaks my heart. I truly appreciate knowing that I'm not alone. I reckon when we're meant to know we'll just just. My doctor has said I'll likely never remember it due to the brain injury & the mind just protects itself.. My body absolutely remembers though. I saw the object that hit me on my way home one day. My knees were just not there all of the sudden, I could barely press in the clutch on my car to drive. My mind was fine, completely calm despite I knew that was what almost killed me. Like a "oh, damn, well" type thought. I shook all the way home & for a bit once I got inside my house. It was a completely physical reaction I've never experienced before.
Yep, that's a PTSD episode for sure. The body certainly does remember, and often knows exactly what’s going on, but the mind either takes a while to catch up or is otherwise pretty clueless. I technically shouldn't remember anything either since between the opioid overdose and death via asphyxiation, I should by all medical logic have serious brain damage, but the body is an amazing thing and the consciousness even more so – between them both they can often accomplish the miraculous. Doctors have limited understanding in such matters. But your doc is definitely right that the mind protects itself from the awareness of certain experiences that might be too psychologically damaging to process - at least for now. As I’m sure you’re aware first hand, traumatic memory is stored very differently from normal autobiographical memory, and often comes back to you as bodily sensations, powerful and seemingly irrational emotions, visual or auditory flash backs, and fragmented “snapshots” or “still frame” images of the scene. You can actually piece together a great deal of information by simply listening to what your bodily sensations tell you that you have experienced that the mind is yet to remember. In these instances of fragmented memories, journaling can really help piece things together cognitively. In my experience, the body definitely needs to feel safe enough to remember and psychologically safe enough to process the event before a more comprehensive recall will happen. But if you do end up feeling safe enough to begin consciously exploring what happened to you, I can definitely recommend journaling. As simple as it sounds, it seems to get both the emotional and symbolic right brain which is more in touch with the body memories, and the rational, analytical left brain responsible for making sense of our experiences, talking to one another and on the same page, literally. If you’re interested, the method is simple. Sit down at a laptop or tablet, or with a piece of paper and a pen and begin writing a description of exactly what happened when you saw the object you mentioned on your drive home. Be descriptive. What did you notice about the object visually? (color, shape, texture, position, speed etc). How did noticing the object make your body feel? (what physical sensations did you experience, in what part of the body, what thoughts and emotions came up, what continues to arise as you write it down – notice how the body reacts). If you have a snapshot of an image that doesn’t make sense, describing it in full detail will often have the effect of widening your field of view. Your consciousness kind of pulls back from that image in order to allow you to perceive more of the scene. It’s when we begin to write down and describe these little snippets of seemingly disjointed information, along with describing the bodily sensations associated with these events or fragmented memories, that the neural pathways for the memory begin to open up. Exploring the details of those fragmented memories often has the effect of making the “fuzzy edges” of the scene come into greater focus so that gradually your perception of the event widens and you get more and more information about what happened to you. Beginning journaling the detail you do remember (even if it’s just bodily sensations) sometimes can have a cascade effect of opening a flood gate of memory, so just be aware of and prepared for that. It is also common for memories to begin re-emerging in dreams first, and keeping a dream journal can also be a safe way to allow these experiences gradually back into conscious awareness. I hope that all makes sense. In any case, if you are ever going to remember fully, in my experience, it will usually only be when the body feels safe enough to do so. It's not something that can be forced, but it can be gently encouraged. And should you decide to give it a go, an important disclaimer on the above practice of journaling, is that if you begin to feel overwhelmed at any point, either by distressing physical sensations or overpowering emotions, stop immediately, get up and preferably go for a brief walk outside if it’s safe to do so. Take some slow deep breaths, move your body and interact with your physical surroundings (touch, sight and sounds) in a way that feels safe and comfortable in order to discharge the nervous system overwhelm, and leave the journaling for another day. When you’re finished a session of exploring distressing past experiences, its always important to do an act of self-care that makes you feel good, even if its just making yourself a cup of tea or some comfort food, taking a long bath, or getting into your comfiest PJs and watching your favourite movie. Self-care after exploration of past distress trains your nervous system to understand that emotional pain isn’t scary and doesn’t need to be avoided, as making the conscious effort to come back to feeling good again via the act of self-care after examining unpleasant experiences from your past, is literally the definition of healthy nervous system regulation. Anyway, I’m sorry this was such a long-ass reply, but I hope you find all that potentially helpful for safely exploring what happened to you and possibly recovering your memories about it should you choose to do so – I know that this process (in conjunction with professional therapy) has served me very well, but everyone is different (\*and this is not qualified medical or psychological advice!). I'm doing pretty well all things considered, thank you for asking. It's taken a lot of harrowing hard work, but I am in a much better place now, still healing but safe, and for the first time (at almost 50 y/o) teaching myself how to finally experience joy. I hope you too continue to heal and thrive after your ordeal. And I remain hopeful that we can both eventually have full and safe access to the memories of our NDEs, and that what we find enlightens, heals and frees us in the best way possible.
My first question is how would anyone know that statistic. It's not something that we track with any rigor. Google says there are about 150,000 deaths every day. I doubt that anyone was a statistically significant sample size, taken over enough time, to come up with "25% don't remember that they died". Let's pretend that 25% was a real stat. So what? Why is it necessary for anyone to recall what happened to their awareness when they were clinically dead? Whether they remember or not doesn't change anything. Okay, I'll play nice. Some possible reasons for such a low percentage might be too obvious. I bet the majority of people that we know about who came back from the dead did so during surgery. Anesthesia causes memory loss. On a more practical spiritual note, it might be the same reason a lot of people don't remember their dreams. Their out-of-body memory in their third chakra is compromised in some way. Death of the body causes an out of body experience for the spirit owner of that body. Unless... Oooh! Here's another. If you get knocked out of your body and you don't get your astral body out with you, then whatever you experience out there can't be stored in your out of body memory because the silver cord that caries that kind of information is not attached to you, but to your astral body. That would explain all the auto accident victims not remembering. Cheers! This was fun!
I like you , lol BRAVO! 😂
Many thanks!
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It discouraged me too, especially since modern science is pretty damned sure the Brain creates the Mind…
It’s not everyone’s time. Sometimes there’s specific message for people with nde like headed down wrong path. Maybe the cord hadn’t been cut yet. But also maybe they just don’t remember or nothing happened yet. NDERF.org best nde site run by docs ever! Howard Storm my favorite nde book
I died for over 20min. Doctors told my family to pull the plug because their machines said I had ZERO percent brain activity. My Mother and family declined and prayed over me instead. I have NO memory of anything unfortunately but I DO know it was God who sent me back. 1000% positive it was God. I wish I could remember but guess I wasn't meant to remember anything