NDE’s and OBE’s

I still don’t quite know what to make of it and I’m not sure why I’ve been thinking about it lately. After all it happened so long ago and it hardly feels real. Part of me doesn’t even think it really happened but I think it really did – it’s just the interpretation that’s open to debate.

I can’t quite place how old I was. If I could remember where we lived at the time I could narrow it down but I can’t even remember that much. I think it was before we moved out of Liverpool so I was probably somewhere around 6 or maybe closer to 8 years old. I remember being ill and lying in bed. I remember the room being pitch black, I mean jet black, as dark as I’ve ever known it to be. It was probably in the very early hours of the morning. Silent like sound had simply ceased to exist. I lay there and then something odd started to happen. I felt like I was gradually reducing in weight, like I was floating in water. Then the strangest thing happened. The weight of my body pressing down on the bed continued to lessen until I started floating, or at least feel like I was floating independent of my physical shell. I didn’t seem to feel that I was moving as such. The room was too dark to discern distance so I didn’t have any real sense of motion. But then I looked ‘behind’ me to see, in the middle distance (it felt like maybe 100 metres or more away), my bed – with me lying in it. To say that I was surprised is an understatement. What is even more of a surprise was that I wasn’t afraid in the least. I was, if anything, exhilarated. I was, after all, actually flying – or so it seemed. It was, I remember, very, very cool.

Time passed and I looked back again. My bed was now reduced to the size of a box of matches, now to the size of a postage stamp and, finally, to the size of a pin head shining in a dark, empty, echoless room of enormous dimensions. Then, as inexplicably as it had begun it stopped. No, I didn’t suddenly wake up. I stopped ‘moving’ and hung there apparently miles above my bed, still illogically within my bedroom ‘floating’ in space. Still I wasn’t afraid. My dominant emotion was curiosity. I wanted to know what was happening and what would happen next. I didn’t have long to wait. After what felt like a few minutes I began to slowly descend back towards my bed. Slowly at first the size of my bed seemed to increase as I apparently ‘moved’ towards the only object in the universe. What did I do at this point? I fought it with everything thing I had. I wanted to float, to fly, even in the blackness. I was having a good time, a great time and I didn’t want it to end. I certainly didn’t want to return to the heavy, lumpen world where people live under gravity’s ever present dominion. I wanted to fly like the birds and explore. It was not to be. Seconds, it seemed, after I was reeled back in I was back in my bed, in my body and that, it seemed was that.

But what happened? Was it simply a childish dream brought on by a fever and an over active imagination or was it something else? Was I ill enough to have had an Out of Body Experience (OBE) that we hear about from time to time or was it something even more profound? Maybe it was a Near Death Experience (NDE) and I was, for a brief moment, literarily on my death bed but then didn’t actually die? I do wonder, if I had died that night if my parents would have discovered me the next morning, cold and lifeless with a serene smile on my face? It’s an intriguing thought. If I had died I would have died happy and without a care in the world, that’s for sure. I was actually enjoying myself. Maybe that was simply dopamine in my brain making me feel happy but if so it certainly did its job. As experiences go it was certainly one of, if not the, strangest I can recall. I still have no confirmed opinion of what, if anything, happened that night long ago. Maybe I’ll never know but I will long wonder and ponder what, if anything, it all meant.