A Reddit user who claims to have been clinically dead for six minutes has shared a chilling account of what they say they saw on the other side, and it’s nothing like the heaven people imagine.
The anonymous poster recounted the experience on Reddit’s NoSleep forum, describing a brush with death that began in 2003, when they were just 15 years old. A sudden medical collapse left their heart stopped, their body motionless in the middle of a road, and their soul, they say, somewhere far darker than pearly gates and angel choirs.
“I was dead, technically,” they wrote. “My heart stopped. EMS found me unresponsive and managed to bring me back en route to the hospital. That part I’ve been told. What I remember is what happened in between.”
‘Six Minutes Felt Like a Lifetime’
The Redditor says they experienced what they now believe was the afterlife. But instead of peace, they encountered something they describe as manipulative and cruel.
They claimed to have met a presence, something childlike, but deeply unsettling, that tormented them psychologically.
“It batted me around like a cat with a caught mouse,” they wrote. “Physical discomforts we imagine hell inflicting upon us pale in comparison to the torture of soul pain. Loss of a loved one comes closest, that piercing, emotional damage resulting from trauma.”
The experience, they said, didn’t come with answers or comfort. Only a warning.
“My reward, they communicated to me, would be a marginally improved station among the slave population. Alternatively, if I managed to convince others of their existence, new horrors would await me when I returned.”
‘Never Thank God for Anything’
Now reportedly in good health thanks to a pacemaker and multiple surgeries, the Redditor reflects on that day not as a spiritual gift, but as a revelation they wish they hadn’t received.
“I don’t thank God for anything anymore,” they wrote. “Whatever I saw that day, whatever it was, it left me shaken, not saved.”
They say their attempt to share what happened was met with disbelief. Doctors chalked the visions up to trauma, hallucinations, or the psychological aftermath of a near-death experience.
But for the person who lived it, those six minutes felt longer than life itself.
So What Happens When We Die?
Whether their story is interpreted as truth, trauma, or allegory, it adds to the growing number of personal accounts that challenge the soft-focus imagery of the afterlife.
Instead of closure, this one leaves questions: What if the afterlife isn’t peaceful? And how do we prepare for something we can’t begin to understand?